A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France in Around the World in 80 Books

Feb 24, 2015 Jim rated it liked it

Shelves: holocaust, non-fiction, history, world-war-2, biography

This book chronicles a woman's attempt to discover the reason behind her grandparents' mysterious and vindictive estrangement shortly after WWII. The author set the hook early: the first 5 chapters were engrossing. Sadly, I rapidly lost interest after that. It's not that the book is poorly written...the author is an educated woman and her writing reflects this...but I believe that the story peters out due to lack of information. The story becomes more about the author than the grandparents, whic This book chronicles a woman's attempt to discover the reason behind her grandparents' mysterious and vindictive estrangement shortly after WWII. The author set the hook early: the first 5 chapters were engrossing. Sadly, I rapidly lost interest after that. It's not that the book is poorly written...the author is an educated woman and her writing reflects this...but I believe that the story peters out due to lack of information. The story becomes more about the author than the grandparents, which is a pity because, (meaning no disrespect) the grandparents were far more interesting. Both survived WWII Europe; the grandmother went on to become a physician and the grandfather was a translator at the Nuremberg trials. Now that would have been a story!

Ms Richmond-Maillot makes much of her opinion that her grandparents were holocaust survivors, a bandwagon everyone seems to jump on if the least chance presents itself. Maybe she's right: both felt the need to flee France and it is likely that they would have been given a one-way ticket to Auschwitz if they were captured. Neither spent any time in a concentration camp or had a particularly close call insofar as apprehension was concerned. To me, they are holocaust survivors the same way my parents were holocaust survivors: they were all alive during WWII and none of them were captured by Nazis. OK, I trivialize perhaps but to me a holocaust survivor is someone who was rescued or escaped from a concentration camp, someone who is in real and immediate peril. The author lets the reader know that there were plenty of hardships, but doesn't create in the reader that sense of urgency and peril.

In short, the book suffers from lack of data. The writer found scant information in records and seems to have been reluctant to interview her grandparents extensively about their past. What is left is speculation, with frequent use of phrases like "would have" and "it is likely". She might as well have written "I've got nuthin' here." She invents entire dialogues for the subjects. In my opinion, this makes the book a bit dodgy as far as history is concerned; it's at least part fabrication. But hey, as the author's own personal love story, the book isn't bad at all. ...more

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Apr 08, 2024 Colleen Chi-Girl rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: anti-racist, carolinas-n-s, france, 2024, non-fic, audiobooks, bios-memoirs, women-centered, europe, ww2-holocaust

This biography/memoir was tenderly written by an American granddaughter, Miranda Richmond Mouillot, about her Jewish grandparents, years after the Holocaust. Her grandmother Anna is a doctor and lives in thw beautiful town of Asheville, North Carolina, USA, whereas her grandfather, Armand, who was significantly involved in the Nuremberg Trials, lives in France. 🇫🇷

Miranda becomes involved in the saving of Anna and Armand’s long-deserted cottage in the south of France, which the grandparents neve ...more

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Nov 02, 2014 Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance rated it really liked it

Shelves: moving-and-starting-over, france

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 path ...more

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