A Fifty-Year Silence by Miranda Richmond Moullot
I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of this. I want to start with a quote from the book:
"Folded into remembrance is the knowledge of all that cannot be recalled: I realized that when my grandparents passed away, I would carry within me not only the memory of them but the memory of their memories, on and on over the horizon of being, back to the tohu-bohu before the waters parted."
I love this quote. It's lovely and seems to encompass the whole world. I love the thought that we inherit a past from our ancestors. Plus it's a great intro into what this book is about.
To say an antagonism existed between Moullot's grandparents would be an understatement. They met right before the beginning of World War II. Being Jewish, they fled south from the occupied north of France before escaping to Switzerland. The story of their escape is really harrowing. In truth they spent very little time together. At one point they separated - the why of it is never really revealed, just an intuition - and they never spoke to each other again. It's a mystery where the solution can only be surmised, as her grandfather, at first violently resistant to her questions about the past, eventually suffers from senility. Her grandmother tends to talk around the question, never giving direct answers.
The part I was most interested in was where she tells of how her grandfather was an interpreter in the Nuremberg Trials. It's a very small section at the end of the novel, but it is quite powerful.
It mostly makes me envious that she was able to get the time with her grandparents to learn their stories. I was about 10 when my grandmother died. Her parents were from Czechoslovakia, and now I wish I could learn more about them. I hope this novel encourages people to question their family and find the memories that make them what they are.
"Folded into remembrance is the knowledge of all that cannot be recalled: I realized that when my grandparents passed away, I would carry within me not only the memory of them but the memory of their memories, on and on over the horizon of being, back to the tohu-bohu before the waters parted."
I love this quote. It's lovely and seems to encompass the whole world. I love the thought that we inherit a past from our ancestors. Plus it's a great intro into what this book is about.
To say an antagonism existed between Moullot's grandparents would be an understatement. They met right before the beginning of World War II. Being Jewish, they fled south from the occupied north of France before escaping to Switzerland. The story of their escape is really harrowing. In truth they spent very little time together. At one point they separated - the why of it is never really revealed, just an intuition - and they never spoke to each other again. It's a mystery where the solution can only be surmised, as her grandfather, at first violently resistant to her questions about the past, eventually suffers from senility. Her grandmother tends to talk around the question, never giving direct answers.
The part I was most interested in was where she tells of how her grandfather was an interpreter in the Nuremberg Trials. It's a very small section at the end of the novel, but it is quite powerful.
It mostly makes me envious that she was able to get the time with her grandparents to learn their stories. I was about 10 when my grandmother died. Her parents were from Czechoslovakia, and now I wish I could learn more about them. I hope this novel encourages people to question their family and find the memories that make them what they are.
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