A Fifty-Year Silence:Love, War, and a Ruined House in France by Miranda Richmond Mouillot was an
unusual memoir. Slow-moving and rambling, it is not a book that you eat, but rather
savor, like memory itself. The author’s beautiful voice carries the book even
though the central mystery – why her grandparents separated after the war and
didn’t speak to each other – isn’t even really a mystery. Miranda is the
grand-daughter of Holocaust survivors and she recalls her childhood, how
uncertain she was about her home, her family, as if they could be ripped from her
any moment. She is close to her grandmother, Anna, who was my favorite person
in this book. Her joy and optimism even in the bleakest of moments is something
to behold. Miranda's grandfather, Armand, is someone she gets to know later, in her
teens when at the encouragement of Anna, she spends a year with him in Geneva. He’s
a cantankerous and fastidious old man, and one has to wonder how the two even
fell in love given their different personalities.
I’ve always been
interested in Jewish holocaust stories and this is the only the second book I’ve
read about people who managed not to get deported to the death centers. Miranda
has been taught to carry the weight of remembering, being the only grandchild.
So I took the journey with her as she dove into archives and tried to tease out
the stories from her grandparents. I especially enjoyed the series of miracles
that saved both Anna and Armand from death. And one can see how these terrible
circumstances bind people together, because to love one another is all one has sometimes. But after the war, they led very separate lives, a pregnant Anna,
working as a physician, and Armand working as a translator at the Nuremberg trials. Miranda concludes that what he learned at those trials couldn’t
coincide with a world in which there was love. It was trauma he had no
words for. There is no fairy-tale ending (oh, how I wanted one) but there was
closure. The very house that Armand and Anna bought, brought Miranda’s husband
into her life.
The writing is
superb! I did find the self-absorption of the author a bit tedious, but she was
trying to discover herself and she’s honest about it. I imagine this book will
become a family treasure and I hope she has a big family so that the weight of
stories isn’t so heavy.
Thanks to Blogging for Books for providing a review copy. I am also posting it on Amazon.
3 comments:
Thanks for your interesting thoughts on this book, I'd wondered how it was. :)
Wow. A deep read for sure. Thanks for the tip.
This sounds like a difficult and emotional read, but well worth it. Thanks for sharing!
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