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Out of Silence: Repair across Generations
The story of one man s journey through three generations and five continents to find and heal a past he didn't know existed. In 1997, Martin Beck Matustík made a dramatic discovery at the age of forty: he was the child of a Holocaust survivor. His mother s shocking secret came from the most unlikely of places shoeboxes full of her literary and personal archives. These dramatic revelations changed his life forever and set him on a path to discover his true identity. His research unveiled his mother s remarkable life and the truth behind her painful decision to reject her Jewish heritage and keep it hidden from her family. Matustík's Out of Silence is an intensely personal Czech-Slovak-American Jewish journey into the past to understand the present and find hope for the future. Dealing with self-transformation, loss, memory, recovery, and the unsettling reality of living with multiple identities, Matustík s exhaustive research and selfless prose offer other children of survivors and the world at large a remarkable look inside one man s endeavor to repair the shattered map of his identity.
348 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2015
2 people are currently reading
349 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 13, 2015
Thank you Goodreads for the opportunity to read this book which traces Martin Matustik's quest to find out why his mother did not acknowledge her Jewish background.
Martin is a grown man when he discovers his mother's background and she is no longer alive so he sets about tracing his family to find some answers.
The book includes a lot of history surrounding the Slovak state and Martin who was born in 1957 takes the reader on a journey of discovery across a number of countries, as he unlocks his mothers secret.
His family had lived in traumatic times but the photos included in the book record strong characters and some happy occasions.
I learnt a great deal from reading this book and feel I will gain more on a second reading in the future.
Martin is a grown man when he discovers his mother's background and she is no longer alive so he sets about tracing his family to find some answers.
The book includes a lot of history surrounding the Slovak state and Martin who was born in 1957 takes the reader on a journey of discovery across a number of countries, as he unlocks his mothers secret.
His family had lived in traumatic times but the photos included in the book record strong characters and some happy occasions.
I learnt a great deal from reading this book and feel I will gain more on a second reading in the future.
November 4, 2015
https://www.facebook.com/Out-of-Silen...
The Book Tour Comes to Sydney
December 2 & 4, 2015
http://newcriticaltheory.com/out-of-s...
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
midday lecture series
13:00-14:00
Sydney Jewish Museum
http://sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au/prod...
Friday, December 4, 2015
Australian Society for Continental Philosophy
Session on Modernism and Philosophy
https://hal.arts.unsw.edu.au/ascp2015/
Award-Winning "Finalist" - International Book Awards 2015
Autobiography/Memoirs"
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
KIRKUS INDIE BOOK REVIEW (March 27, 2015)
OUT OF SILENCE
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re...
A philosophically charged memoir of a man connecting with a Jewish heritage that he only discovered later in life.
Matustik (Philosophy and Religious Studies/Arizona State Univ.; Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope, 2008, etc.) was born in Slovakia in 1957 and orphaned at the age of 14. Later, he signed a document called Charta 77 in defiance of Communist authoritarianism, fled Czechoslovakia, and ultimately landed in the United States as a respected academic. Still, none of this fully prepared him for news he received in 1997 that completely upturned his sense of identity. While living in Chicago, he received two letters from Australian relatives revealing his Jewish origins—a major piece of family genealogy that his mother had determined to keep from him. He’d never discussed the horrors of the Holocaust while growing up, and never knew that his mother’s family was ravaged by Nazi violence. Fifteen years later, after digging more deeply into his untold history, he discovered the reasons behind his mother’s deliberate silence.
Because he was deprived of a full sense of his past, this memoir is an unusual exercise in “postmemory,” as he attempts to excavate a personal history he never experienced. A well-known professor of philosophy and the author of six academic books, Matustik places his personal quest in the context of world history, dissecting the plight of the Jews and the global conflict against tyranny that animated the 20th century. His ruminations are often deeply scholarly and literary, spanning an impressive breadth of topics from Plato to Pink Floyd. It all results in a protean work that resists easy categorization—a complex amalgam of the personal and historical that he calls his “philosophical-political quest.” The prose can be soaringly poetic, but also dense. However, his attempt to rescue himself from “generational blindness” is both intellectually stirring and emotionally poignant. “Shame is the survivor’s unacknowledged trauma,” he writes. “My mother’s trauma has settled me with her generation’s guilt and my own survivor’s guilt. I have been suffering from her disrepair, even as I survive her traumatized silence.”
An important examination of what it means to discover one’s self, and to reclaim one’s sense of belonging.
Kirkus Indie, Kirkus Media LLC, 6411 Burleson Rd., Austin, TX 78744indie@kirkusreviews.com
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From the Publisher
http://newcriticaltheory.com/out-of-s...
Reviews
http://newcriticaltheory.com/out-of-s...
Educational Resources
http://newcriticaltheory.com
Book Trailer
The Book Tour Comes to Sydney
December 2 & 4, 2015
http://newcriticaltheory.com/out-of-s...
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
midday lecture series
13:00-14:00
Sydney Jewish Museum
http://sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au/prod...
Friday, December 4, 2015
Australian Society for Continental Philosophy
Session on Modernism and Philosophy
https://hal.arts.unsw.edu.au/ascp2015/
Award-Winning "Finalist" - International Book Awards 2015
Autobiography/Memoirs"
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
KIRKUS INDIE BOOK REVIEW (March 27, 2015)
OUT OF SILENCE
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re...
A philosophically charged memoir of a man connecting with a Jewish heritage that he only discovered later in life.
Matustik (Philosophy and Religious Studies/Arizona State Univ.; Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope, 2008, etc.) was born in Slovakia in 1957 and orphaned at the age of 14. Later, he signed a document called Charta 77 in defiance of Communist authoritarianism, fled Czechoslovakia, and ultimately landed in the United States as a respected academic. Still, none of this fully prepared him for news he received in 1997 that completely upturned his sense of identity. While living in Chicago, he received two letters from Australian relatives revealing his Jewish origins—a major piece of family genealogy that his mother had determined to keep from him. He’d never discussed the horrors of the Holocaust while growing up, and never knew that his mother’s family was ravaged by Nazi violence. Fifteen years later, after digging more deeply into his untold history, he discovered the reasons behind his mother’s deliberate silence.
Because he was deprived of a full sense of his past, this memoir is an unusual exercise in “postmemory,” as he attempts to excavate a personal history he never experienced. A well-known professor of philosophy and the author of six academic books, Matustik places his personal quest in the context of world history, dissecting the plight of the Jews and the global conflict against tyranny that animated the 20th century. His ruminations are often deeply scholarly and literary, spanning an impressive breadth of topics from Plato to Pink Floyd. It all results in a protean work that resists easy categorization—a complex amalgam of the personal and historical that he calls his “philosophical-political quest.” The prose can be soaringly poetic, but also dense. However, his attempt to rescue himself from “generational blindness” is both intellectually stirring and emotionally poignant. “Shame is the survivor’s unacknowledged trauma,” he writes. “My mother’s trauma has settled me with her generation’s guilt and my own survivor’s guilt. I have been suffering from her disrepair, even as I survive her traumatized silence.”
An important examination of what it means to discover one’s self, and to reclaim one’s sense of belonging.
Kirkus Indie, Kirkus Media LLC, 6411 Burleson Rd., Austin, TX 78744indie@kirkusreviews.com
--------
From the Publisher
http://newcriticaltheory.com/out-of-s...
Reviews
http://newcriticaltheory.com/out-of-s...
Educational Resources
http://newcriticaltheory.com
Book Trailer
February 17, 2015
Out of Silence: Repair Across Generations exposes two closely-held family secrets to the public eye: secrets that affected the author's identity and perception of himself and which ultimately led to revelations that would re-unite pathways destroyed by regimes and decisions.
It took a shoebox full of diaries and writings to bring this truth to light. This discovery shook the author's long-held beliefs about who he was, his family's past, and its place in the present. And his decision to write Out of Silence serves as testimony not just to his family's struggles and survival mechanisms, but to the process by which secrets revealed come to repair long-broken lives.
The course of charting this process could have been so much different, under a different pen. Here it assumes an immediacy that is rare even in a memoir, with Matuštík focused on capturing the sights, smells, ethical questions, and complicated facets of Jewish relationships to the world.
In the course of the author's journey, underlying prejudices, perceptions, and broader concerns of the modern world are revealed as Jew and non-Jew alike consider the lasting impact of history's influence.
So many accounts have been written about Holocaust survival that one might wonder at the need for yet another, and at its approach. In truth, Out of Silence explores more than one man's family, one family's secrets, and the journey it provokes. It provides a gripping account of the process of discovery and reconciliation not just between generations, but between peoples; and it succeeds in documenting the lasting effects of decisions, choices, and survival mechanisms from past to present worlds.
It's a journey that embraces three generations, five continents, and a cast of supporting characters over the decades. The time span is winding and embraces the period from before the Holocaust to WW 2, the author's birth in the Communist era, and his journey from Czechoslovakia to the US and back, after the fall of the Iron Curtain; and it even includes the author's discovery of lost family connections in Australia.
His is a narrative that brings the personal and the political in line with history and experience, and it's an approach that holds vivid immediacy and meaning for any student of the Holocaust and its presence in today's world. To aid in this study, it should be noted that photography and online resources for teaching are offered at www.newcriticaltheory.com. The book is well illustrated and at 348 pages, it's a solid read.
It stands at the crossroads of theology, social and political analysis, and literature, and handily complements existing works, adding more research than most to elevate it well beyond the 'simple memoir' genre; making it a top pick for any collection strong in history and the psychology of family relationships as a whole.
It took a shoebox full of diaries and writings to bring this truth to light. This discovery shook the author's long-held beliefs about who he was, his family's past, and its place in the present. And his decision to write Out of Silence serves as testimony not just to his family's struggles and survival mechanisms, but to the process by which secrets revealed come to repair long-broken lives.
The course of charting this process could have been so much different, under a different pen. Here it assumes an immediacy that is rare even in a memoir, with Matuštík focused on capturing the sights, smells, ethical questions, and complicated facets of Jewish relationships to the world.
In the course of the author's journey, underlying prejudices, perceptions, and broader concerns of the modern world are revealed as Jew and non-Jew alike consider the lasting impact of history's influence.
So many accounts have been written about Holocaust survival that one might wonder at the need for yet another, and at its approach. In truth, Out of Silence explores more than one man's family, one family's secrets, and the journey it provokes. It provides a gripping account of the process of discovery and reconciliation not just between generations, but between peoples; and it succeeds in documenting the lasting effects of decisions, choices, and survival mechanisms from past to present worlds.
It's a journey that embraces three generations, five continents, and a cast of supporting characters over the decades. The time span is winding and embraces the period from before the Holocaust to WW 2, the author's birth in the Communist era, and his journey from Czechoslovakia to the US and back, after the fall of the Iron Curtain; and it even includes the author's discovery of lost family connections in Australia.
His is a narrative that brings the personal and the political in line with history and experience, and it's an approach that holds vivid immediacy and meaning for any student of the Holocaust and its presence in today's world. To aid in this study, it should be noted that photography and online resources for teaching are offered at www.newcriticaltheory.com. The book is well illustrated and at 348 pages, it's a solid read.
It stands at the crossroads of theology, social and political analysis, and literature, and handily complements existing works, adding more research than most to elevate it well beyond the 'simple memoir' genre; making it a top pick for any collection strong in history and the psychology of family relationships as a whole.
February 14, 2016
i was a goodreads winner. special thanks to the author.
i gave this book 5 stars. i just loved it. it really struck a chord with me at the moment as i am researching my family history and trying to piece it all together. It is important that history does not get lost and as time goes on, this becomes harder, but now this author has a book so this particular story will always be around. We must not forget where we came from but for a lot of people, there are more questions than answers. This "story" was put together so well and you could tell that there is much respect. I recommend this book highly. it gave me a little more insight into the past and it is hard to sum it up and do this book justice. So here are some words- brave, honest, raw, real, humble. Amazing props to the author! Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to read this. Thank you for sharing this!
i gave this book 5 stars. i just loved it. it really struck a chord with me at the moment as i am researching my family history and trying to piece it all together. It is important that history does not get lost and as time goes on, this becomes harder, but now this author has a book so this particular story will always be around. We must not forget where we came from but for a lot of people, there are more questions than answers. This "story" was put together so well and you could tell that there is much respect. I recommend this book highly. it gave me a little more insight into the past and it is hard to sum it up and do this book justice. So here are some words- brave, honest, raw, real, humble. Amazing props to the author! Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to read this. Thank you for sharing this!
July 28, 2015
Check back for a review…in the works.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews