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

It isn't often a book grasps my soul, into my core-being where I cannot forget what I just read for months, if not years. It takes a great writer to capture me like that. Miranda Richmond Mouillot is one of few authors who has accomplished that fairly impossible task.

A Fifty-Year Silence takes it readers on a journey through the lives of Armand and Anna Jacoubovitch, the authors grandparents. A story that started with a silence between two people who should have been inseparable, but who hadn't spoken since 1955. The story which is pieced together by Mouillot through a myriad of memories either from her grandparents themselves or through the files in history.

The journey starts in the eyes of the author and how her family's history had her tied to a time and place that was far from our conceptual grasp, but close to one's soul. The unexplained dreams and fears that only come to life when you continue reading through the leaves of this book. Through her grandfather's apartment in Geneva, to the small, crumbling home in La Roche. A tiny village named Alba, tucked away somewhere in France. The small silver dish with the word Aubette that holds so much memory; a memory that cannot be unveiled. As the story unfolds, it leaves one enraptured by a piece of history hardly able to be grasped by our frail minds.

The lives of two people torn by war, refugee camps and the need to survive. The gruesome realization of the Nuremberg Trials, and that the war didn't end with the defeat of Hitler. The war lived on, to destroy lives with the burden of memory, nightmares and a fear that will never be forgotten. To read this book will bring a new enlightenment on how lives are affected by the past even in the present. 

The past may seem dim and we may forget, but thanks to Miranda Richmond Mouillot the lives of her grandparents, Armand and Anna Jacoubovitch, are not forgotten, and their memory will live on.

In the words of Anna,"...All that is in the past. You have to live your life forward." **

Purchase your own copy here: A Fifty-Year Silence

**page 260, lines 28 and 29.

*I received this book from Blogging for Books for my honest review. All opinions are 100% my own.