"A FIFTY-YEAR SILENCE"

The book,  “A Fifty-Year Silence”,  could have been drab and cold; it could have been an average, run-of-the mill account of two lives haphazardly drawn together by unforeseen  circumstances in a relationship that did not last. It could have been a drawn out, boring read that would have induced the onset of a long, soporific state on the reader. But the genius of the author's story-telling that breathed life into the otherwise hollow years of her two reticent and evasive characters, the snatches of the geo-political and social unrest pervasive on the holocaust years that she injected into the drama of her grandparents' personal lives, as well as the adept way she blended her present, intercontinental world into the unknown world of her grandparents, made this story remarkable.

This true account was a labor of love that sought to uncover the mystery of another love long dead. As the author tried to unmask the events that brought her grandparents, Anna and Armand, together as well as the sad circumstances that pulled them apart and eventually severed the flimsy emotional thread that bound them, she discovered a physical connection that ironically, both of them would not give up – an old, ruined, stone house in rural France. Apparently, Anna bought it with Armand's money (according to him) after the second world war, then five years later, she walked out on him bringing their two young children. Anna, fed-up with her husband's moroseness and seeming indifference, failed to comprehend the demons that plagued him. Armand, unable to shake off the survivor's guilt and horrors of the holocaust that were intensified as he listened to the testimonies on the Nuremberg Trials, became a victim to the dreadful ghost of the past. It consumed him and cost him and Anna a chance for a future life together. At their own choosing, they never spoke or saw each other again until the end of their lives. That fact alone would have been depressing. The bitterness that robbed the author's grandparents the chance to reconnect and forgive each other could have been this novel's undoing. But the author fashioned each event as a way to associate those two mercurial characters caught in the wave of their own hatred in the strong bond of family through her. Her love and dedication that fueled her research, her effort and imagination to bring her grandparents' story to life, as well as her dogged desire to maintain the family bond she had on both sides, were remarkable indications of her affection for both of  her complicated, embittered grandparents. She was the catalyst that moved this story through the portals of a great memoir. I thought it is a fitting ending to this story that as she tried to reconstruct the history of a love affair two generations past with the ruined house as a backdrop, a new love was born and smoldered from those same ruins– hers and Julien's, the man she later married.

I love the elegant prose, the clever, innovative way the author blended the complex past and the volatile present in a journey of discovery, so I am putting a five-star stamp on this enthralling memoir.

I received this book from “Blogging For Books” for this review.