After Long Silence: A Memoir

The author of this book grew up in what she thought was a polish Catholic family . She always thought there was a family secret. She and her sister began to suspect that their parents were Jewish Holocaust survivors. The book describes how they discovered the truth , their extended family and how this discovery affected their family relationships. The author does a good job of describing the tragedies her family experienced and the choices they made. This book is more than straight history. I loved how honest the author was in describing her feeling and the empathy she had for her parents and the hard choices they made. It really helped me to see sources of intergenerational conflict and how individuals handle it

If you remember when Madeleine Albright, former U. S. Secretary of State found out her family had in fact been Jewish when she was brought up Catholic you will see further relevance in this story. The story had many sides to it. It was interesting, emotionally suspenceful and fulfilling but I also think the authoress could have conveyed the heroes' suffering without such excruciating description of their unending suffering. It was hard to plow through and threatened to bury the author's message about love, survival and the lengths people go to survive and continue.

The author does well with intertwining her life with the telling of her parents life. Also love the descriptiveness of every day things.

I found this book incredibly fascinating and completely opposite of any other books about victims of the Holocaust I’ve ever come across. It was frustrating I am sure for the Author ,the daughter of the victims as well as the reader to have her parents deny their past experiences during that excruciating time during the Holocaust in Poland and Ukraine! From what I’ve read most survivors are anxious to retell they’re stories but not this authors parents! She can’t even learn her Mother’s birth name it’s buried so deep in her parents and Aunts psyche! Very frustrating for reader and author! The denial of they’re experience has to have meant that it was so dramatic and painful they can’t even reach it.

Even though I enjoyed reading this memoir I thought the two daughters came on too strong in almost demanding more information from their parents, especially their mother. I think they could have handled the conversations in a softer, kinder way.

After Long Silence was recommended to me by a friend who knows that I've been thinking a lot lately about shamed silence. What I'm mulling over in my mind has nothing to do with restraint; restraint suggests self-discipline and control. Shamed silence is not a carefully measured response to a situation, it's what happens when a person is faced with a situation that is incomprehensible. It's cognitive dissonance. It's what happens when fragmented, incomplete thoughts get banished to our psychological dungeon to rot. In After Long Silence, Helen Fremont carries a flickering torch into the dungeon of doom where her family history smolders and fumes, a history that includes her Jewish relatives and the mind-blowing atrocities they were subject to during the WWII holocaust. She interlaces her personal present life as a reluctant Boston attorney and partially-out lesbian with fleeting glimpses into her parent's lives and the lives of lost friends and relatives. But this memoir is not only about the shattering inhumanity that annihilated her family or her sexual orientation. Her chronicles are also about baring witness to the unspeakable. Without sentimentality, in this memoir, Fremont presents both historic and current details as if laying out a case for the reader to judge. What are we being asked to judge? Not the Nazis, the jury has long ago delivered on that horror. Not the choices and sacrifices made by those around her. We are being asked to judge ourselves. Fremont presents through one incisive portrait after another a spectrum of courage that inexorably challenges her readers to place themselves on the continuum. This is a brilliantly crafted memoir. It's sobering, enlightening, infuriating, tender, mysterious, gripping, and it is also funny in parts. She hits on so many human emotions, and that's it's gift to the reader. We get to feel. I believe it is my right as a human being to feel my feelings, to think my thoughts, to speak whatever truth I can. This right becomes a higher calling when considered in opposition to shamed silence. Pearls My Mother Wore

Literally could not stop reading as the author and her sister, raised Catholic in the United States, begin to realize that they are not who they have been taught that they are. What emerges is one of the most remarkable stories of Holocaust heroism and resistance that I have ever seen. And all--remarkably--told with wit and verve.

"After Long Silence" = currently the most awful & wonderful book I have ever read! ♥️♥️♥️ 100% recommend. A multi-generational memoire including detailed, personal and historical accounts of the Holocaust, woven together with stories of relationships which survived circumstances that should never have been. This text is worth persisting through the pain evoked!