A Fifty-Year Silence
Love, War and a Ruined House in France
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3.8 • 18 Ratings
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
After surviving World War II by escaping the Nazi occupation, Miranda Richmond Mouillot'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. The two never saw or spoke to each other again.
This is the deeply involving account of Miranda's journey to find out what happened. To discover the roots of this embittered and entrenched silence, Miranda abandons her plans for the future and moves to the old stone house, now a crumbling ruin, where she immerses herself in letters and archival materials, slowly teasing stories out of her reticent, and declining, grandparents. Along the way she 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 detail, A Fifty-Year Silence is a heartbreaking, uplifting love story spanning two continents and three generations.
Miranda Richmond Mouillot was born in North Carolina, USA but now lives in the South of France with her husband, daughter, and cat. She works as an independent translator and editor. A Fifty-Year Silence is her first book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 Ard che 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.
