Miranda Richmond Mouillot

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.… (more)

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.… (more)