Review Essay: On the Edge of Deaf Culture: Hearing Children/Deaf Parents, by Thomas Bull

In 1973, I asked a fellow graduate student in the Sociolinguistics Program at Georgetown University where she was from. Like me and most students in the program, she was in her mid-thirties, and like me, she spoke English fluently, without an accent, yet with a difficult-to-identify foreign intonation. Her response was somewhat vague and disconcerting: "France ... Switzerland. Where are you from?" For me, the answer to this question depends on the context and who is asking it. By the age of 13 I had lived in three different countries and three more by the time of this encounter. Usually, I would answer simply "Seattle," but I hesitated while figuring out how much I was willing to reveal. Before I could decide, her next statement caught me off-guard: "You don't have to say anything ... I understand." Although no information had been exchanged, not even our names, we knew we had just shared a secret about our childhood.

Many years later, I helped organize a group in the Washington/Baltimore area which has been meeting monthly for the past 15 years. Spontaneously, other groups such as ours sprang up in other cities in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, and Israel. We called ourselves Child Survivors of the Holocaust. Within a year we held our first national conference which later became annual and international. Though we came from almost every Nazi-occupied country and our stories are very different from each other -- some lived in hiding, some passed for Christians, some were shipped in children's transports to England in 1939 never to see their parents again, others lived on their own in forests, and still others survived ghettoes and concentration camps -- among ourselves we don't have to explain ourselves.

Our meetings and conferences have had a profound effect on our lives. We became aware that our childhood experiences -- both during the war and after as immigrants in new countries -- contributed to making us who we are and explained in part the choices and decisions we have made. By sharing our personal experiences and painful memories, most of us for the first time in our lives, we realized that we were not unique. Others like ourselves could understand us and the deep feelings that had been hidden for a lifetime. We discussed issues such as identity (Why do we feel like outsiders everywhere? Why do we feel so alone, even when we are married and have families?), anger (We were robbed of our childhood. The usual parent-child relationship was permanently damaged by the Holocaust.), resentment (Our parents didn't protect us against the outside world . . . or they gave us away to strangers.), role reversals (Those of us lucky enough to have one or both parents alive after the war found that they used us to face the outside world because as children we acquired the languages and the cultures of the countries in which we lived.), and embarrassment (Because of our parents' foreign ways and limited linguistic ability -- they may have known several languages but that did not count since they were not fluent in the languages of the countries where we lived -- we rarely invited our friends to our homes.). Participation in this group, for some more than others, has been a liberating experience, enabling us to acknowledge buried memories ("You were too young to remember. Just get on with your life!"). The process of discovering our identities seems endless. One positive aspect is that we feel like brothers and sisters with all the sibling rivalries and conflicts that entails.

Recently, upon reading the introduction to Thomas Bull's exciting new annotated bibliography of materials about hearing children of deaf adults (On the Edge of Deaf Culture: Hearing Children/Deaf Parents), I found confirmation that there are many interesting parallels between the experiences of codas (hearing children of deaf adults) and the experiences of members of my group. Bull describes himself as always having felt alone and different from others because he had deaf parents. Like many codas, he was often unsure whether he was hearing or deaf. (Such an identity conflict reminds me of the many Jewish children who survived the war by assuming Christian identities. I was known during much of the war as "Henry Vanderlinden.") Bull recalls the painful memory (as a 12-year-old), of acting as the intermediary between his deaf parents and a funeral home as they selected a casket for his grandmother. He also remembers embarrassing moments when as a young boy he signed in ASL in front of his peers. Another unpleasant memory was witnessing his father's helplessness when trying to get assistance from neighbors when his sister fell ill one night. It was not until Bull became associated with the CODA organization well into adulthood that he started coming to terms with the different parts of his identity. He attended his first CODA conference in 1986 and describes its impact as follows:

My experience was personally dramatic. For me the sense of isolation and aloneness yielded to the camaraderie and joy I found. Over the last few years, I have shared what I thought were the experiences of a jaded personality with my coda brothers and sisters.

Bull's annotated bibliography contains 2,200 citations and 104 organizational resource references, making it an invaluable tool for codas, deaf parents, service providers, researchers studying codas, or other groups whose members have special affinities with each other. This 350-page softbound book contains a preface by Paul Preston, author of Mother Father Deaf (described on page 20), as well as the introduction by Bull. The bibliographical part -- full of helpful annotations -- is divided into separate sections: books; journal articles and book chapters; newspaper, magazine, proceedings, and newsletter articles; CODA conference proceedings and chapter newsletters; Ph.D. dissertations and M.A. theses; video and audio tapes, films, and compact discs; information about, by, and for deaf and disabled parents; miscellaneous publications (including monographs, reports, brochures, manuscripts, Internet articles, and difficult-to-obtain papers). There are also sections on obtaining information from international resources and instructions for using Gallaudet University resources.

In his introduction, when Bull describes his family, it's as if I knew it already. He draws parallels between his own family and the family depicted in Joanne Greenberg's In This Sign (described on page 17), a book I read almost 30 years ago. As a student, like the grandson in the novel, Bull participated in the civil rights movement, inspired to fight discrimination and social injustice. The child survivors belong to an older generation but many of their children took part in that movement. It's also worth noting that a very high percentage of child survivors are in the helping professions: social workers, therapists, psychiatrists, and teachers. The development of the CODA organization has been accompanied by a vast increase in the coda literature. Similarly, as child survivors have come to terms with their experiences and accepted the legitimacy of their memories, they have written many new books that shed light on a previously neglected aspect of the Holocaust.

The discovery that one has affinities with others marked by special circumstances in their childhood can be liberating, whether the experience is that of a coda or of a child survivor. However, for whatever reasons, some prefer to assimilate by denying their past. For example, Madeleine Albright, our Secretary of State, only recently acknowledged her Jewish origins, after having believed her whole life that her family had always been Christian. I would guess that of the 1.5 million people Bull estimates to be codas in the U.S. many choose to dissociate themselves in part or fully from the Deaf community. In a very moving scene in the excellent documentary videotape Passport Without a Country (described on page 226), one of the codas interviewed explains that he left England for Australia to get away from his deaf parents; nevertheless, he adds tearfully that after many years in Australia he began to visit deaf clubs there because he found, to his surprise, that he needed contact with deaf people.

Taken from Research at Gallaudet, Spring 1999. Readers wishing to respond to the above essay are encouraged to write letters to the editor (or send e-mail to Robert.C.Johnson@gallaudet.edu) some of which may be printed in a future issue of this newsletter. Individuals or groups interested in ordering copies of On the Edge of Deaf Culture: Hearing Children/Deaf Parents may write to Deaf Family Research Press, P.O. Box 8417, Alexandria, VA 22306-8417 or contact the author by e-mail (tomthe@aol.com). The author of the essay may be contacted at: Harry.Markowicz@gallaudet.edu.

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