After Long Silence: A Memoir - Hardcover

Fremont, Helen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385333692 ISBN 13: 9780385333696

Publisher: Delacorte Press, 1999

Synopsis

Helen Fremont was raised Roman Catholic in America, only to discover in adulthood that her parents were Jews who had survived the Holocaust.  Delving into the extraordinary secrets that held her family together in a bond of silence for more than forty years, she recounts with heartbreaking clarity and candor a remarkable tale of survival, as vivid as fiction but with the eloquence of truth.

When Helen was small, her mother taught her the sign of the cross in six languages.  Theirs was the tender conspiracy of a little girl and her mother at bedtime, protected by a God who could respond in any language.  What she didn't understand was that she was being equipped with proof of her Catholicism, a hedge against persecution, real or imagined.

It wasn't until adulthood that she began to comprehend the terrible irony of her mother's gesture, as she and her sister discovered their parents' remarkable, long-held secret.  She knew that her father had spent six years in the Siberian Gulag, surviving nearly on will alone; that her mother's elder sister, fearless and proud, had married an Italian Fascist whose title and connections helped them to survive during the war.  But their faith, their legacy as Jews, was kept hidden for decades.

After Long Silence is a searching inquiry into the meaning of identity, self, and history.  It's about the devastating price of hiding the truth; about the steps we take, foolish or wise, to protect ourselves and our loved ones.  No one who reads this book can be left unmoved, or fail to understand the seductive, damaging power of secrets.

About this title

About the Author

Helen Fremont lives in Boston, Massachusetts.  She has had fiction and nonfiction published in The Harvard Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Marlboro Review, and Ploughshares.  After Long Silence is her first book.

From the Back Cover

"[A]n incredible tale of survival, a beautiful love story...a triumphant work of art."
--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Few writers have imagined the lives of their parents as fully and richly as Helen Fremont has done in After Long Silence. Her memoir is a harrowing journey and a brave attempt to insure that her family's heroic suffering has not been in vain."
--Richard Russo, author of Straight Man and Nobody's Fool

"Reading this beautifully written memoir, I was amazed all over again by the suffering of the Holocaust and the remarkable power of humans to survive almost anything, except safety. After Long Silence is a stunning testimony to the power of silence and memory."
--Margot Livesey, author of Criminals

"A stellar example of the new literary nonfiction. A page-turning, suspenseful narrative, a canny, wise-cracking narrator, and a subject as pertinent as today's newspaper headlines."
--Helen Epstein, author of Children of the Holocaust

"Helen Fremont has written a spellbinding book, heartbreakingly mysterious as all true family explorations must be. The story she tells is hair-raising, but her grasp of memory's wily ways is revelatory, and her voice is as pure as song."
--Patricia Hampl, author of A Romantic Education

"After Long Silence is an amazing chronicle of suffering and terror and rebirth and secrecy, carefully researched and courageously re-imagined to bring to light what had been hidden and hushed up. A brave and beautiful book."
--Charles Baxter, author of Believers and Shadow Play

"Helen Fremont writes with seamless authenticity and lyric tenderness about her family's piebald secrets.--A book that offers wise decisions and tender solace in re-weaving family bonds after silent chaos."
--Maria Flook, author of My Sister Life

"Helen Fremont has the rare wisdom to know that the life of the story is her subject, not the life of the autobiographer, which is only the raw material of the story. And what a story it is--about historical brutality, human frailty, moral complexity, and the power of fear, shame, and love. The result is a rich, deftly structured work of art, both profound and entertaining, and a gift to the rest of us humans: the real thing."
--Michael Ryan, author of Secret Life

From the Inside Flap

t was raised Roman Catholic in America, only to discover in adulthood that her parents were Jews who had survived the Holocaust. Delving into the extraordinary secrets that held her family together in a bond of silence for more than forty years, she recounts with heartbreaking clarity and candor a remarkable tale of survival, as vivid as fiction but with the eloquence of truth.<br><br>When Helen was small, her mother taught her the sign of the cross in six languages. Theirs was the tender conspiracy of a little girl and her mother at bedtime, protected by a God who could respond in any language. What she didn't understand was that she was being equipped with proof of her Catholicism, a hedge against persecution, real or imagined.<br><br>It wasn't until adulthood that she began to comprehend the terrible irony of her mother's gesture, as she and her sister discovered their parents' remarkable, long-held secret. She knew that her father had spent s

Reviews

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. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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. Recommended for all public libraries and for academic libraries with large Holocaust collections.?John A. Drobnicki, York Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Lara and I were raised Catholic in a small city in the Midwest. In 1960, at the age of three, I went to nursery school at the convent of the Saint James Sisters, and at six I wore Lara's hand-me-down itchy white petticoat dress to my First Communion. It was the first and last time I would ever swallow a wafer, however, since our family always tiptoed out of church every Sunday before Communion. "It's not an important part of Mass," my mother explained, and for a long time we believed that Communion was a curious American addition to Catholicism.

My sister and I knew that our parents were from a distant and dangerous world, that they had come out of a war, and that no one else had come with them. Although we could not hear their accents, our playmates told us our parents spoke funny English; and when our schoolmates asked about our grandparents and aunts and uncles, we said we didn't have any. Except, of course, our auntie Zosia, who lived across the ocean in a place called Italy.

I also knew that my parents had been in concentration camps. I misunderstood the meaning of concentration and assumed that in prison, the inmates were consumed by intensely focused mental activity. I believed that these camps were so deadly that they had sewn my parents into pockets of complete silence. And so I understood that two things could happen to you in a war: either you were suddenly, breathlessly, swept off the streets by a bomb, or you were scooped into a concentration camp, where you swallowed a terrible silence.

My mother, I knew, was finally sprung from the camp by her sister, Zosia, who baked goodies and buttered up the camp warden. My father had it worse--he was off on a sheet of ice somewhere in Siberia for six years, until he escaped. I never knew how he escaped, except that he had managed to jump a train and hang on for days. I pictured him dangling from his one good arm, long, tattered legs swinging an arc each time the train banked a curve.

Their love story I had been fed early and often, until it seemed part of my bones. I knew that they had fallen in love before the war, and they had been separated for six years without knowing if the other was alive; my mother escaped Poland dressed as an Italian soldier, and my father walked across Europe after the war, found my mother in Rome, and married her ten years to the day after they had first met. This was the tale they liked to tell and retell, the story they used to summarize their lives. It was a good story, because it ran a thread across the war and connected the two lovers before and after. It tied a knot in their tongues at the end, and the war remained silent; the intervening six years could never be spoken.



My father, Kovik Buchman, was a self-employed family doctor with a sharp Slavic accent, pure white hair, and a chip on his shoulder the size of a Soviet tank. He was forty-two when I was born, twice as old and almost twice as tall as other daddies. He built a little office downtown, having drawn up the blueprints and supervised the construction himself. He bought all the latest equipment, an X-ray machine and elaborate instruments, lab equipment and simple furniture. His office was dark and smelled of medicine, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, textbooks, and illustrated medical periodicals. My mother sewed the curtains--bold op-art designs without a trace of heritage.

His patients poured in, Poles and Lithuanians, Czechs and Hungarians. They liked bantering with him in their home tongues, liked his European approach, his punctuality, his efficiency, his dry sense of humor. He worked from early morning until late at night, six days a week. He made house calls on a moment's notice, day or night. You could almost hear him click his heels as he marched from one patient to another. His stride was enormous, his smile brief, his gaze intense. "Sit," he would command, slapping on a blood-pressure band. "Inhale deeply." "Cough." "Say 'Aaah.'" His exam was quick and thorough. "All set," he would snap. "You may dress. Call me tomorrow." In a flash he would be down the hall, ushering the next patient into his other examining room.

My mother was a more slippery figure. Slender and supple, she was half my father's size and twice as elusive. She spent the day at home up to her elbows in yellow Playtex living gloves, cleaning house. She smelled of ammonia and lemons. "Be a doctor," my mother always instructed us. "Don't marry one."

In the fall she tied her hair in an aqua-green surgeon's cap and began rearranging nature, brandishing a rake that was taller than she was. She stuffed leaves into barrels, dragged them from one end of the property to the other, and dumped them over the cliff behind our house. In the spring she planted an elaborate rock garden under the white pines, using rocks she had kidnapped from nearby streams. Kneeling in dirt for hours, she separated and reunited plants from the woods and the rock garden, until it was hard to tell where her garden ended and the woods began.

Our house itself was a crazy-shaped glass-and-brick affair surrounded by a small forest--a swank fifties Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff. My parents had fallen in love with it instantly because it looked like nothing they'd ever seen before. We moved in just after I was born, after they'd changed their name to Bocard and settled into their new American identity.

It was a loud house. The sun danced through the pines and smashed through our floor-to-ceiling windows. An overbearing sky trumpeted each new day and tossed us out of bed. From the living room, violins wept on the hi-fidelity. A fat medical text lay open on my father's lap, the Sunday Tribune spread at his feet. The dog a respectful distance away, banished from the Oriental rug.

Kazakhstan followed my father to the new world in the form of floor covering. He wiped his feet on Middle Asia. Solzhenitsyn lined his bookshelves. The First Circle, Cancer Ward, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. The Gathering Storm, volume after volume after volume, by Churchill. Books soared for the ceiling: The Art of Florence, The Operas of Puccini, The Roman Ruins. Dictionaries in every color and language. Volumes of German grammar, Duden.

From the moment my mother moved to the States, she and her sister, Zosia, wrote each other three or four times a week. Pale blue aerograms with every millimeter of available space filled in elite type, with handwritten notes squeezed into the margins. The Italian post was terrible, and my mother would go days without mail and then get a bonanza of letters. Sometimes the letters arrived in little plastic bags, charred, torn, and taped back together.

They wrote of the same things day after day: the weather, their bridge games, the children, books, movies, opera--or so my mother claimed whenever I asked her to translate the letters. From the excerpts she read to me, I couldn't fathom why my mother's face lit up every time she found a letter from my aunt in the mailbox. "Zosia!" she would exclaim, and race up the driveway to make herself a celebratory cup of pale tea with lemon. Then she gently pried open the aerogram with a knife, careful not to lose any words clinging to the inside edge of the folds, and settled into the chaise longue in her bedroom to read.



When I was small, maybe five or six, my mother came to my bed every night to tuck me in. She would teach me the sign of the cross in six languages: Polish, Russian, German, Italian, French, and English. Each night I selected a language, and we said the sign of the cross in that language: In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Then she taught me the prayer Our Father in these languages, and I rehearsed them until I knew them by heart. I loved the way gumdrop syllables rolled off the tongue in Italian and the way consonants crashed in German; I loved the tongue-twisting sounds of Polish and the fur-lined purr of French and Russian. And of course, I loved our conspiracy--my mother's and mine. It was our time alone, our time together, and she was sending me into a night of sleep, protected by a God who could respond to me in any language, under any sky.

What I didn't understand was that my mother was equipping me with the means of survival: proof of my Catholicism to anyone in a dozen countries.

It never occurred to me that someone in my family might actually be Jewish, until a few years ago, when I was already in my thirties and working as a public defender in Boston. One evening, at a Bar Association cocktail party, I was introduced to a statuesque high-heeled, slim-hipped woman, the wife of a partner in a Boston firm. She told me she was the daughter of a distinguished family of Philadelphia WASPs, and only after she had married and had three children did she discover that her mother was in fact Jewish. We exchanged family stories over a glass of wine, and she threw back her head and laughed. "You're Jewish!" she said.

"No," I insisted, "Catholic. Polish Catholic."

"Then why were your parents in concentration camps?" Her eyes gleamed a beautiful emerald-green, and she tried to suppress a smile. She did not look the least bit Jewish. When she laughed, her yellow hair seemed to break around her shoulders like waves on a beach.

"Lots of Poles were imprisoned during the war or taken by the Germans," I explained. "They--"

"Of course," she interrupted, "but if they were Catholic they wouldn't have had to escape and emigrate to the States. I bet your parents were Jewish. Or at least your mother."

It didn't take more than half a glass of wine for me to grow fond of the idea. This would explain so much, I thought--all those mysteries of childhood, my endless tiptoeing around a jigsaw-puzzle past in which all the pieces were missing except m...

Edition details

• Publisher: Delacorte Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385333692
• ISBN 13: 9780385333696
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336