After Long Silence: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Helen Fremont (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 9, 1999

Helen Fremont was raised Roman Catholic in America, only to discover in adulthood that her parents were Jews who had survived the Holocaust.  Delving into the extraordinary secrets that held her family together in a bond of silence for more than forty years, she recounts with heartbreaking clarity and candor a remarkable tale of survival, as vivid as fiction but with the eloquence of truth.

When Helen was small, her mother taught her the sign of the cross in six languages.  Theirs was the tender conspiracy of a little girl and her mother at bedtime, protected by a God who could respond in any language.  What she didn't understand was that she was being equipped with proof of her Catholicism, a hedge against persecution, real or imagined.

It wasn't until adulthood that she began to comprehend the terrible irony of her mother's gesture, as she and her sister discovered their parents' remarkable, long-held secret.  She knew that her father had spent six years in the Siberian Gulag, surviving nearly on will alone; that her mother's elder sister, fearless and proud, had married an Italian Fascist whose title and connections helped them to survive during the war.  But their faith, their legacy as Jews, was kept hidden for decades.

After Long Silence is a searching inquiry into the meaning of identity, self, and history.  It's about the devastating price of hiding the truth; about the steps we take, foolish or wise, to protect ourselves and our loved ones.  No one who reads this book can be left unmoved, or fail to understand the seductive, damaging power of secrets.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In her mid-30s Helen Fremont discovered that, although she had been raised in the Midwest as a Catholic, she was in fact the daughter of Polish Jews whose families had been exterminated in the Holocaust. Fremont's tender but unsparing memoir chronicles the voyage of discovery she took with her older sister, ferreting out information from Jewish organizations and individuals and worrying about its impact on their angry, overpowering father and reticent, nightmare-plagued mother. Fremont has the courage to paint a nearly unsympathetic portrait of her parents' secretiveness and initial reluctance to have their children dredge up the past; as the narrative unfolds, readers comprehend the tormented roots of their behavior without forgetting the psychological problems it created for their daughters. Fremont's re-creation of her parents' ghastly ordeals--her mother narrowly escaping the murder of nearly every Jew in her hometown; her father surviving six years in the Soviet gulag--is a triumph of dogged research and sympathetic imagination. Her book tells a deeply American story of identity lost and reclaimed, complete with Fremont coming out to her parents as a lesbian, yet it also achieves understanding of the dark European past and its icy grip on her family. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

Fremont's memoir is an incredible tale of survival, a beautiful love story and a suspenseful account of how the author's investigation of her roots shattered fiercely guarded family secrets. Raised Roman Catholic in a Michigan suburb, Fremont knew that her parents had been in concentration camps. Her Polish mother, Batya, was interned in Mussolini's Italy, and her Hungarian-born father, Kovik, was sentenced to life in the Siberian gulag. But her parents refused to talk about their past, and they never let on that they had been born Jews. Fremont, a Boston lawyer and public defender, and her sister, Lara, a psychiatrist, pieced together their parents' hidden past by examining archives and tracking down Holocaust survivors. As Batya and Kovik gradually opened up to discuss their ordeals, Fremont was able to reclaim her Jewish faith and to make sense of a childhood marked by panic attacks and a hyperactive fantasy life. She also divulged a secret of her own when, at the age of 35, she finally told her mother that she is a lesbian. The bombshell coming-out story is secondary to the harrowing account of her parents' traumas: Batya's escape from Nazi-occupied Poland only to be arrested on the Italian border; the bizarre marriage of Fremont's maternal aunt to a government official in Fascist Rome who helped secure Batya's release from an Italian concentration camp; Kovik's escape from Siberia after six years of hard labor and his 1947 reunion with his fiancee in Rome, where they married as Catholics; the couple's emigration to the U.S. in 1950. Though the story is at times emotionally overwhelming, Fremont writes with an admirable restraint that enables her to turn her parents' life, and her own, into a triumphant work of art. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Delacorte Press (February 9, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385333692
• ISBN-13: 978-0385333696
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (79 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,434,813 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Amazing Book, December 1, 1999

By 

Helene Hoffman (Long Beach, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: After Long Silence: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Like Helen Fremont, my parents are also Jewish Holocaust Survivors. However, unlike her, my parents never hid their past. Even with our differences, she does a remarkable job of showing something most children of survivors have in common - how truly difficult it is to "ask" our parents about their past; I label it "a difficult dance" - we, as their children, feel we must know about their past, but we don't want to hurt them by making them spill their guts about the utter inhumantiy they lived through. This is a difficult topic to capture, but Fremont did it magnificently. I also felt tremendous sympathy for her. I truly understand how she felt. The incredible "jolt" (and this is putting it mildly) when she learned her real identity is probably one of the hardest things she has ever had to live through. I hope that committing her story to paper, in the moving way that she did, will help her resolve her background. She should be commended for opening her life to the rest of us.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Understanding the silent & why we must break our own silence, March 17, 2000

By 

Daniel W. Krueger - See all my reviews

This review is from: After Long Silence: A Memoir (Hardcover)

As the son of a survivor, I read this book differently than most. I understand the author's parents need for silence. I also understand the destructiveness of it on the survivors and their children. Ms. Fremont has created a wonderful framework for the telling of HER story.

Those who read this just for the story of her parents are missing the point of writing the book. The silence of her parents - like many survivors of the Shoa - cannot be completely broken, so admittedly the author `fills in' or `imagines' details so painful that her parents are unable or unwilling to remember.

This novel is an exploration into the author's movement OUT OF SILENCE. She skillfully represents this personal growth by sharing with the reader her journey into her family's and her own past. It is during this journey as she questions why her parents kept so silent that she puts herself to the ultimate test and breaks her own conspiracy of silence to her parents and family about her sexual orientation. Bravely she works to stop all the silences of her family - silence of Shoa experiences, silences of avoiding one's true identity - so that they may no longer live in the shadow that silence casts.

The book is to be applauded as a journey to self truth. A journey we are always on and must always work at.

Read the book as a tool to remove your own silences.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating story of survival, April 25, 2000

By 

Roz Levine - See all my reviews

This review is from: After Long Silence: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Helen Fremont writes of her struggles uncovering the truth about her family and their past. Raised as a Roman Catholic, she finds out in her thirties that she is actually Jewish. Armed with this knowledge, she, with some help from her sister, begin to look for answers to her family's past. The story that unfolds is remarkable. She finds out how her parents and aunt survived during World War II and how they eventually came to America. But, unfortunately there are many loose ends and holes in the story...information no one would tell her and that she could not find out on her own. Because of this, the book, though riveting, leaves the reader hanging, wanting more facts. One can only hope that Fremont will eventually find out more and be able to write a sequel, to complete her story. This is not just a story of survival, but of the will to live and go on. All in all a good book, proving the adage: Truth is stranger than fiction.