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10/29
1999

88 Detroit Jewish News

-6000

Author Helen Fremont was shocked to discover that her
Roman Catholic parents were Jewish Holocaust survivors.

JUNE D. BELL
Special to the Jewish News

n

elen Fremont's first book,
After Long Silence: A
Memoir (Delacorte Press;
$23.95) reads like fic-

tion.
The author gracefully recounts a
young Jewish couple's brief courtship
in Lvov, Poland, as the Nazis rose to
power, the horrors that tore them
apart and their miraculous reunion
in Italy.
But the story is all true. Or
at least as much as the 40-ish
Fremont has been able to piece
together.
Her parents refused to talk
about their lives in Europe
when Fremont was growing up
in the Midwest, and they
weren't much more forthcom-
ing when she was an adult.
Fremont, a Boston lawyer
and published writer, suspected
she and her older sister were
being shielded from truths
their parents didn't want to
tell.
The sisters' hunch that they
were Jewish led them to con-
tact Yad Vashem.
Records there confirmed
that their grandparents and
many relatives were killed in
the Belzec concentration camp
in 1943.
"I had to admit," Fremont
wrote, "I wanted to be Jewish
— if for no other reason than
because it simply made sense. I
began to recognize myself as a person
with roots and a past, with a family
history, with an identity. ... But an
unsettling feeling gnawed at me
when I thought about my parents.
What had kept them hiding all these
years? What had made them hide
from me?"
She knew that her father, identi-
fied in After Long Silence as Kovik
Buchman, survived six bitter years in
the Gulag. Her mother, whom she

June D. Bell is a former senior staff
writer for our sister publication the
Atlanta Jewish Times.

calls Batya, managed a harrowing
escape from Poland — to her sister,
Zosia, in Italy — dressed as a young
Italian soldier.
Threading together snippets of
stories her parents reluctantly shared,
Fremont lovingly describes pre-Nazi
Poland and her parents' families. Her
book breathes warmth, courage and
personality into the painful history
her grim parents continue to guard.
Fremont, who visits the 48th Annual
Jewish Book Fair 11 a.m. Sunday, Nov.

Then, when I was found out I was
Jewish, I was even more determined
to find out what happened.
Especially when everything had been
hidden, covered up, denied. It
became really a mission to find out
the truth and to find out who we
were — and answer so many trou-
bling questions about who I was.
But I was still stuck with this bias that
novels were the real art. I went to a lot of
my teachers, professors and mentors. Every
single one of them looked at me and said,
"This will not work as a
novel. Nobody will
believe it."

Helen Fremont:
"I wanted to be
Jewish — if for
no other reason
than because
it simply
made sense.

14, at the D. Dan and Betty Kahn
Building of the Jewish Community
Center in West Bloomfield, recently
spoke to the Jewish News about her
book and the silence her parents contin-
ue to maintain.

JN: Chapters of your book read like
fiction, with dialogue between peo-
ple who died before you were born,
but parts about you are clearly.
memoir. Did you plan it that way?
HF: I had this bias that fiction was real art
and memoir was this crass, exposing tell-all.
I really wanted to write a novel about this. I
started writing a novel before I even knew I
was Jewish.

JN: How did you put
the book together?
HF: I took a nine-
month leave of
absence [from my job
as a lawyer] to write
the book's first draft. I
went to Rome for six
months. I wrote con-
sistently every day. It
took most of five or
six months to get a
very, very rough draft.
Then it took another
five years to revise it
and turn it into a
book. There were
reams and reams and
reams of material I
didn't use.

JN: How did your parents react
when they realized you were writing
a very personal book about their
lives and your sometimes strained
relationship with them?
HF: I realized this was extremely
loaded and very threatening to them.
I had not realized the degree of trau-
ma. I was really quite naive, even
after spending months sitting with
my parents and talking to them and
hearing how hard it was for them. I
still had this misguided belief that in
time this would help them heal,
[that] it would bring them out of
hiding and not make them feel so
persecuted.

JN: Did your parents read the book
when it first came out?