A Fifty-Year Silence Quotes

“The point of a fairy tale is never in the details. The point is that it's easy to remember, to carry, to tell. We'll continue telling until the stones fall down, and then we'll rebuild and start again.”
― Miranda Richmond mouillot, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

“Here the past was everywhere, an entire continent sown with memories.”
― Miranda Richmond Mouillot, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

“I saw an infinity of forgotten details dancing across history's dizzying expanse.”
― Miranda Richmond Mouillot, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

“What do you think? Do you also believe that what gives our lives their meaning is the passion that suddenly invades us heart, soul, and body, and burns in us forever, no matter what else happens in our lives? —SANDOR MARAI, Embers  (translated from the Hungarian by Carol Brown Janeway)”
― Miranda Richmond Mouillot, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

“Grandma's memory had overflowed like a springtime river escaping its banks, and her stories lapped over me. They say a flood makes the world look as it did in the beginning, before the dry land emerged. It seemed to me that her outpouring of memories had dissolved the wide gulf between us and the past, that beside her I could glimpse her grandmother, and her grandmother's grandmother, and all the worlds each of them contained. I had understood how the war severed my grandmother from her everyday life, relegating it to the bygone and the lost, but now I saw it had also carried away her past - not only loved ones but also advice and instructions, proclivities and inside jokes, books and recipes, trinkets and keepsakes, all her rightful inheritance. For a split second, I saw an infinity of forgotten details dancing across history's dizzying expanse. Folded into remembrance is the knowledge of all that cannot be recalled: I realized that when my grandparents passed away, I would carry within me not only the memory of them but the memory of their memories, on an on over the horizon of being, back to the tohubohu before the waters parted.”
― Miranda Richmond Mouillot, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

“On the appointed day, I waited in the vestibule of the boardinghouse until his car rolled up the Chermin de Verey, turned around, and parked outside the gate. He disliked my housemistress intensely and refused to park on school property in case he ran into her. I got into the car, and we drove south in silence, over little highways that wiggled precariously through the mountains, on main streets through half-abandoned villages, on back roads past quiet factories with dark eyes shattered into their windowpanes, past geraniums and lace curtains and dingy cafes. My grandfather pointed out monuments to the Resistance along the way, sad gray stones tucked up onto the banks of the road, where bands of men had been denounced, discovered, shot down. Entire villages, he told me, had been massacred because they wouldn't surrender their resistance fighters. Women and children had burned alive because they would not speak. As I listened, I thought of all the times my grandmother complained to me that Americans had no sense of history. Now I understood that she meant Americans had no sense of her history, of our history. Here the past was everywhere, an entire continent sown with memories. For the first time, I wondered if she had sent me back so I could learn what it was like to live in that punishing landscape. I cracked open the window a tiny bit; I felt suffocated. The wind pierced the silence inside the car, whose pneumatic suspension system I imagined pumping more air into itself to hold the weight of those stories. I wondered what life would be like without that load to carry.”
― Miranda Richmond Mouillot, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

“Despite his forbidding silence, living with my grandfather finally allowed me to put words to the fears and nightmares from which I had suffered for as long as I could remember. His vast library taught me many things, including that I was part of a community of people coming to terms with a genocide. And if his library taught me the vocabulary and the history, he himself taught me to recognize the landscape in which the survivors of destruction live their lives, to see that minefield of guilt and sadness for what it was. Hints of the people and the world lost were everywhere, waiting to blow holes in his fragile hold on the present. Just as I vacuumed my crumbs and wipes up my water droplets, I did my best, for his sake and mine, not to disturb the minefield. Little did I know, he was still suffering from the fallout of a single explosion, the one that had originally blown him and my grandmother apart.”
― Miranda Richmond Mouillot, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

“In their entire refugee dossier - hundreds of pages - this letter was the only mention of my grandparents' marriage. But whether they wed for love, loyalty, or my grandmother's beautiful black hair, at least now I knew the date: July 12, 1994.”
― Miranda Richmond Mouillot, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

“A miracle.' How many times had I heard Grandma use that word? That you even exist is a miracle; a miracle that you're here; a miracle we're alive; a miracle that we survived. As a child, I'd thought miracles were good. But Jewish tradition teaches that miracles are ambiguous. After all, if the universe really was created in the image of the Divine Spirit, there should be no need for miracles. A miracle happens when we humans rip holes in the universe's perfection, and the Divine Spirit bleeds through the holes. Thus a miracle cannot prevent or undo the damage humans inflict; it can only alleviate some of the suffering caused by that damage. The question that follows a miracle is the same as the question provoked by tragedy: Why me? In those days, the only answer I could summon was, To remember. And I would look around the bleak living room in La Roche and feel afraid, as if I had faded entirely out of the present and transmogrified into some kind of remembering hermit crab, holed up in a bunker for unbearable memories.”
― Miranda Richmond Mouillot, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

“In Avignon, the breadth of my ignorance dawned on me: I knew almost no facts, no chronology, no geography. I tried to sketch a timeline of my grandparents' relationship and realized I didn't even know what year they had been married.”
― Miranda Richmond Mouillot, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

“Well, at my age, you never know. It’s interesting, in a way, to watch your body shut down,” she observed cheerfully.”
― Miranda Richmond Mouillot, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France