A review by katebrarian
Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World by Leah Hager Cohen

4.0

I really like Cohen's writing style, even though the narrative was totally disjointed. I don't know that she went "inside a deaf world" so much as provided vignettes of a particular deaf place. They were beautiful vignettes though; I was also very interested in her musings on being a hearing person in Deaf places. Her father had gained respect and acceptance despite being hearing by being a native signer with Deaf parents, while she was both hearing and a non-native signer which put her even further outside the community. Her grappling with even the idea of being an interpreter - that interpreters of every other language except ASL will only translate into their native language because one can only truly grasp all the nuance of meanings of a language if you learned it from birth - really got me thinking about the idea of hearing interpreters who aren't native signers, most of them, acting as an imperfect link between hearing and Deaf worlds. Very interesting.