Search -
A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France
A FiftyYear Silence Love War and a Ruined House in France Author:Miranda Richmond Mouillot A meditative, finely wrought memoir by a young woman who travels to France to uncover the truth about her grandparents' mysterious and irrevocable estrangement and pieces together the extraordinary story of their wartime experiences. — — In 1948, having survived World War II by escaping Nazi-occupied France for refugee camps in Switzerland, the ... more »author'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. After a final, acrimonious parting of ways, the two never saw or spoke to each other again.
A Fifty-Year Silence is the deeply personal, 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 never uttered his wife's name aloud after she left him. But how to discover the roots of such an embittered and entrenched silence? Miranda moves to that abandoned stone house, now a crumbling ruin; delves into letters, archival materials, and secondary sources; and teases stories out of her reticent, and declining, grandparents. While reconstructing their shared history, she finds herself moving forward with her own life ? making a home in the village, falling in love, learning how not only to survive, but to thrive.
As she explores how Anna and Armand endured against all odds and how Nuremberg changed her grandfather forever, Miranda wrestles with the legacy of trauma, the burden of history, and the limits of knowledge and memory. With warm humor and rich, evocative details that bring her grandparents' outsized characters and their struggles vividly to life, A Fifty-Year Silence is a beautiful record, both heartbreaking and uplifting, of two love stories spanning two continents and three generations.« less
The Market's bargain prices are even better for Paperbackswap club members!
Retail Price:$26.00 Buy New (Hardcover): $17.89 (save 31%) or Become a PBS member and pay $13.99+1 PBS book credit (save 46%)