News Release
January 2000
(Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania) Helen Fremont, the best-selling author of After Long Silence,
will conduct a reading from the book and speak about her experiences
retracing family secrets and historical omissions and the effect of
such secrets on subsequent generations. The reading and discussion will
be held on Wednesday, February 16, at 8:00 p.m., in Peter Hall. Following
the lecture, a reception with Fremont will be held in Moravian's Payne
Gallery. The reception is sponsored by Moravian's student literary magazine,
The Manuscript. Both Peter Hall and the Payne Gallery are located on
Moravian College's Church Street Campus, at Main and Church streets
in historic downtown Bethlehem.
Raised as a Roman Catholic her entire life, Helen Fremont
discovered in adulthood that her parents are Jewish holocaust survivors
and her family’s past is an incredible tale of secrets and survival
that spans forty years.
The daughter of middle-class Poles who emigrated to America
after World War II, Helen grew up believing she was Catholic and that
her parents fled Europe simply to build a new life in America after
the war. She and her older sister attended church regularly, though
they were never allowed to take Communion: their mother dismissed it
as an "unimportant part of Mass," a curious American custom.
Helen was living and working in Boston when a stranger
she met at a wedding suggested that she might have Jewish blood. That
comment set into motion the disclosure of a past almost beyond imagining.
By contacting family friends, acquaintances, and a rabbi, she and her
sister pieced together a shaky puzzle of their parent’s early
lives. As gently as possible, they confronted their mother and father
with what they learned, and began to unravel a twisted skein of secrets:
their maternal grandparents were gassed in the camp at Belzec; their
maternal aunt married, a count, an Italian fascist, whose connections
made possible their survival during the war.
For more than forty years, Helen’s parents had kept
these secrets, and their discovery, at once painful and cathartic, made
it possible to reclaim her identity, to finally understand where she
comes from and who she is.
When the Delacorte Press published After Long Silence
last February, critics across the nation praised Fremont’s honest
and evocative memoir, while Fremont’s story climbed onto bestseller
lists, including those of the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe,
and Newsday. After Long Silence, a beautifully written exploration of
the bonds of family, the devastating price of secrecy, and the enduring
will to live, will be published for the first time in paperback from
the Bantam Dell Publishing group on January 18, 2000.
Helen Femont, a lawyer with the Massachusetts public defender
agency and a consultant for the U.S. Department of Justice, lives in
Boston, Massachusetts. She is a graduate of the Warren Wilson College
MFA Program for Writers and is a fiction editor for the Marboro Review.
Her stories and essays have appeared in many publications, among them
Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, Ploughshares, and The Harvard Review.
After Long Silence is her first book.
The reading is free and open to the public. For more information,
call the Moravian College at (610) 861-3916. Moravian College is a private,
coeducational, selective liberal arts college located in Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania. Tracing its founding to 1742, it is recognized as America's
sixth-oldest college.
After Long Silence is about the devastating price of hiding
the truth; about families; about the steps we take, foolish or wise,
to protect ourselves and our loved ones. No one who reads this book
can be unmoved, or fail to understand the seductive, damaging power
of secrets.
"A story of safe but costly passage from one identity
to another that takes us from Europe to America via World War II...[Fremont]
has the intelligence and imagination to question her own motives.
This allows her to question the memoir form, even as she deploys it
so beautifully."
--The New York Times
"An extraordinary tale...eloquently written....Its
complex narrative weaves back and forth between past and present,
the tale and its discovery."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Fascinating...A tragic saga, but at the same time
it often reads like a thriller filled with acts of extraordinary courage,
descriptions of dangerous journeys and a series of secret identities."
--Chicago Tribune
"Riveting...painfully authentic...a poignant memoir,
a labor of love for the parents she never really knew."
--The Boston Globe
"Mesmerizing...Fremont has accomplished something
that seems close to impossible: She has made a fresh and worthy contribution
to the vast literature of the Holocaust."
--The Washington Post Book World
