TRAIN GO SORRY

Clunky title (American Sign Language for ``missing the boat'') aside: a sensitive report on one year in the life of N.Y.C.'s Lexington School for the Deaf. Cohen, who teaches at Emerson College, is well situated to be Lexington's chronicler: Her father, Oscar, is the school's superintendent; her deaf grandfather, Sam, was a student there 75 years ago; and the author herself—who can hear—attended classes there as a preschooler. She writes at a time when Lexington is coming to terms with the deaf-pride movement, initiated in 1988 with a student rebellion at Gallaudet University, over the appointment of a hearing president. Lexington, Cohen says, is steering a middle course between ``hearing chauvinists'' and ``deaf militants.'' The former—who see deafness as a hated handicap— rally around the risky ``cochlear implant,'' a new electronic hearing-device fitted in young children; the latter, who consider deafness to be an ethnic trait, oppose ``oralism'' (teaching deaf people to vocalize, long a staple at Lexington) in favor of signing. These tensions within the deaf community shoot through Cohen's narrative, which unfolds via portraits of two Lexington students (a black American and a Russian immigrant) and memories of her grandfather, whose death was accelerated by a hospital's failure to provide a deaf interpreter. On a more personal note, Cohen talks of her own awkwardness at learning sign language; the difficulties of ASL interpretation; friendships between the deaf and those who can hear; and the crisis that hearing advocates of the deaf face in an increasingly politicized climate. An intimate portrait of a tightknit subculture that, ironically, is coming of age as it shrinks in size, the result of medical advances against meningitis and other causes of deafness—a situation that Cohen terms, with typical awareness of both sides, ``bittersweet.''