Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World [Paperback]

Leah Hager Cohen (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 25, 1995

This portrait of New York's Lexington School for the Deaf is not just a work of journalism. It is also a memoir, since Leah Hager Cohen grew up on the school's campus and her father is its superintendent. As a hearing person raised among the deaf, Cohen appreciates both the intimate textures of that silent world and the gulf that separates it from our own.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Combining memoir and reportage, Cohen provides a sensitive, intimate portrait of a New York City school for the deaf and the issues facing the deaf community. Cohen is not deaf, but her father heads the Lexington School, and she grew up there. She tracks the progress of two students: Sofia, a Russian immigrant bravely learning a second sign language and a new American world; and ghetto-raised James, who finds stability after moving into the school dormitory. Cohen analyzes the fierce debates over mainstreaming the deaf, the value of oralism and whether new cochlear implants rob the deaf of their culture. She tenderly recalls her deaf grandparents, probes her father's dilemmas, reports on her frustrated romance with a deaf man and her work as an interpreter in a program for deaf adults at the City University of New York. She portrays sign language with wonderfully tactile prose--the word "silence," for example, is signed with "austere arcs." If Cohen's narrative is disjointed, her commitment and her descriptive gifts make her book memorable.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

YA-Cohen draws upon her experiences as the hearing grandchild of deaf immigrants to combine personal stories of hearing-impaired individuals with related aspects of deaf culture. Using her first home and her father's place of employment, the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York City, to connect characters and experiences, she shares tales of activities familiar to young adults-boring classes, the school play, selling ads for the yearbook, graduation. The only difference for these students is that they cannot hear and cannot speak the language of the hearing world. Through Cohen, readers share in the challenges, frustrations, fears, triumphs, and joys of achievement not only of these young people, but, through historical vignettes, of her grandparents as well. This perspective allows readers to determine how (or if) life has changed for the deaf in America. A careful reading of Train Go Sorry provides exposure to the urban poor and our country's many immigrants (both past and present), making this a resource suitable for sociology or history students interested in viewing the American melting pot through the eyes of a group of people with a silent past.
Janis Ansell, Tidewater Association Hearing Impaired Children (TAHIC), Virginia Beach, VA
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Thus. edition (April 25, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679761659
• ISBN-13: 978-0679761655
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #164,743 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #28 in Books > Education & Reference > Schools & Teaching > Special Education > Physically Disabled
  • #41 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Diseases & Physical Ailments > Physical Impairments

More About the Author

Leah Hager Cohen is the author of four works of nonfiction, including Train Go Sorry and Glass, Paper, Beans, and four novels, most recently The Grief of Others, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Among the other honors her books have received are New York Times Notable Book (five times); American Library Association Ten Best Books of the Year; Toronto Globe and Mail Ten Best Books of the Year; and Massachusetts Must Read Book.

She holds the Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review.

www.leahhagercohen.com

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful Look at the Deaf World April 27, 1997

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

I really enjoyed this book. Leah Hager Cohen has managed to create a portrayal of the Deaf Community which is thought provoking and interesting. Anyone with a connection to the Deaf Community ought to read this book. Cohen comes from an extreme viewpoint of inclusion being wrong for the Deaf Community and Deaf children. However, in this book she is able to portray, in a passionate way, the importance of the Deaf Community for Deaf people without pushing her views on inclusion. Cohen creates an atmosphere of warmth and companionship within her text that speaks out in a louder voice than any argument on the street against inclusion

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I highly recommend this book April 21, 2000

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

I really enjoyed this book. Once I started it I could not put it down. Leah Hagar Cohen described the school, the deaf students and their teachers, her family all so well that I felt like I was there with her walking down the school's corridors. I really felt like I got to know the people that she focused on and appreacited her sharing her own personal story about her contact with the deaf community.

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Issues in Deaf Education October 12, 2004

By Erika Mitchell TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

This book is a personal overview and interpretation of several issues of concern in deaf education. The author, Leah Cohen, was born into a hearing family who worked and resided at Lexington School for the Deaf in New York City. In this book, she explores her connection to the school through the stories of her father's parents, who were both deaf, and her father, who was superintendent of the school when this book was being written. Cohen also looks at the school from the point of view of two students, Sofia Normatov and James Taylor. She describes some of the accomplishments these students have achieved despite tremendous challenges. Sofia was a recent immigrant from the USSR, and must learn ASL and English if she wants to go on to university. James hails from the housing projects and receives very little support from friends and family for his academic endeavors. Nevertheless, he is determined to pass the Regents Exam and earn an academic diploma so that he will have the opportunity to continue his education. Cohen also describes her own experiences learning sign language and then developing her skills as a translator. The book includes some black-and-white photos of the main characters described in the text. There is no index or bibliography.

Worked into the chapters telling stories about Lexington School, its students, and staff are many issues that are central to the deaf community today. One of these issues is the question of mainstreaming deaf children into public education. Many administrators (and hearing parents) believe that deaf children should be treated like other handicapped children and enrolled in regular classes in hearing schools. These people cannot seem to comprehend how misguided this policy is. Deaf children, especially those born to hearing parents, need the company of other deaf children in order to learn the language that is best suited for them. Only in the company of other deaf children of varying ages and deaf adults is it possible for deaf children to pick up on Deaf culture, the culture that will understand them for who they are and not consider them handicapped. A deaf child who is mainstreamed is likely to spend most of his or her childhood isolated, unable to communicate effectively with peers or develop native fluency in sign language for effective communication with other deaf people. Schools for the deaf, on the other hand, provide rich opportunities for deaf children to develop socially as well as learn in classes that are thoroughly adapted for their skills and needs. In her chapters touching on the question of mainstreaming, Cohen reports the discussions at board meetings and the frustration on the part of educators for the deaf in getting education departments to listen to their arguments.

Cohen discusses at some length the topic of cochlear implants. Not only does she explain why those in the Deaf community see no use for them, but she also points out how they can harm the user by eliminating residual hearing they might have. In her material about the student James, she points out how little supposed hearing specialists know about the implants.

One of the largest and perhaps somewhat understated issues in the book is the question of the role of ASL in deaf education. I was shocked to read that some teachers at the Lexington School, at least in the early 1990s when this book was written, still had no fluency in ASL. How in heavens name could they communicate with their students? As Cohen explains, Lexington was founded as an oral school, and it has only been quite recently that students were finally allowed to communicate with each other in sign. Cohen was born into a family where her father and grandparents were fluent in sign and used it as their primary means of communication, and she spent the first 7 years of her life living in a residential school for the deaf, haunting the hallways and even attending preschool classes with deaf children. With such an upbringing, fluency in ASL should have almost been her birthright. Instead, with ASL banned on campus during the time she lived there, she did not start to learn sign language until her college years, by taking private lessons. (Perhaps this is why she was completely ignorant about deaf applause, and mistakenly attributes its invention to the Deaf President Now campaign at Gallaudet in 1988. While she claims that the shimmering hand applause of the deaf spontaneously appeared at Gallaudet in 1988 and from there spread rapidly around the world, I saw it in action in 1985-86 in deaf schools in Finland. I suspect it has been part of Deaf culture for quite a bit longer than Cohen was aware.) In her book, she notes that "train go sorry" is a deaf idiom equivalent for "missing the boat". The truly tragic "train go sorry" in this book is the fact that Cohen was denied learning sign language as a child, and that deaf students anywhere studying in deaf schools still find teachers in their classrooms who do not know and use ASL. While oral skills have their place and should be a part of the deaf curriculum, they should constitute a minor course of study, and not the medium of instruction.