A Fifty-Year Silence

Zusatztext 91259716 Informationen zum Autor MIRANDA RICHMOND MOUILLOT was born in Asheville, North Carolina. She lives in the South of France with her family. Klappentext A young woman moves across an ocean to uncover the truth about her grandparents' mysterious estrangement and pieces together the extraordinary story of their wartime experiences In 1948! after surviving World War II by escaping Nazi-occupied France for refugee camps in Switzerland! Miranda's grandparents! Anna and Armand! bought an old stone house in a remote! picturesque village in the South of France. Five years later! Anna packed her bags and walked out on Armand! taking the typewriter and their children. Aside from one brief encounter! the two never saw or spoke to each other again! never remarried! and never revealed what had divided them forever. A Fifty-Year Silence is the deeply involving account of Miranda Richmond Mouillot's journey to find out what happened between her grandmother! a physician! and her grandfather! an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials! who refused to utter his wife's name aloud after she left him. To discover the roots of their embittered and entrenched silence! Miranda abandons her plans for the future and moves to their stone house! now a crumbling ruin; immerses herself in letters! archival materials! and secondary sources; and teases stories out of her reticent! and declining! grandparents. As she reconstructs how Anna and Armand braved overwhelming odds and how the knowledge her grandfather acquired at Nuremberg destroyed their relationship! Miranda wrestles with the legacy of trauma! the burden of history! and the complexities of memory. She also finds herself learning how not only to survive but to thrive--making a home in the village and falling in love. With warmth! humor! and rich! evocative details that bring her grandparents' outsize characters and their daily struggles vividly to life! A Fifty-Year Silence is a heartbreaking! uplifting love story spanning two continents and three generations. Chapter One When I was born, my grandmother tied a red ribbon around my left wrist to ward off the evil eye. She knew what was ahead of me and what was behind me, and though she was a great believer in luck and the hazards of fortune, she wasn't about to take any chances on me, her only grandchild. My grandmother had fled or lost countless homes in her lifetime, and though she never fully resigned herself to living in America, she was determined to die in her house in Pearl River, New York, to which she had retired from her job as a supervising psychiatrist at Rockland State Mental Hospital. She would tell me this with some frequency, because my grandmother viewed death as an interesting dance step she'd eventually get around to learning, or perhaps a pen pal she'd come awfully close to meeting several timesno doubt this intrigued equanimity was part of the reason she managed to live so long. My grandmother told me many things over the years, in a jumbled and constant flow of speech. I hung on to her every sentence, fascinated and admiring. Each word she said was like a vivid, tangible object to me, a bright buoy, a bloodred lifeline: MY Godt musckle VEG-eh-tayble sourrwvive That was her favorite word. She rolled it out of her mouth with Carpathian verve, inflected with both Austro-Hungarian German and French. You're like me, Mirandali, she'd say. You'll sourrwvive. This was immensely comforting, because outside the reassuring confines of my grandmother's presence, I was never too sure about that. When Grandma wasn't around, my life was bafflingly full of terror. I say bafflingly because my childhood, albeit eccentric, was outwardly perfectly secure: my parents divorced when I was small, but they'd done so amicably, and each remarried a stepparent I loved ...

“What are you guys doing the weekend of January 24? No, you’re not. Cross it off, unless it’s a beach stay that will allow you uninterrupted time to read Mouillot’s A Fifty-Year Silence. I have never before read a book like this one… The story is full of worldly drama—the Nuremberg war trials, a short but beautiful existence in the South of France—but it’s the minute family-history details that make the book truly delicious.” – Glamour.com, “Best New Books Coming Out in January”

“What makes the book so lively are not only Mouillot’s imaginary scenarios, but her dense web of identifications: between herself and her grandmother (both have a talent for finding four-leaved clovers); between her grandparents’ experience of the Holocaust and her own generation as bearers of its memory; between herself as author and Marcel Proust, who helps her piece together her grandfather’s past; and between her grandparents’ love and the love of Proust’s protagonists Swann and Odette. Mouillot delightfully crosses different literary genres: tragic romance, third-generation Holocaust survivor novel, autobiography, fiction, Bildungsroman, and intertextual homage.” –Haaretz

“Filled with warmth and evocative details, this is a heartrending memoir about historical memory.”– FRANCE

“This haunting, beautiful little mystery deftly shows just how long pain can linger through generations, and what shining a light on the past can do to heal a family.” – Winnipeg Free Press

“Gorgeous...define[s] the pinnacle of this new genre...Meticulously researched and artfully constructed…a labor of love, infused with familial tenderness.” – *Jewish Daily Forward

• “Eloquent and engrossing....Miranda Richmond Mouillot has imbibed her tale with the frisson of a detective story while gently introducing us to the charm and hidden pain of her extraordinary grandparents... A totally captivating journey that will keep you rapt from start to finish.” *– **Australian Women's Weekly
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  “Written with an almost poetic transcendence of time, place and memory, this moving memoir chronicles an amazing circle of life. No fairy tale, it is as epic as the times in which Anna and Armand lived and the love they inspired.” - BookPage

“As Mouillot upends her own life to investigate [her grandparents’], she begins to understand the lengths to which people will go to protect their fragile dignity and comes to recognize the power of memories that both comfort and torment wounded souls. A vibrant, earnest, and profound tribute.” - Booklist

"The corrosive effects of the Holocaust—upon those directly involved and generations thereafter—are illustrated vividly in this candid saga of familial love and misunderstanding, which will resonate with readers of World War II history as well as those who appreciate accounts of ancestral sleuthing in the vein of Anne Sinclair’s My Grandfather’s Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War and Sarah Wildman’s Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind." - Library Journal

“Charming, understated… A wonderful evocation of the way that the Holocaust has haunted many generations.” – Publishers Weekly

"A moving family history researched with dedication and completed with a granddaughter's love." - Kirkus Reviews

“A Fifty-Year Silence is one of those exceedingly rare books that touches you deep down – page by page – through the rawness of its story and its sheer insight. The extraordinary quality of the prose, the elegance of the storytelling, and the genius with which Miranda Richmond Mouillot has laid down the twists and turns make this a book to treasure. It is a memoir that sings to us all.” – **Tahir Shah, author of *The Caliph’…