After Long Silence by Helen Fremont

The overarching point about this book is one that has been said before: this story cannot be told enough times. That is, the Nazi Holocaust remains the pre-eminent example of the results of racist actions and speech in a society, and most in a civilized society agree that a people reaching these depths of brutality are destined for self-destruction and, well, Hell. Most surely, there is another book out there that chronicles the Holocaust and most likely one that would mention similar stories and details of actual gruesome events. So, although I’ve read historical accounts and watched the countless television documentaries, I have not been exposed to enough, and After Long Silence succeeds in delineating circumstances that further educate and illuminate. That being said, most other aspects of the book fall short, and seem like patches inserted to hold the book together rather than tell a story, which it purports to do. Although I’ll never forget some scenes, such as author Helen Fremont’s account of her mother and Zosia evading the massacre in their hometown and the ordeals of her father in a Siberian prison camp, the “true” story does not pull things together in an organized fluid manner. Instead, events are put together like scraps of information, loosely organized like a collage, with the hope that the reader can complete the story by melting it all together at the end. The time between her father being taken captive and her mother being separated, for example, does not adequately answer a key question: Why would she continue to wait for him when she is not really sure he is dead or alive? And, although the “love” story of the two was described briefly, it does not show how a commitment of the two would be so strong as to chew up seven years of youth (even though punctuated by traumatic events) . And why does Louis risk so much? Why didn’t she marry him? The answers to my questions, I believe, lie in the first pages of the book when Fremont states that the “true” story contains some “imagined” events. Rarely though do we know which are made up and which are not. So what is true? Furthermore, both her parents disapproved of the book, which, therefore, lends to more suspicion that there are inaccuracies. On a scale of 1 to 10, I give this a 5.