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A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France
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Published:
Books on Tape 2015
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Description
A young woman moves across an ocean to uncover the truth about her grandparents' mysterious estrangement and pieces together the extraordinary story of their wartime experiences
 
In 1948, after surviving World War II by escaping Nazi-occupied France for refugee camps in Switzerland, Miranda'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. Aside from one brief encounter, the two never saw or spoke to each other again, never remarried, and never revealed what had divided them forever.
A Fifty-Year Silence is the deeply 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 refused to utter his wife's name aloud after she left him. To discover the roots of their embittered and entrenched silence, Miranda abandons her plans for the future and moves to their stone house, now a crumbling ruin; immerses herself in letters, archival materials, and secondary sources; and teases stories out of her reticent, and declining, grandparents. As she reconstructs how Anna and Armand braved overwhelming odds and how the knowledge her grandfather acquired at Nuremberg destroyed their relationship, Miranda wrestles with the legacy of trauma, the burden of history, and the complexities of memory. She also finds herself learning how not only to survive but to thrive—making a home in the village and falling in love.
With warmth, humor, and rich, evocative details that bring her grandparents' outsize characters and their daily struggles vividly to life, A Fifty-Year Silence is a heartbreaking, uplifting love story spanning two continents and three generations.
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Format:
OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen
Edition:
Unabridged
Street Date:
01/20/2015
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781101888391
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Miranda Richmond Mouillot. (2015). A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France. Unabridged Books on Tape.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Miranda Richmond Mouillot. 2015. A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France. Books on Tape.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Miranda Richmond Mouillot, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France. Books on Tape, 2015.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Miranda Richmond Mouillot. A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France. Unabridged Books on Tape, 2015.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 17:15:57
Date Updated:
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title
A Fifty-Year Silence
fullDescription
A young woman moves across an ocean to uncover the truth about her grandparents' mysterious estrangement and pieces together the extraordinary story of their wartime experiences
 
In 1948, after surviving World War II by escaping Nazi-occupied France for refugee camps in Switzerland, Miranda'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. Aside from one brief encounter, the two never saw or spoke to each other again, never remarried, and never revealed what had divided them forever.
A Fifty-Year Silence is the deeply 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 refused to utter his wife's name aloud after she left him. To discover the roots of their embittered and entrenched silence, Miranda abandons her plans for the future and moves to their stone house, now a crumbling ruin; immerses herself in letters, archival materials, and secondary sources; and teases stories out of her reticent, and declining, grandparents. As she reconstructs how Anna and Armand braved overwhelming odds and how the knowledge her grandfather acquired at Nuremberg destroyed their relationship, Miranda wrestles with the legacy of trauma, the burden of history, and the complexities of memory. She also finds herself learning how not only to survive but to thrive—making a home in the village and falling in love.
With warmth, humor, and rich, evocative details that bring her grandparents' outsize characters and their daily struggles vividly to life, A Fifty-Year Silence is a heartbreaking, uplifting love story spanning two continents and three generations.
reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: - Booklist
      • content: "As Mouillot upends her own life to investigate [her grandparents'], she begins to understand the lengths to which people will go to protect their fragile dignity and comes to recognize the power of memories that both comfort and torment wounded souls. A vibrant, earnest, and profound tribute."
      • premium: False
      • source: - Library Journal
      • content: "The corrosive effects of the Holocaust--upon those directly involved and generations thereafter--are illustrated vividly in this candid saga of familial love and misunderstanding, which will resonate with readers of World War II history as well as those who appreciate accounts of ancestral sleuthing in the vein of Anne Sinclair's My Grandfather's Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War and Sarah Wildman's Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind."
      • premium: False
      • source: Publishers Weekly
      • content: "Charming, understated... A wonderful evocation of the way that the Holocaust has haunted many generations."
      • premium: False
      • source: - Kirkus Reviews
      • content: "A moving family history researched with dedication and completed with a granddaughter's love."
      • premium: False
      • source: Tahir Shah, author of The Caliph's House
      • content: "A Fifty-Year Silence is one of those exceedingly rare books that touches you deep down -- page by page -- through the rawness of its story and its sheer insight. The extraordinary quality of the prose, the elegance of the storytelling, and the genius with which Miranda Richmond Mouillot has laid down the twists and turns make this a book to treasure. It is a memoir that sings to us all."
      • premium: False
      • source: Anya von Bremzen, author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking
      • content: "A Fifty-Year Silence is an existential detective story, a family chronicle, a journey of self-discovery, a meditation on memory, a reckoning with ghosts of a tragic past -- and, miraculously, this luminous book succeeds on all levels. The complex, unforgettable characters of Anna and Armand belong in a novel. The author's own quest to uncover the startling truth about their relationship has the candor and intimacy of the best kind of memoir."
      • premium: False
      • source: Anouk Markovits, author of I Am Forbidden
      • content: "A Fifty-Year Silence bravely confronts a truth that most memoirs deny: even the most thorough investigation of family history cannot elucidate the heart of the past. Richmond Mouillot's voice -- shaped by stories yet resisting any single story -- does the profound work of using imagination, place, love, and art to transform the unknowable past into a rooted, liberating spring of identity."
      • premium: False
      • source: Leslie Maitland, author of Crossing the Borders of Time
      • content: "Miranda Richmond Mouillot's loving, suspenseful, and determined quest to uncover the mysterious wound that divides her family holds us fascinated in the intimate spaces where generations seek each other. She beautifully explores how time and memory challenge us all."
      • premium: False
      • source: Marianne Szegedy-Maszák, author of I Kiss Your Hands Many Times
      • content: "In Miranda Richmond Mouillot's luminous and courageous exploration of the two complicated lives of her grandparents, the tragedy of the Holocaust, a crumbling house in France, and her personal search for what might be a kind of truth, A Fifty-Year Silence brings to life a singular family across generations. Richmond Mouillot is a writer of extraordinary grace whose love of her subjects illuminates nearly every page."
      • premium: False
      • source: Sarah Wildman, author of Paper Love
      • content: "Miranda Richmond Mouillot's remarkable book takes the French concept of the lieux de memoire -- places of memory -- those geographic repositories of story and pain, and upends it. Richmond Mouillot draws a powerful portrait of her beloved grandparents, long estranged from one another yet both in love with their only granddaughter, whose own lives are a microcosm of the impact of the Holocaust. In discovering what drove them apart, she unfolds a captivating, intensely moving tale of family, love, war, loss, and finding oneself in the tea leaves of the past."
      • premium: False
      • source: Matti Friedman, author of The Aleppo Codex and winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature
      • content: "A keenly observed and poignant memoir of one young woman's journey from North Carolina to the south of France, and from the present day into the dark spaces in the history of her family and of Europe."
      • premium: True
      • source: AudioFile Magazine
      • content: Mouillot delivers memories of her family, particularly the strained silence between her long-divorced grandparents. The author reads her book with bright, sharp tones that share her excitement at spending time in her grandparents' ancient stone house in France, which they purchased after surviving the Holocaust but never lived in. Mouillot's voice grows sharper and more dramatic as she digs into the memories that haunt her family. In dramatic contrast, she gives her physician grandmother, Anna, a loud voice and Eastern European accent and her grandfather, Armand, once an interpreter during the Nuremberg trials, a high-brow British tone. As the story moves slowly from past to present, and back again, Mouillot's narration lulls listeners through this tale of remembering. M.B.K. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        October 13, 2014
        In this charming, understated memoir, author and translator Richmond Mouillot finds clues to her past as well as her future in a house her French-Jewish grandparents bought in 1948 in Alba, in the Ardèche region of Southern France. Born in 1981 and growing up in Asheville, N.C., Richmond Mouillot was close to her voluble Romanian-born grandmother, Anna, who was a longtime supervising psychiatrist at New York’s Rockland State Mental Hospital; yet, when she was young, the author saw very little of her prickly Zurich-born grandfather, Armand, a U.N. translator at the Nuremberg trials and a later resident of Geneva. The brainy pair met in the 1930s as students in Strasbourg and fled to Switzerland to escape the Nazis. They picked grapes, scrounged for food, and were eventually smuggled to safety. They immigrated to New York in 1948 with their two children
        , but that year Anna left Armand, who had grown emotionally distant after the horrors of war. When she was in college, Richmond Mouillot came to stay periodically at the house in Alba, developing a deep affinity with the place and spending more time with her solitary grandfather in Geneva, even bringing the embittered man back to the rituals of Judaism, as she describes in one moving passage. Her memoir is a wonderful evocation of the way that the Holocaust has haunted many generations.

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shortDescription
A young woman moves across an ocean to uncover the truth about her grandparents' mysterious estrangement and pieces together the extraordinary story of their wartime experiences
 
In 1948, after surviving World War II by escaping Nazi-occupied France for refugee camps in Switzerland, Miranda'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. Aside from one brief encounter, the two never saw or spoke to each other again, never remarried, and never revealed what had divided them forever.
A Fifty-Year Silence is the deeply 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 refused to utter his wife's name aloud after she left him. To discover the roots...
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      • description: History / Modern / 20th Century