After Long Silence: A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written, honest, and thought-provoking
Review: Helen Fremont discovers that she's not Catholic, as she'd been raised, but Jewish. As she explores the secrets within her family, explores her parents' experience as Jews in Poland during WWII, and unfolds their history--her history--she also explores and discovers herself and the secrets she's held onto.

After Long Silence is page-turning exploration of the tangled dynamics of one family, but it's also a book about strength of spirit and survival. Helen Fremont pens a story that will stay with you long after you've finished the last page.

Rating:
Summary: Story of a life lived secretly
Review: Helen Fremont's "After a Long Silence" (New York, Delacorte, 1999) reads
like fiction, like a thriller, like a melodrama written for conversion into
a screenplay. But it is not fiction. It is the story of two daughters' slow
realization that their "Roman Catholic" parents, who always left Mass
before Communion, were really Jewish.
The father was a physician in Lvov who ended up in the Gulag, where he allbut lost the use of one arm..
The mother was smuggled out of Poland to Italy dressed as an Italian
soldier to join her sister in Rome (who was married to an Italian
aristocrat and pretended Catholicism).
But, to protect the "Italian" sister, the mother went into complete denial.
She denied her Jewishness, denied that Helen Fremont, a Boston lawyer, was a lesbian, denied her entire life.
Helen and her sister Lara went about proving all the falsehooods quite
methodically. And in their voyage of discovery they slowly learned not only their parents' secrets but also came to understand why the "Italian" aunt spoke Hebrew, vacationed in Israel alone, and was a staunch opponent of Holocaust deniers.
All this being said, there are flaws in the book, based partly on the
failure of American schools to teach geography and to teach history.
In one section of the book, the mother is smuggled out of "Yugoslavia" into Italy (during the war). Once again, my research into writing my own novel, "Comrades, Avenge Us," enters the scene.
Yugoslavia was invaded in 1941 by the Germans after Yugoslav nationalists broke the pact with the Axis that had been signed by the Yugoslav government. The Germans and Italians immediately partitioned Yugoslavia. At the time the mother was moving from "Yugoslavia" to "Italy," the area she crossed was part of the Third Reich (Slovenia became Oberkrain, Upper Carniola, a part of the "German" province of Carinthia). So she was not in Yugoslavia at all.
This makes the imagined border crossing totally unbelievable.
She crossed to Postumia (site of the world-renowned caverns), which is just outside Trieste, but which Helen Fremont somehow thinks is high in the Alps and covered in deep snows. In fact, it rarely snows in Postumia.
There are other instances of such egregious errors, but they do not detract from the basic story of denial and rediscovery.

Rating:
Summary: Silence is deadly
Review: I totally agree with all those who said that this book is an outstanding peace of art. One more example of that there cannot be too 'MANY" books about the Holocaust subject. I understand,however the reluctance and even hostility of Helen and Lara's parents(as well as some of the readers) about the exposing Helen's parents life story.It is definetely painful, as well as possibly embarassing to let the whole world to know their very private life.(even though they have nothing to be ashamed about).But to that you can also add that Lara and Helen have a RIGHT to know about thier roots and their family. So in that respect I agree that their parents made a big mistake by SUPRESSING it all. It seems that they mostly defnding themselves rather than their kids about the truth.When our children are small that is understandable. But it is WRONG to hide the truth about the family once children are all grown up. Amazing story and I wish Zosia and Helen's mom would open up and tell everything. Once they die... no more memory...
(...)

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Summary: One family's surprising secrets!
Review: It's not until Helen Fremont is an adult that she discovers that her Polish parents, whom she always believed were Catholic, were in fact both Jewish by birth. Because surviving World War II had been so difficult for them, neither wanted to share details of their past with Helen or her sister Lara until the daughters started researching family history for themselves.

AFTER LONG SILENCE is a fascinating story of survival against great odds, yet the focus of the story keeps coming back to the author and her sister. Throughout the heartbreaking story of Helen's family, it somehow seems as if it's told through the eyes of the author instead the mother. Much of the historical context is missing, such as a thorough description of the town in which her parents lived, a closer look at extended family and friends, and a clearer picture of wartime atrocities. It's agonizing to realize the extent to which Helen's parents, at first very unwillingly, had to open up to share their

painful past with her. It's also disturbing for the reader to learn that the book is about family secrets rather than a clear picture of one family's history. Nevertheless, as a gripping saga of survival in World War II Poland, this book should be read to learn of yet another way one particular family was able to get through a most gruesome time in recent history.

Rating:
Summary: Read it !
Review: She was hungarian and jew like me, but older. I did not live through all those horrors and the life before the lightening strook that she describes so well. Also very interesting how helping each other saved the three women.
She writes very well and I was recitating with her at hightschool, and hoping and sometimes crying.
And it took so many years to get it out finally from her system and could speak about it.

Rating:
Summary: Sad all around
Review: The story was riveting... I was amazed at what the characters (who had been silent) went through to survive. Being a contemporary of Ms. Freemont, I was humbled to be reminded that the Holocaust was within my parents' lifetimes. I would think of my American parents and how old they were when these horrific events were going on. Ms. Freemont was & should have been deeply affected by this enlightening discovery. Yes, I can imagine recording all the details down and 'investigating' their lives... after all, that is why so many are interested in geneology. However, I fail to see what possible good-intentioned motive there was to making it into a tell-all book that was admittedly not encouraged by her parents or her aunt. I was so ticked off at the author for her betrayal. I feel similarly repulsed by those adopted children who come barging back into the lives of those who gave them up years ago without fully investigating how much these peoples' lives can be affected by 'a blast from the past.' Like other readers, I felt the book should have been given a 'Novel' listing... perhaps I would have liked it better if it was a story based on the revelation the author had in her 30's of her family's Holocaust heritage.... rather than airing all the dirty laundry. Also, if her parents had been deceased I wouldn't have been as bothered. I was probably the most angry when Ms. Freemont selfishly divulged this Jewish revelation to her 50 year old cousin. I can't imagine how Ms. Fremont's parents can ever trust her again... I also can't imagine spending a lifetime being unable to trust those anyone... including those you love the most. Shame on you Ms. Fremont.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing story of survival
Review: This book would make a great movie. The story of the author's parents during the war is truly a tale worth telling. They've overcome tremendous odds but did not survive unscathed. It made me realize that although people physically survive wars, they are scarred for life. They live with the price of their survival everyday. Theirs is an amazing story, very poignant.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: This is a fascinating book. As for accuracy, this book is creative non-fiction and does not matter if it is accurate according to history-- but rather what does a person remember happening?

The silence surrounding the whole idea of who the author is devastating, and how it ties into her own identity of how she is a lesbian is even more interesting. The parent's silence about who they are is sadly enough, understandable, if not damaging to their children who suspect for years that something is not right.

As one person wrote previously, why did the author write this? This subject of silence and suppresion of one's own identity is certainly a far-reaching theme and one that most everyone could relate to. Why does anyone write, for that matter? She tells a fascinating, tragic, and beautiful story and I certainly don't think she needs a reason to share it.

Rating:
Summary: Great story on most fronts
Review: 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.