Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 17, 1991                   TAG: 9103210020
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: B-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by SIDNEY BARRITT
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

AUTHOR WRITES SMALL, BUT FITTING, TRIBUTE TO PARENTS

The greatest temptation is to describe this book as "heartwarming." It would be an accurate but incomplete description that would categorize the book and dismiss it simultaneously.

"Heartwarming" conjures up other adjectives: "saccharine," "cloying," "sweet" - words that suggest an experience untempered by pain, grief, loss and redemption. But Ruth Sidransky's experience was certainly tempered.

Both her parents were deaf - her mother congenitally afflicted by an errant gene from conception, her father stricken in infancy by meningitis. These two children of immigrants from Eastern Europe managed despite their handicap. In the ethnic ghettoes of Brooklyn and the Bronx, they bore and reared two hearing children without the public assistance that current standards would require.

Now their daughter, the older child, has written this small but fitting memorial to their spirit.

The human spirit has certainly triumphed against odds and deserves this celebration. Sidransky does it deftly. Her stylistic gift, for the ear of this hearing reader, is the translation of the sign language of the deaf into smooth, flowing, readable English.