‘The Unheard’ will be heard Aloud

NEW YORK -- When you’re born in no man’s land, nothing seems more distant than a place you can call home.

Josh Swiller, the Yale-educated son of a prominent family, grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, but was nonetheless born on one of America’s invisible margins, the silent world of the deaf. Swiller recounts in a newly released memoir how his search for a place in the world took him as far from Central Park as he could imagine, and how he found friendship, affection and a sense of himself alongside a river in Zambia.

Swiller’s book, “The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa,” is alternately passionate and funny, much like its author. Swiller will be at the Los Angeles Central Library’s Mark Taper Auditorium tonight at 7 p.m. to discuss the memoir and his disability as part of the library’s Aloud series.

Swiller noted that he was so adept at hiding his deafness that even members of his own family didn’t know that he couldn’t hear much of what was said to him: “I learned to speak and lip-read quite well. Too well, almost, because I was able to pass through the world of hearing people to such a degree that many people didn’t know I was deaf and I consequently could never quite figure out what I was. Deaf? Hearing? None of the above?”

He was born moderately deaf, a condition that only worsened. Doctors later discovered that his disability was caused by a genetic glitch that surfaced in his family with his generation. Swiller, 37, was fitted for his first hearing aids when he was 4. Eventually he lost his hearing altogether. Three years ago, he had a successful operation for a cochlear implant in his right ear. He also credits the support he has received from his family in his progress. (His older brother, Ari Swiller, is a fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and a top advisor to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.)

His struggle for belonging has been a difficult one. It’s a battle he’s waging still. “At times I have felt homeless,” he said. He’s had many careers since he returned from Zambia, where he served in the Peace Corps in the mid-1990s. He’s been a forest ranger, raw food chef, Zen monk. These days, he works with hospice patients in Brooklyn.

Nevertheless, it’s his days in that African country that loom the largest.

“I wanted to find a place to go that was so far away that deafness didn’t matter,” he said.

In the book, a paperback published by Henry Holt and Co., he writes about his arrival in Mununga, Zambia: “I’d come to the village to find a place past deafness. I know that seems strange to say, I mean, do you eat burritos to find out what chocolate tastes like? Maybe you do if you’ve reached the end of your options.”

One of Swiller’s newfound Zambian friends, Augustine Jere, was the first to ask about his hearing aids. (He thought they were radios.)

“Not radios,” Swiller told him. “I’m deaf.”

“He responded in total disbelief,” Swiller recalled. “No one else in the village had noticed them or, if they had, they hadn’t said anything. Maybe they thought the aids were large earrings that all white guys wore.”

He soon came to the realization, through poignant experiences he details in the book, that finding a home would need to come from within.

Geography and culture, no matter how far away or how different, could only provide so much solace.

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tina.daunt@latimes.com