A Fifty-Year Silence

Author: Miranda Richmond Mouillot
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1925095525
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book 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. ‘A tender portrait of a family and the inheritance—and obligation—of memory. A stunning debut.’ Kristina Olsson ‘A moving family history researched with dedication and completed with a granddaughter’s love.’ Kirkus ‘Charming, understated...A wonderful evocation of the way that the Holocaust has haunted many generations.’ Publishers Weekly ‘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.’ Library Journal ‘An eloquent and engrossing read...It’s a totally captivating journey that will have you rapt from start to finish.’ Australian Women's Weekly ‘Miranda’s story is moving and evocative of the times, rich in detail and with characters who come vividly to life.’ Toowoomba Chronicle ‘A skilfully written and nuanced portrait of two tough and complex individuals trying to cope with the extraordinary challenges of war.’ New Zealand Listener ‘The warmth with which Mouillot shares her experiences ensures the reader travels with her until the end in this heartbreaking insight into the last effects of the Holocaust.’ InDaily

A Fifty-Year Silence

Author: Miranda Richmond Mouillot
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0804140650
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book 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.

50 Years of Silence

Author: Jan Ruff-O'Herne
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781863407830
Category : Comfort women
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The long idyllic summer of Jan Ruff O'Herne's ildhood in Dutch colonial Indonesia ended in 1942 with the Japanese invasion of Java. She was interned in Ambarawa Prison Camp, along with her mother and two younger sisters. In February 1944, when Jan was 21, her life was torn apart. Along with nine other young women, all of them virgins, she was plucked from the camp and her family, and enslaved into prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Army.

A Time to Keep Silence

Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
Publisher: John Murray
ISBN: 1848547021
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 65

Book Description
From the French Abbey of St Wandrille to the abandoned and awesome Rock Monasteries of Cappadocia in Turkey, the celebrated travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor studies the rigorous contemplative lives of the monks and the timeless beauty of their monastic surroundings. In his occasional retreats, the peaceful solitude and the calm enchantment of the monasteries was passed on as a kind of 'supernatural windfall' which A Time to Keep Silence so effortlessly records.

Silence over Dunkerque

Author: John R. Tunis
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453221174
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Book Description
DIVJohn Tunis vividly imagines the drama of Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of Allied forces from Dunkerque/divDIV /divDIVSergeant Edward Williams of the Second Battalion was among the first British troops to land in France, just across the English Channel from his family in Dover, after the declaration of war in September of 1939. Battles have been few and far between since then, in what the Germans have been calling der Sitzkrieg—the sitting war. /divDIV /divDIVIn May 1940, under the leadership of their new prime minister, Winston Churchill, the British are hoping to stem the tide of Nazi invasion along their southern border. But now, flanked to the east and west by German troops and cut off from the Allies further south, Sergeant Williams and his battalion must retreat to Dunkerque in the north, and escape by sea is their only hope./div

Silence

Author: Erling Kagge
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524733245
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
What is silence? Where can it be found? Why is it now more important than ever? In 1993, Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge spent fifty days walking solo across Antarctica, becoming the first person to reach the South Pole alone, accompanied only by a radio whose batteries he had removed before setting out. In this book. an astonishing and transformative meditation, Kagge explores the silence around us, the silence within us, and the silence we must create. By recounting his own experiences and discussing the observations of poets, artists, and explorers, Kagge shows us why silence is essential to sanity and happiness—and how it can open doors to wonder and gratitude. (With full-color photographs throughout.)

Silence on the Mountain

Author: Daniel Wilkinson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822333685
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Book Description
Written by a young human rights worker, "Silence on the Mountain" is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala's 36-year internal war, a conflict that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people.

Against Silence

Author: Frank Bidart
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374603529
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 51

Book Description
An urgent new collection from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and “one of the undisputed master poets of our time” (Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR) Words, voices reek of the worlds from which they emerge: different worlds, each with its all but palpable aroma, its parameters, limitations, promise. Words—there is a gap, nonetheless always and forever, between words and the world— slip, slide, are imprecise, BLIND, perish. • Set up a situation,— . . . then reveal an abyss. For more than fifty years, Frank Bidart has given voice to the inner self, to the depths of his own psyche and the unforgettable characters that populate his poems. In Against Silence, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s eleventh collection of poetry, Bidart writes of the cycles we cannot escape and the feelings we cannot forget. Our history is not a tabula rasa but a repeating, refining story of love and hate, of words spoken and old cruelties enacted. Moving among the dead and the living, the figures of his life and of his past, Bidart calls reality forth—with nothing settled and nothing forgotten, we must speak.

Fifty Days of Solitude

Author: Doris Grumbach
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497676657
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 73

Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book: To truly understand herself, Doris Grumbach embraces solitude With a busy career as a novelist, essayist, reviewer, and bookstore owner, Doris Grumbach has little opportunity to be alone. However, after seventy-five years on the planet, she finally has her chance: Her partner has departed for an extended book-buying trip, and Grumbach has been given fifty days to relax, think, and write about her experience. In this graceful memoir, Grumbach delicately balances the beauty of turning one’s back on everything with the hardship of complete aloneness. Even as she attends church and collects her mail, she moves like a shadow, speaking to no one. Left only to her books and music in the midst of a Maine winter, she must look within herself for solace. The result of this reflection is a powerful meditation on the meaning of aging, writing, and one’s own company—and reaffirmation of the power of friends and companionship.

Fifty Words for Rain

Author: Asha Lemmie
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 152474638X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Book Description
A Good Morning America Book Club Pick and New York Times Bestseller! From debut author Asha Lemmie, “a lovely, heartrending story about love and loss, prejudice and pain, and the sometimes dangerous, always durable ties that link a family together.” —Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Nightingale Kyoto, Japan, 1948. “Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist.” Such is eight-year-old Noriko “Nori” Kamiza’s first lesson. She will not question why her mother abandoned her with only these final words. She will not fight her confinement to the attic of her grandparents’ imperial estate. And she will not resist the scalding chemical baths she receives daily to lighten her skin. The child of a married Japanese aristocrat and her African American GI lover, Nori is an outsider from birth. Her grandparents take her in, only to conceal her, fearful of a stain on the royal pedigree that they are desperate to uphold in a changing Japan. Obedient to a fault, Nori accepts her solitary life, despite her natural intellect and curiosity. But when chance brings her older half-brother, Akira, to the estate that is his inheritance and destiny, Nori finds in him an unlikely ally with whom she forms a powerful bond—a bond their formidable grandparents cannot allow and that will irrevocably change the lives they were always meant to lead. Because now that Nori has glimpsed a world in which perhaps there is a place for her after all, she is ready to fight to be a part of it—a battle that just might cost her everything. Spanning decades and continents, Fifty Words for Rain is a dazzling epic about the ties that bind, the ties that give you strength, and what it means to be free.