A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

I still have a problem with it. The book has a little cloud over it. The child Walker worries incessantly that people will think her parents are quaint or not worthy for their deafness or in other ways as well, because they're not socially aware and sophisticated. There seems always to be an unspoken feeling of loss.

Walker's family is deeply loving, but she grew up feeling a burden of the type that lower East side of Jewish grandmothers inflict. She was the oldest, she was her parents' interpreter. She was their conduit to the world outside their home; she was privy to things a child doesn't usually know about her family. She went to doctors' appointments with her mother, and introduced the family to new neighbors. But she bore up under this onus, smiling, never letting on that it bothered her. Until now. Or so she seems to suggest in the book.

I can't say how I would act under the same weight, however, Walker's mother says once that her oldest daughter "takes things too hard." Walker seems by nature to be subdued, and just a little dour; at times she casts too much of her own personality into what she passes off as the general experience of children of Deaf parents. My experience of the Deaf community is that Deaf people are fun, energetic, full of humor and adventure. My view is my view. This just needs to be kept in mind; this book is one woman's biography, and not an unbiased sociological study of Deafness and family life.

What also isn't made clear is that times have changed. Walker was in college in 1973. Her parents were in the State Schools for the Deaf in the THIRTIES. Back then, students were not permitted to sign; they were expected to speak and lip-read only. Rarely taken off the school grounds for outings, Deaf children went home only for Christmas and the summer. Otherwise, they were at school, signing to one another whenever they were sure they were not being watched.

The Deaf parents now raising children watched Marlee Matlin win an Academy Award when they were in high school. When they were in college, at Gallaudet University, they took to the streets in an explosive protest to eject their school's president, and have a new, Deaf president appointed.

The book is a beautiful autobiography, and does capture some important moments in Deaf history. Read the book for its language, for its eloquent and unabashed descriptive passages. Read it for history. But don't expect to learn about the Deaf Community as it is today.