When Jennifer Amy Rose's firstborn baby fails her postnatal hearing test, Rose is stunned. How will she and her husband, both hearing, raise a deaf child? Rose then discovers her hidden family history, going back generations to the ghettos of Eastern Europe and the culture of shame that was attached to the 'deaf and dumb'. Now the parent of two congenitally deaf children, Rose shares her journey into the modern world of the hearing impaired, but also travels back in time to imagine her silent relatives, who showed surprising creativity in a world that chose to ignore them.