The Silence of Parents: A Novel [Paperback]

Susan Simpson Geroe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 15, 2006

This gripping family saga travels back and forth between the Old and New Worlds, spanning four decades and it explores the lives of Holocaust survivors and their subsequent families from the Second Generation's point of view. The book shows how political changes reshape the life of a family through love, misunderstandings, emigration, and coming to term with reality. The story involves a large cast of characters and takes them over the course of several decades, from Eastern Europe to New York and Boston. Ilona Gabor in the mid 1960s is a romantic schoolgirl in socialist Romania; by the end of the century she is a New Yorker and a writer with a mission. Her mother, Ethel, a Holocaust survivor caught in the impersonal vise of the postwar Iron Curtain, changes from a reticent and worrying mother to a self-assertive educator and author. Andras, Ilona's cast-off lover, changes from a lighthearted bachelor to a hard working Boston doctor obsessed by his newfound roots. The central defining event in the consciousness of each of these characters is the Holocaust.

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About the Author

Susan Geroe was born in Oradea (Nagyvárad), Romania after World War II, the only child of Holocaust survivors. In the 1960s, she emigrated with her parents and settled in California, where she married and became a mother while she earned her degrees in foreign languages. An educator, she worked for many years in both the public and private sector. She lives with her husband in Southern California.

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Daniel & Daniel Publishers (August 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564744620
• ISBN-13: 978-1564744623
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,623,980 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in Oradea, Romania after World War II to Holocaust survivor parents, following graduation from high school, Ms. Geroe resettled in the USA. She earned her college degree while becoming a wife and mother. When her son started school, she started teaching, and when he went to college, she also went back to school to earn her graduate degree.

Fluent in several languages, Ms. Geroe first published the English translation of a Hungarian poetry volume, Pearls and Lace - poems by Magdalena Klein, in 1997. She later also published the translation along the original verse. While she enjoyed writing her own poetry and short stories, Ms. Geroe started working on her first novel, following her retirement. Writing the first version of the novel went smoothly; the editing and publishing process became a labor of love and it took nearly five years. The Silence of Parents was published in 2007. To her delight, the book went on to be translated into Romanian and published in 2009 in her hometown, Oradea.

Ms. Geroe compiled a number of her short stories, comprising essays and mementos from life in the old country to modern day experiences into the volume Treasures and Pleasures and published them in 2009.