Customer Reviews

After Long Silence

5 star:		(43)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I was originally intrigued by the basic story presented here: a search to find one's family tree, one's genealogical background. However, as I read more and more I got an uneasy feeling which eventually turned to outright alarm. The author was "outing" her parents as Jews, completely against their wishes and request. With a daughter like that, who needs a treacherous neighbor to turn you over to the Gestapo? Aside from that (and that's a *major* aside), the bulk of the book - the dialog, the details of events - is in fact NOT fact, but supposition by the author (which she admits in one shocking example - a simple one sentence statement by her mother regarding her escape turns into a full-blown paragraph about what *might* have happened, created wholly from the imagination of the author). In the end, I felt like some kind of voyeur into her parents' most intimate secrets and it wasn't a good feeling. The author tries to put a "feel-good" twist to all this by telling us about the family reunion she had with all her newly-found relatives - a reunion her parents did not care to attend. The author had every right to know what her true background was, but that didn't mean she had the right to expose her parents' carefully constructed post-war identities and lives.

I could not put this book down for several reasons. My father's experience was much the same as the author's father. My father was born and raised in Lvov and was conscripted into the Russian army shortly before the Russians evacuated. He left behind five siblings, his parents and a family of 200 people. They were all murdered at Belzec.

What particularly intrigued me was her father's life in the gulag. My father was also incarcerated in a place called Aktubinsk in Middle Asia and shared many of the experiences described in the book. I know that what Ms. Fremont is describing is truthful because it is the same as was described to me by my father. He also acknowledged that although the camp was hell, he probably would not have survived had he remained in Lvov.

The description of the pogram on Petlura Day had me in tears. I can only assume that my family endured that horror also.

I can understand some of the criticism leveled at the book by those who are not the children of survivors. Growing up as the child of survivors is not the same as growing up in a "normal" household. Even if parents are not reticent, as mine were not, there are certain boundaries past which you do not wander. You do not need to be told not to ask; you just know.

I do not think that one can compare Ms. Fremont's discretion with respect to her friends and her "outing" of her parents. Ms. Fremont's parents, I'm certain with the best of intentions, denied her her heritage. This denial is part of the heitage that scars the first generation of survivors' children. I'm sure that a variation of these scars will be handed down to our children. Never knowing your grandparents, your aunts, your uncles or you cousins but knowing that they once existed and were murdered for no reason, gives a perspective that cannot be understood unless you've actually experienced it. I know for a fact that Ms. Fremont is not the only first generation child who has tested herself with hunger or cold. I've done it myself. It gives you a different scale on which to measure life. It also makes you stronger.

After Long Silence is no kitchen-table memoir; Helen Fremont is a skilled student of the writer's craft. How would you like to find out, as an adult, that your heritage was completely different than you had been told as a child? Helen Fremont did what we all yearn to do--to find out the truth. This is a tale of catharsis and of conflict, and will leave the reader drained, but in a good way. The tales of Jews struggling to survive are remarkable, and one learns from them to be willing to reinvent oneself, and to help others. The tone is bittersweet, not cloying. There is romance, and Helen's honesty about herself burnishes the work nicely. My only complaint was the lack of an index with which to follow the European locations in which most of the book takes place.

As I read some of the other reviews in this section, I couldn't help but wonder if I had read the same book. Fremont is a beautiful and gifted writer with a true sense of her craft. I had just finished the book when I turned to the reviews here, and was surprised by several of the lukewarm responses. It seems that those responses evolve mainly from 1) the readers' discomfort with the blur between so-called fact and so-called fiction; 2) the writer's own involvement in the story; and 3) the writer's revelation of herself as a lesbian. All of these, however, are what made the story so moving and rich for me. First of all, can we be so naive as to think that we can ever completely fill in the past with pure "facts?" Think of what happened to Zosia in her lifetime: she was obviously traumatized into forgetting, and thus her story, not remembered, almost became a big gap in the larger construction we call "history," until Fremont revived that story, and breathed life into it as well. Besides, what are memoir and history if NOT presentation, performance, and construction? No one author/historian/memoirist knows all facts, and authors choose to include some material and omit other material for a variety of reasons, oftentimes as a result of unconscious (or conscious) bias. Our only hope is that people like Fremont come along and reconstruct the stories and fill in the gaps with lost voices and narratives. Her use of fictional techniques allow us a three-dimensional look at particular people, times, places, and actions. As far as the ethics of "outing" her parents go, I hardly think Fremont does not struggle with this throughout her story. I think she writes about them with respect and tenderness. However, as she says about her father at one point, it is HIS story too, and so, by the same token, it is Fremont's as well. This is, after all, very much an autobiography and which one of us can construct our lives separate from our family's? We live and build our lives in relation to others and those relationships form us. So, of course, Fremont had to, and had every right to, find out about her parents' lives. I think, yes, the question of ethics enters into this and that is a question I hope we keep trying to address. It is also a question that adds a deeper dimension to this work. As far as some reviewer's disdain of Fremont's disclosure of herself as a lesbian, all I can say is: GOOD GRIEF!!!! Of course this is pertinent to the story! Quite frankly, I am tired of folks who cannot see the violence done to gays and lesbians who may feel compelled to conceal their identity for fear of bigotry and physical harm. Fremont's need to "come out" to her family parallels her cracking open of secrets in her family's lives. It is a prime example of the kind of identity concealment and hidden existence that she pinpoints in her family. The connection is so clear to me, I cannot help but wonder if there is (albeit unconsciously, perhaps) a homophobic element to these responses. And once more it's important to remember that this is a memoir as much about the author and her journey towards identity as it is about the author's parents. In short, this is a first-rate book that honors rather than disparages the author's family. Do not deprive yourself of THIS one! A good and textured "read" from beginning to end....

Helen Fremont is such a talented writer that I hated for thebook to end. Don't discount it if it's a story you have no interestin; if you love words this woman knows how to make them sing.

it takes the author a long time to allow herself to write freely about her subject. it seems to me that she is largely the victim of her own need to control her narrative. this takes away from the impact of her story and often turns her report into a lukewarm listing of events. only when she describes her mother's narrative and steps aside to let her mother speak and when she gains a deeper understanding of her own identity does this narrative take wing and become lyrical at times and moving most of the time. the book will appeal to students of the Shoah (Holocaust) and those interested in Jewish identity. Ruth Tenenholtz Haifa Israel

This was a really well-told story interweaving a number of different plots--the childhood of the author, her father's experience in Siberia and his later escape from it, her mother's escape from occupied Poland into Italy, her aunt's life in Italy before WWII broke out, her parents' and aunt's childhoods, and events from the present day. Ms. Fremont says in the beginning that she has filled in some gaps in her parents' and aunt's story with imagined details which she feels conveys the emotional truth of those experiences, which kind of seems like authors who make real-life characters be composites of multiple people involved in the story--sure it tells the story, but how well or accurately is another matter.

I'm glad that the author and her older sister found out their true identity (though it's surprising it took till they were in their thirties, given how many obvious clues were out there all throughout their childhoods), and that they found all of their new relatives at the end, people who were able to clue them in on other people in their family tree. What I didn't like how they broke the news to their parents (and later to their aunt, against their mother's stern warnings not to). Many survivors of tragic events, not just the Shoah, hid their true identities for decades, even their entire lives, to protect not just themselves but their children from possible future persecution. Their daughters have no way of knowing what was going inside of their heads to make them make this huge decision, but certainly it wasn't done out of meanness or spite, to purposely keep their future children ignorant of their true history. They had their reasons which they firmly believed in and shouldn't have to explain or justify them to anyone. And the parents and the aunt doubtless reacted so angrily and emotionally to finding out the cat was finally out of the bag because of the way in which the news was conveyed. It's like they didn't think ahead far enough to how these aging survivors might take this shock to the system. Would you angrily confront your mother because, for example, you found out you had been fathered by a rapist and not the man you thought was your father? That's like saying that it doesn't matter why the other party kept this secret; it's all about how you and you alone feel. Zosia, the aunt, said that she was so traumatised by the events of the War that she literally forgot everything that happened before she escaped from Poland and back into Italy to her husband, even forgetting her sister's own name. The mother even mentioned in passing that the day of the Petlura massacre, her period stopped for nine months; it's a wonder her children didn't grill her about that too, asking if she'd been raped and had a child. Haven't these three elderly people been through enough? No wonder they didn't approve of this book.

Some family secrets do need to come out of the closet, and this was certainly one of them, but the subject could have been broached in a way that was more sensitive to what the parents and aunt had suffered through. You may feel better after finding out the truth, but exposing a painful family secret is about everyone involved and thinking ahead to how this might disrupt a formerly happy family inalterably. The parents and aunt didn't even seem to have come to terms with what happened or achieved any sense of closure or inner-peace; indeed, Ms. Fremont reports that now they don't even speak about it anymore, after the initial period when they were telling them what had happened to them.