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    A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France
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    A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France
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    A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France
    Audiobook9 hours

    A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

    Written by Miranda Richmond Mouillot

    Narrated by Miranda Richmond Mouillot

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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, the author'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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJan 20, 2015
    ISBN9781101888384
    Unavailable
    A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

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    Reviews for A Fifty-Year Silence

    3.5/5

    85 ratings34 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This memoir held my interest enough to keep me reading it, but not enough that I "couldn't put it down" - I could. Hard to follow at times.
    • 4/5
      The author's grandparents survived the Holocaust, but five years later, split up and never spoke to one another again. This family memoir is the author's attempt to figure out what happened by immersing herself in her grandparents' past. Mouillot visits the crumbing old house in the south of France where her grandparents marriage fell apart, and pieces together an incomplete story from old family letters, ephemera, secondary sources, and the few stories she can wring from her closed-lipped, elderly grandparents. And her quest opened a new story for Mouilot herself as she finds a home in the village and falls in love.
    • 3/5
      A solid 3.5 stars. I enjoyed this book, was able to follow the flow of the story-line, tho at times wishing i could tweak it, and was impressed with the descriptive style. Overall? Kudos to Miranda Mouillot for jumping in with both feet to give us the story of her grandparents.I started initially wondering WHY? and HOW COME?? but the reader eventually comes to realize that not all lives and / or marriages are created to follow what we think are pre-set patterns. Who are we to point at a situation and question it, particularly during times of upheaval and "sourwvival"?? The author did more than her share of digging and ' did her grandparents proud'.
    • 3/5
      I received a copy through the Early Reviewer Give-away. This book kept me thinking "I like it" and then a few pages later "I don't like it". I think my biggest problem was with the author "imagining" what actually happened to her grandparents before and during WW II. She couldn't find any direct answers (neither from the grandparents nor from any written sources), so she kept writing about what she thought MIGHT have happened. Except for those aspects it was a good read about a tough subject.
    • 4/5
      I found this to be an excellent memoir by Miranda Richmond Mouillot. My first impressions as I was reading were that I wanted to know more about the grandparents and their war time stories, and less about the author's childhood. By the middle of the book though I was glad of the detail that the author gave to her own life. I enjoyed learning about how her upbringing and relationships with both her grandparents shaped her life. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in the Holocaust.
    • 3/5
      I don't really know what to say about this. it's always hard to leave a negative review of anything involving the Holocaust because you feel so much for the people that went through it all but as a book this was anticlimactic. there is maybe 10% about her grandparents actual holocaust experience and perhaps 5% about their marriage, at most. the other 85% is only about the granddaughters trip to France and her life. there is literally NOTHING about the Holocaust. let me be clear THIS IS NOT A TESTIMONY OR RECREATION OF A HOLOCAUST EXPERIENCE. If you are seeking that look elsewhere. The paragraph description of the book that I read that lead me to pick this book should be rewritten to say" a book about a young girl/woman from a holocaust survivors family finding herself and love in paris" it's not a bad book if this is what you are looking for. I was looking for a book about holocaust testimony or retelling from the next generation. this is not that. there is no big discovery she makes about some secret from her grandfather's work as a transcriber for the war crimes trial. they make it sound like some juicy secret that pulled them apart and the whole book your waiting for that to come out but it never does. it doesn't ever pull you in. this probably sounds harsh but I feel mislead 100%. Grammer and punctuation is due to my (un)smart phone...
    • 2/5
      I received this book through the Early Reviewers program.This book is marketed as the story of the author's grandparents who parted early in their relationship after having two children and never spoke to each other again. Their story has appeal as they lived through WWII and there is the makings of a great novel here. Unfortunately, this is a memoir and the author ends up talking as much or more about her own experience trying to discover her grandparents' lives (who are still alive and obviously don't want to talk about this which is a whole different ethical topic) as finding out anything about her grandparents. In going on this journey, the author moves to France, meets her husband, and has a child. I just didn't like the tone of this book and I didn't think the grandparents' story panned out enough to warrant an entire book.
    • 4/5
      3.5 A search by a grand-daughter for the truth of the relationship between her grandparents who have not talked about or to each other for fifty years. War time experiences have left scars for many so it is not surprising that this story is filled with anguish, confusion and sadness but it is also written with a great deal of love. Yet, it was still confusing to me at times, didn't understand the motivation of her grandparents, nor why her grandmother would not tell her story nor explain even when directly asked. Her grandfather I understood a little more, as a translator for the Nuremberg trials and as a son who lost his parents in Auschwitz, he was I believe bitterly scarred. The grandmother, I believe did not want to look back and the grandfather was unable to look forward. Still I applaud the author, her journey to know her grandparents as individual people not just family members. Her love of the little house in the south of France, the care she took of her grandfather and this book she wrote to honor their lives. Loved the pictures, they always add so much to a book, and enjoyed reading the end, which was a conversation with the author. This was an interesting book, but there were still many things I didn't understand.ARC from librarything.
    • 4/5
      Why did her grandparents separate and refuse to speak to each other after WWII? Mouillot's book seeks the answer to this question. She grew up knowing both of them but they refused to answer her questions. She traveled to the house they left in France and thought she might learn the answers there. She slowly uncovered what had happened to them, Jews in Occupied France, during the war.This is a very well written book and when reading it, I felt like I came to know her family and wanted to know what happened. I really enjoyed reading this.
    • 4/5
      I won a copy of the book A Fifty-Year Silence by Miranda Richmond Mouillot, through the LIbrayThing Early Reviewers Program. A Fifty-Year Silence details the story of the author's estranged grandparents who have not spoken to each other since the end of WWII. As Miranda grows older she wonders what caused the couple who seemed to have been in love at some point to never speak again and she seeks to unravel their secrets. The book got off to a slow start but picked up toward the middle and I really began to enjoy this tale of war, tragedy and triumph. This book shows the ripple effect of overwhelming loss and tragedy, how it affects not only those who experience the tragedy first hand but the generations that follow. It also shows how some people grow stronger after trials and tribulations and how others let it defeat them. Interesting book that really leaves you thinking long after you've completed your reading.
    • 3/5
      I like reading these types of books. This time period of WWII just fascinates me. The people who lived this era draw me into their stories. Each story is different but good. I thought that the author did a good job compiling her grandparents stories and memories into this book. Not to take anything away from the author's grand parents but I liked them but was not in love with them. I missed this from this book. From other books that I have read in this genre that was part of the magic that I enjoyed from these books is that I felt like I had an open window to these peoples lives and thus I became really close to them as if I was part of their extended family or a really close friend. So again with this book I felt like I got to know Miranda's grand parents but I still felt like I was at a distance and just a bystander. As I read the story I could see the clues all coming together as to the reason for Miranda's grandparents silence. Which was fine but I was kind of wishing it was something more grand as to the silence. Overall a nice read.
    • 3/5
      There's not much to "A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War and a Ruined House in France," as its young author, Miranda Richmond Mouillot, concedes with this summary on the very last page: "Armand and Anna fell in love, bought a house and never spoke again." Her 263-page book details her efforts to discover why Armand and Anna, her maternal grandparents, never spoke again.There is a bit more to the story. Armand and Anna, both Jews, survived World War II in France, although other family members did not. They saw little of each other during the war. Afterward they married, bought that house and lived together long enough to have a daughter. Then Armand became a translator at the Nuremberg Trials, where he learned firsthand what the Germans did to the Jews. After that, silence. Armand stayed in France. Anna moved to the United States, where years later Miranda was born. Why her grandparents never spoke, yet in some odd way still seemed to love one another, weighed on her mind while she was growing up. Eventually she found that ruined house, spent time with her grandfather and began to piece together the story that neither grandparent wanted to talk about.Because this story really doesn't amount to much, Mouillot fills out her book with details of her own life, including her romance with and eventual marriage to a Frenchman. She's a fine writer. Not everyone could make so much out of so little and still make it worth reading.
    • 4/5
      I was not looking forward to reading this book as I am into Holocaust overload right now, but Miranda Richmond Mouillot's memoir of her parents flight from the Nazi's, their surviving refugee camps in Switzerland, and their marriage, divorce and refusal to talk about any of it for over 50 years is both compelling and gives a new twist on a story that has been told so many times that it's almost a cliche.Mouillot grew up knowing that something was terribly wrong in her family even though no one would discuss it. She developed strange a vague fears as a child: leaving her shoes by the door for a quick escape, for instance. While close to both grandparents, it was difficult for her to understand them. Her grandmother frequently spoke in what appeared to be riddles, while the mere mention of her grandmother's name would snd her grandfather into a terrifying rage.Finally, when Mouillot graduated from college, she decided to discover the answer to her questions. She won a fellowship to study her grandparents' lives and decided to live in a ruin of a stone house her grandmother had purchased right after the war in Alba-La-Romaine, in southeast France.There, using letters, records from refugee camps and whatever she could pry out of her grandfather, Mouillot pieces together their story. It's not the story of her fantasies, but it is an honest, heroic tale of love, luck and survival.The passage that stuck me the most came at the end of the book when she writes:"I Thought of Anne, the daughter of friends of my grandmother, and her crusade to record and preserve survivors' memories of the time before the war, before that generation had been reduced to remembering the Shoah for the benefit of history. I shuddered thinking of the endles punishment it must be to live with both the personal and cultural aftereffects of a trauma.....my grandparents were hounded not only by the memory of what they'd lived through in the war, not only by the loss of all that had been destroyed in those six years, but also by the exhausting injunction, 'never forget.'"This is a hauntingly beautiful book about how the horrific events of the war continue to reverberate in the generations that have followed. Thank you to Library Thing for sending me this ARC
    • 4/5
      Tracing the journey the author went on in search of understanding her grandparents, this memoir wanders through the chaotic life they led as refugees during the war. It is only in the end, as the author explores their life post war, that the explanation is discovered in its enormity and intimacy. While her grandparents survived the war physically, it can't be said that they both survived it emotionally. For the survivors, the ability to move forward in a world that could contain such evil and could hold it at arm's length as though it weren't the horror that it was. That was the task that faced the author's grandparents and which drove them apart in the end. The ending of this memoir is powerful in its emotional payoff.
    • 4/5
      I received a copy of this book for the purpose of review.I could not read this book fast. I was truly reading only pages a day, sometimes even as little as only a few paragraphs. The story cause much thought and introspection as to how life events shape each person and how it can be so profoundly different for each person.The author grew up knowing both of her grandparents but as separate people, living completely separate lives and never speaking to one another. They were Jewish and they had survived the war, survived the atrocities that so many did not. She wanted to know what broke her grandparents up but they would not talk directly about it. So over many years she dove head first into their lives. She moved to the house they owned in France. She talked to many people, went through many papers & asked her Mom and grandparents many questions. As she found out what their lives were like during the war she was able to see the strength that each had. Tragedy can do one of two things- bind you closer together or tear you hopelessly apart and unfortunately the latter is what happened to her grandparents. This story is poignant, sad, and heartfelt. Be prepared to spend time with this one
    • 4/5
      An interesting memoir, but one that could have benefitted from a bit more editing. The author manages to capture the drama of the Nuremberg trials. The story is an interesting look at how events impact lives and how individuals deal with the forces that rage around them.
    • 4/5
      Absolutely beautiful and meet my high expectations, I highly recommend A Fifty-Year Silence by Miranda Richmond Mouillot.
    • 5/5
      This is a lovely story.It is extremely well written.It just proves that one never knows where their path will take them nor how that path will change the lives of others. I wish it had ended on a happier note re the grandparents and kept hoping there would be some kind of late-in-life reconnecting for them but I guess life isn't Hollywood and reality was the only true ending- and there was happiness in that the grandmother lived long enough to read her story, that the granddaughter came to understand her grandparents and find happiness herself in that same small village.I highly recommend this book.
    • 3/5
      I wanted to like this book more than I did. It had the potential to be a great book--the story of a secret leading to her grandparents' divorce that was kept by the parties for fifty years. Unfortunately the disjointed manner in which it was told did nothing to engage the reader. Instead of a reasonably exhaustive search for the story, we find a rather haphazard plan that was put in place with limited success. The story seemed to be focused as much on the author's romance and relationship while she was in France as it was the story that was told. The actual story could have probably been told in a documented journal article with far more success than the manner in which it was told. This review is based on an advance readers copy received through LibraryThing Early Reviewers with the expectation a review would be written.
    • 4/5
      In A Fifty-Year Silence, Miranda Mouillot tries to learn what drove her grandparents to split soon after WWII. Interestingly, both of her grandparents were alive well into Miranda's adulthood and she spent a lot of time with each, so it's not like she couldn't just ask them. But the split was so bitter that she couldn't just ask them. They seemed to clam up, so she had to take a circuitous route to find out.In the meantime she moved to France and moved into a home that her grandparents had owned, and part of the book is the story of Miranda making her way in her new home.I loved to hear my grandmother's stories and so in that way I really connected with that part of the story. I was expecting there to be some one big reason for why her grandparents split, but in the end the story was more complicated than that. At first I was disappointed, but after thinking about it for a few days, I realized that that's really the way life works. An enjoyable read.
    • 5/5
      Mouillot, Miranda Richmond. A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War and a Ruined House in France. New York: Crown Publishers, 2015.Reason read: an Early Review book from LibraryThing.Here's what I loved about Mouillot's memoir straight away: she was unapologetic about the inaccuracies in her book. She admits a lot of her documentation is based on conversations and possible faulty memories. From some reason, that admission alone makes it all the more real to me.How does a relationship go from just that, a relationship, to a subject for a book? When I think about Mouillot's grandparents and their fifty year silence I find myself asking, what makes this divorce any different from other relationship that crashed and burned? Could we all write a story about a relationship that fell apart? Well, yes and no. Add World War II, being Jewish and escaping the Holocaust and suddenly it's not just about a couple who haven't spoken to each other. It's a mystery of survival on many different levels. While Mouillot's account is choppy and sometimes hard to follow I found myself rooting for her. I wanted her to discover the mysteries of love and relationships, especially since her own love life was blossoming at the same time.We aren't supposed to quote from the book until it has been published but I have to say I hope this sentence stays, "How do you break a silence that is not your own?" (from the preface). I love, love, love this question. It should be on the cover of the book because it grabs you by the heart and throttles your mind into wanting to know more. Maybe that's just me. Case in point: I was drawn into the show, "The Closer" after hearing Brenda say, "If I wanted to be called bitch to my face I'd still be married" in a promo. One sentence and I was hooked. Sometimes, that is all it takes.
    • 3/5
      A Fifty-Year Silence is Miranda Richmond Mouillot's musings combined with research about the relationship between her estranged grandparents. Married in the midst of the Holocaust, her grandparents are as different as can be. Anna, a physician living in New York, is gregarious and ever optimistic. Armand, an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials and living in Switzerland, is solitary and volatile. What they have in common is the fact that neither is willing to remember or discuss their four year marriage and subsequent 50 year estrangement. This book is Mouillot's attempt to go back and forth between continents and make sense of the war years and her grandparents' early relationship, with its bitter ending.Mouillot's writing style is good, but through much of the book her narrative is a little muddled, as indeed, her own thoughts must have been. She talks about the effects of the Nazi Genocide on survivors and their families. Mouillot herself grew up with irrational fears that were her grandmother's legacy, and the mandate to "never forget" is one that she can not let go of, like it or not. I particularly liked reading about her thoughts when she read transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials. Being an interpreter herself, she understood that the words that her grandfather heard were quickly translated and spoken, without seeming to enter his brain. Those words, however, were so horrific and personal that they couldn't help entering his very soul, making him into the man he had become. It is no wonder he found it difficult to resume life with his bright and forward-looking wife after the trials.When Anna did talk about her feelings for Armand, she said she no longer loved him, because the opposite of love, after all, is indifference, which is what she felt toward him. Armand, on the other hand, was very bitter about Anna, refusing to even utter her name. His hatred was so intense that it was easy to imagine it being just a step away from love. But because of his history, Armand was unable to direct his feelings toward Anna into anything positive. I received this book as an advance reading copy from Librarything, so it was not the finished book. There were several pages in the beginning which showed that maps are to be inserted. Those will be extremely helpful to the reader. Without the maps I was very disoriented as to the various places and the distances between them.
    • 5/5
      This is the true story of Miranda's search for her grandparent's history. When she was young, she knew that she had two grandparents but she never realized that they had been married - she had never seen them together and they never spoke to each other or about each other. Her grandmother lived in the United States and her grandfather lived in Europe. Once she got older, she decided that she wanted to know how they fell into and out of love during World War II. This is not normally the type of book that I would read but I can assure you that once I read the first chapter, I couldn't put it down. Its the story of the love that Miranda has for her grandparents and its really a coming of age story for her. Its also a history of struggle during WWII and some very difficult information about the war trails in Nuremberg. Its a must read!
    • 5/5
      An unusual blend of mystery, family anguish and introspection. It was the premise of the book that interested me; however, the story itself drew me in and I felt compelled to find the same answers the author was seeking. That is was based on real events the author had painstakingly cobbled together from recollection, research and stubbornness made the book even more intriguing. Even though the final denouement was, in my opinion, a little anticlimactic, it was still a satisfying ending and hopefully, brought a sense of closure for the author's long search for resolution.
    • 3/5
      A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in Franceby Miranda Richmond Mouillot; (3*)The author tells the story of her grandparents who escaped Nazi occupied France during World War II. After the war they married and had two children. The grandmother took the children and left her husband after 5 years of marriage and after the Nuremberg Trials. The two only saw each other once after that and they never spoke again. Mouillot attempts to piece together their story, their history, and their relationship. At this place in time her grandparents are aged and their health and memory is declining. She moves to a small town in the South of France, to the very house that her grandparents bought when they were still married. Here she meets her future husband, fixes up the house, and tries to sort through papers, books, and her grandparents' hazy memories.Mouillot, in this book, is telling two stories. The story of her Jewish grandparents and what it was like for them going through the war and all that came with that life and her story as their granddaughter. As one may imagine her information was somewhat limited.I was able to appreciate this book and I recommend it to those interested in the subject matter.
    • 3/5
      As someone who is also fascinated by my own family's history, I can relate to Ms.Mouillot's passion and obsession for understanding her grandparent's situation. She also made me stop and think about the immediate aftermath of the war. It didn't just magically end and have everything return to normal. The horrors of what happened after the war too often go unacknowledged.
    • 1/5
      While there is a mystery here, and a story, there is not a book. This feels like reading someone's family story, not necessarily intended for publication. It would be *very* interesting for family members, not so much for others.
    • 4/5
      The cover and the title of Miranda Richmond Mouillot’s memoir intrigued me the most about reading, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France. A fifty-year silence sparked my imagination about what kind of silence it could be, was or how was it resolved, and what could have led to it in the first place. Would there be a happy ending? Come to find out, Mouillot was as intrigued as I about the silence. The back cover explains that in 1948 Anna and Armand bought a house together in the South of France. Five years later, Anna leaves France for the United States, taking only their children and a typewriter. “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.” This reader wanted to know what was so horrible that separated two people for the remainder of their lives.Mouillot is very close to her grandmother, Anna, and semi-close to grandpa Armand. She can’t get their relationship out of her mind, and eventually goes to France to see the house the family still owns. She takes a leave of absence from her job and goes in quest of her grandparents’ marriage. She has a year to complete her task; a year to write a book about her grandparents’ lives. I never really understood what drove her to undertake this, but only that she wanted to write about it. The house is a dilapidated, uninhabitable ruin. Yet, Mouillot is undeterred. She finds housing nearby and undertakes restoring what little is left. Her grandmother won’t talk on the phone, so the two write letters. Readers are given snippets of what appears to be long letters that sometimes make sense and sometimes don’t. Mouillot has spent a considerable amount of time with her grandfather, especially when she was sent to a nearby boarding school. It’s unclear if Armand is living in France or Switzerland. But now that she is back, she tries to get him to talk about his life, yet Armand is reluctant.There are so many unanswered questions. Like were Anna and Armand ever truly married. Or divorced? In the five years they were together, most of that was spent apart as WWII raged across Europe. Armand was sent to a concentration camp, and survived; survived enough to become a translator during the Nuremberg Trials. The question of his citizenship is discussed, which I found strange. Surely he had to be a legal citizen in the county of birth. What appealed to me about A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France is two-fold. First, Mouillot tries to understand her grandparent’s relationship; a relationship hampered by survivor guilt. In my mind, she never unravels or gets to the heart of the couple’s revulsion to each other. That makes this work truly realistic. Second, the story is as equally about Mouillot. It’s about her relationship with her grandparents, which becomes quite tender when Armand begins to suffer from dementia. And it’s about her relationship with her past, a legacy of survivor guilt, and her attempts to move forward---a new generation ready, if not totally able, to forget the past and surge ahead.I give A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France 4 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.
    • 2/5
      A Fifty-Year Silence part memoir, part mystery, and part psychological exploration of a relationship. The author Miranda Richmond Mouillot's sets out to discover what happened between her grandmother, a physician, and her grandfather, an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials, who refused to speak to each for more than 50 years. In 1948, after surviving World War II by escaping Nazi-occupied France for refugee camps in Switzerland, the author's grandparents, Anna and Armand, bought an old stone house in a remote 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. In addition to presenting her grandparent’s story, Richmond Mouillot presents her journey as well, from her seeing the stone house as a teen (and immediately falling in love), her relationship with her grandparents both as a child and an adult, her families legacy of generational trauma and her eventually moving on with her own life. Though the novel is well written, I found myself let down in the end. I still don’t have a clear picture of relationship between Anna and Armand—and when we finally get to the “answer” if felt like a complete let down. In the end I found that the book lacked much real information or focus. 2 out of 5 stars.
    • 4/5
      I thought this memoir was very compelling. I thought her somewhat naïve about what happened to her grandparents during the war and she romanticized her their relationship to much.