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Overview
"To this day, I don't even know what my mother's real name is."
Helen Fremont was raised as a Roman Catholic. It wasn't until she was an adult, practicing law in Boston, that she discovered her parents were Jewish—Holocaust survivors living invented lives. Not even their names were their own. In this powerful memoir, Helen Fremont delves into the secrets that held her family in a bond of silence for more than four decades, recounting with heartbreaking clarity a remarkable tale of survival, as vivid as fiction but with the resonance of truth.
Driven to uncover their roots, Fremont and her sister pieced together an astonishing story: of Siberian Gulags and Italian royalty, of concentration camps and buried lives. After Long Silence is about the devastating price of hiding the truth; about families; about the steps we take, foolish or wise, to protect ourselves and our loved ones. No one who reads this book can be unmoved, or fail to understand the seductive, damaging power of secrets.
What Fremont and her sister discover is an astonishing story: one of Siberian gulags and Italian royalty, of concentration camps and buried lives. AFTER LONG SILENCE is about the devastating price of hiding the truth; about families; about the steps we take, foolish or wise, to protect ourselves and our loved ones. No one who reads this book can be unmoved, or fail to understand the seductive, damaging power of secrets. —>
Synopsis
"To this day, I don't even know what my mother's real name is."
Helen Fremont was raised as a Roman Catholic. It wasn't until she was an adult, practicing law in Boston, that she discovered her parents were Jewish—Holocaust survivors living invented lives. Not even their names were their own. In this powerful memoir, Helen Fremont delves into the secrets that held her family in a bond of silence for more than four decades, recounting with heartbreaking clarity a remarkable tale of survival, as vivid as fiction but with the resonance of truth.
Driven to uncover their roots, Fremont and her sister pieced together an astonishing story: of Siberian Gulags and Italian royalty, of concentration camps and buried lives. After Long Silence is about the devastating price of hiding the truth; about families; about the steps we take, foolish or wise, to protect ourselves and our loved ones. No one who reads this book can be unmoved, or fail to understand the seductive, damaging power of secrets.
What Fremont and her sister discover is an astonishing story: one of Siberian gulags and Italian royalty, of concentration camps and buried lives. AFTER LONG SILENCE is about the devastating price of hiding the truth; about families; about the steps we take, foolish or wise, to protect ourselves and our loved ones. No one who reads this book can be unmoved, or fail to understand the seductive, damaging power of secrets. —>
New York Times
Poignant...an affecting memoir.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Helen Fremont, raised a Roman Catholic in the American Midwest, didn't learn until she was an adult that her parents were Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, that her father had spent six years in a Siberian gulag, and that her mother had trained Fremont in the ways of the Catholic Church to insure that her daughter never faced the persecution that she had endured. Publishers Weekly called After Long Silence, Fremont's account of her family's trials and triumphs, "a triumphant work of art."Kimberly Conniff
...[An] elegantly written memoir....Ultimately, Fremont learns that the secrets [her parents] guarded to protect their children may have also guarded their souls.—Brill's Content
New York Times
Poignant...an affecting memoir.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.KLIATT
Raised as the younger daughter in a nominally Catholic family, the author remembers a childhood that her European immigrant parents strove to make whole-heartedly American. As a lawyer in her early thirties, Fremont and her sister independently became curious about their family history and rapidly uncovered the family secret: their parents were Jews who had survived the Holocaust—and, in their father's case, the Soviet Gulag—and were determined to remake themselves without a past. Fremont interweaves the facts she has been able to uncover from that past, her admittedly imagined ideas of how discrete events might have been lived and linked, the confrontations between the younger generation's quest for history and her parents' desire to forget the past, the oddities of her childhood which now make more sense to her in the light of historic revelation, and her anxieties about revealing her own secret, that of her identity as a lesbian, to her parents. Fremont brings both an excellent storytelling ability and a willingness to be self-revealing to this memoir. The various time periods and issues unfold without confusion, each providing a new angle of insight on how the past and the present continue to inform each other. Family dynamics, post-traumatic stress and world history all become transparent and approachable in Fremont's telling of her own family's story. In addition to adding a new dimension to Holocaust literature and to the new wave of literature about the children of survivors, readers can find here an excellent introduction to how we continue to outgrow our parents while never attaining the awareness of necessity with which they are imbued. KLIATT Codes:SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 1999, Dell/Delta, 352p, 22cm, $12.95. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Francisca Goldsmith; Teen Svcs., Berkeley P.L., Berkeley, CA, May 2000 (Vol. 34 No. 3)Library Journal
Along with her older sister, Lara, Fremont was raised in an ostensibly Roman Catholic family in the Midwest, although her secretive and tight-lipped parents didn't follow many of the customs. Although Fremont knew that her father had been in a Siberian gulag for six years and that her mother had been in a concentration camp, she and Lara later discovered (through perseverance and detective work) that their parents were actually Polish Jews whose families had been virtually wiped out in the Holocaust. Fremont's voyage of discovery is engrossing, as she not only learns of her family's tragic history and heroic survival but also of the powerful relationships between sisters: she with Lara and her mother with her own strong-willed sister, Zosia, who saved them from the Nazis. Unlocking her family's past helps draw Fremont closer to both her sister and her parents, who had remained silent for 50 years. -- John A. Drobnicki, York College. Library, CUNYKimberly Conniff
...[An] elegantly written memoir....Ultimately, Fremont learns that the secrets [her parents] guarded to protect their children may have also guarded their souls.— Brill's Content
Thane Rosenbaum
...[P]art detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past....[an] affecting memoir.— The New York Times Book Review