This is a recollection of growing up as the hearing child of two deaf parents. It is the story of a young girl's life in the silent world of her family's household. Ruth's mother tied her infant to herself, so that she could detect any movement in the baby whose cries could not be heard. As a young girl Ruth was placed in a class for the mentally retarded because she spoke only sign language, until an astute principal recognized that she could both speak and hear. This book also offers an evocation of a vanished New York City of close-knit Jewish neighbourhoods, where people had to endure the poverty and turmoil of their place and time - the Bronx and Brooklyn of the 1930s and 1940s.