Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Heightened emotions and confusion would have marked the anguish parents must suffer when discovering that one, then--three years later--another daughter are deaf. Yet, Jennifer Rosner uses restrained prose throughout without resorting to the melodrama that has marked her life.
While both Rosner and her husband carried recessive genes that sentenced her daughters to deafness, there had been nothing in her husband's family history to warn them. In Ms. Rosner's case though, her father's family-tree was peppered with tales of deafness, and her own mother had lost her hearing at an early age. Having grown up with a mother who, in spite of hearing aids was either not hearing or just not listening, Ms. Rosner set out to chart a new path in her relationships with her daughters.
My own college roommate has a daughter who was born profoundly deaf, and I was therefore familiar with the heated debates in the Deaf community about "fixing" the problem, as if deafness is a disability, which some within the community claim it is not. Ms. Rosner and her husband, both academics who use speech at its higher forms opted to provide their daughters with sound, which would therefore enable them to learn to speak. That meant hearing aids for one and a cochlear implant for the other.
The thrust of this memoir, however, is Ms. Rosner's journey of investigating the fate of her deaf relatives, long dead. Most were born and lived in Eastern Europe, in a Jewish shtetl. When her research into their whereabouts failed to satisfy her quest, she connected the dots of what she knew and fictionalized their lives. With imagination and sweeping prose, their stories are intertwined throughout the tale of the Rosners' victory over the obstacles nature put on their daughters' path to integrate into the speaking world. Modern technology and society's perception have made huge strides in the over one century since deaf people were naturally also mute and were considered feeble-minded, outcast from society, and forever locked in the jail of their silent worlds.
It hurts to think that even today, without Ms. Rosner's and her husband's education, geographical mobility, financial resources, pedagogical opportunities, modern technology and access to top medical services, millions of deaf children do not thrive as Sophia and Juliet. For millions of deaf children, life is no different than the life of Rosner's ancestors in the shtetl, which she describes so deftly.
Click Here to see more reviews about:
If a Tree Falls: A Family's Quest to Hear and Be Heard
Get 32% OFF
Click here for more information about If a Tree Falls: A Family's Quest to Hear and Be Heard
