A Fifty-Year Silence

I love bios, but, sometimes, bios can be a little too bio-y; that is, bios are published that are eagerly read by family and friends but hold much less interest for the general public. Sometimes, too, the author finds dead ends in his research and putties the holes with trivial conjecture. And, finally, sometimes what starts as a story of a person moves into a story of side character or even the writer himself.

I'm happy to tell you that A Fifty-Year Silence didn't take any of these joyless paths. Mouillot tells the
story of her grandparents based on years of intense research in a way that reveals subtle truths
about all people. A compelling and fascinating story.

This was quite good. I appreciate WWII stories that give me a perspective I haven't read before, and this was essentially a story of two people with an incredible survival story whose relationship couldn't survive the trauma of their shared experiences.

Mouillot is not a journalist, so I wasn't annoyed that her own life featured so heavily in this, because after all, it is the story of her grandparents' lives (Anna and Armand). But because she is not a journalist (she studied English and history in college), I got the sense that she didn't really know how to do the deep research necessary until very late in the game, literally as she was panicking because both Anna's and Armand's memories had started to deteriorate (in Armand's case, to the point where he imagined himself to be back in the 1940s, and had forgotten the vitriol he harbored against Anna for most of his life). Mouillot had this idealized sense of what her grandparents' marriage was, and what being a Jewish survivor and refugee of WWII meant, and therefore she had a hard time even getting her grandparents to talk about each other because she fundamentally didn't, or couldn't, understand their relationship or the experience of the war as it actually was.

I had originally planned to rate this 3 stars, but it gets the extra one for the last few chapters, when Mouillot finally digs into Armand's post-war life more fully, as he served as a translator during the Nuremburg trials, particularly during Göring's testimony. That was really powerful, how that horrific and rapid-pace work would both skim over one's brain and seep into one's psyche simultaneously, and cause additional trauma because Armand knew he was hearing his own family history.

It was good. A short read. Would recommend.