After Long Silence is a fascinating discourse of discovery that despite being brought up as a gentile you discover you were Jewish. Your father tells a story of growing up under both Gods. Being blessed twice. The father mentions that he hated being Jewish but Jews wouldn’t fight back. The author Helen Fremont, knows this is a stereotype so has to mention this is Poland in the late 1930’s not the Israeli Jews of today. Does the reader need this explained? Each physical trauma (falling into ice) the writer encounters makes her compare these events to her parent’s history of being bludgeoned by Russians, Germans and Ukrainians. There is an odd line “History is a card table full of illusions, and we must sort through and pick the ones we wish to believe.” This relates to the stories her parents tell her. I usually like metaphors but at times the author over does it-Italy was a great skillet that sizzled with life. The complications of family secrets are richly explored. The book gives various scenarios as to why the family’s Jewishness was kept hidden fifty years after the end of WW11. An exceptional read. ( )

After Long Silence
After Long Silence Lessons and Key Takeaways:

1. Tell the truth. Speak your truth of everything. Be honest. Hide nothing.
2. Do not lie about your family. Try to be honest as much as you can. Lying won’t help anyone.
3. Roots are everything. Embrace your roots. Fully. Learn everything you can about the culture and customs of the languages including money habits. That is the gift your great-uncle left you. Be invested in learning and remembering where you came from. Including the people whose languages you are learning.
4. It is perfectly acceptable to be quiet. You don’t have to talk if you do not want to. Creativity comes through silence anyhow.
5. Be a reader of books. Read anything you can find. Do not discriminate in your reading. Read widely across many countries. Those are your teachers. Write down their wisdom and apply it to your life.
6. Although you thrive off of peoples love you also know you prefer solitude and books and are content to have a book, a cup of tea, and musick going to keep you happy. Or just bring a book along to public occasions and private ones. That way no one can say you weren’t there participating.
7. Study languages because that is your ticket to understanding people, their mindsets, and their behaviors, money habits and beliefs.
8. Being poor did not stop people from achieving their dreams. The only way is up.
9. Save money because no one will do so for you. If you want an item save up and buy it for yourself. Save any way you can. It is your ticket out. That and educating yourself.
10. Keep your mouth shut. Protect people and their privacy. Do not be a ship that sinks. Maintain peoples trust and confidence in you.
11. Rely solely on yourself. No one will help you. Only God can.
12. Just because someone does not tell you something doesn’t mean that they do not love you. They are trying to protect you and your feelings and answering questions from not her people. Tread carefully.

Biggest Lesson Learned:

What I learned is that you have to trust your gut and your intuition. Learn to read between the lines and silences when a conversation is going on. What is not being said? Also research. Do not trust everything blindly as the gospel truth. Do your own research even if it means cutting yourself off from family members who don’t want the truth to be known. Tell the truth. Don’t hide. It hurts too much. You already lost too much because of the family dynamics and secrecy. Don’t fail anyone else. Save money because no one will do so for you. Ever.

Quote in Summary:

“Trust and obey. Publish glad tidings. Power with man and power with God saves those who believe and are willing to heed the call of honesty, truth, decorum, and peace and being willing to stand up for what they believe in against all odds. To speak truth to power.” ( )

Notes in Goodreads

I’ve read a lot of stories about the Shoah (the Holocaust), but never one quite like the story of Helen Fremont’s family. Her book, After Long Silence: A Memoir, is truly a blend of genres, regardless of the title.

Fremont is of my generation, but her parents were European refugees who came to the United States after WWII. To everyone outside the family they were a nice Polish-American Catholic family. Inside the nuclear family, they also appeared to be Catholics of Polish ancestry.

The book is about the story Helen discovers when she is an adult. Her parents were actually Jews who had survived the horrors of the Holocaust. They won’t admit it, though–at least not until Helen hounds them for the truth.

From the opening, the main question Helen seeks to answer in the book is “What really happened to my parents during the war years?” Eventually that question turns into “Why do they still want to keep the secret?”

Fremont alternates her story with that of both her parents before and during and right after the war. Once the story of her parents’ paths to survival begins in earnest, Fremont has me completely hooked. Those chapters/sections are to me the essence of the book–and they truly would not be memoir if they were not framed within a memoir. They read like a Holocaust biography or novel–gripping and disturbing. What her parents did to survive shows how far the human spirit and personality can stretch and mold.

The sections about Fremont’s parents’ lives are imagined stories based upon Fremont’s research.It makes sense that the stories of her parents overshadows Fremont’s own story since the huge secret her parents imposed on their family overshadowed Fremont’s life. But at the end of the book she feels independent of them. This is important because it means she can differentiate herself as an individual adult. ( )

Too disjointed ( )