A Fifty-Year Silence

October 13, 2014
In this charming, understated memoir, author and translator Richmond Mouillot finds clues to her past as well as her future in a house her French-Jewish grandparents bought in 1948 in Alba, in the Ardèche region of Southern France. Born in 1981 and growing up in Asheville, N.C., Richmond Mouillot was close to her voluble Romanian-born grandmother, Anna, who was a longtime supervising psychiatrist at New York’s Rockland State Mental Hospital; yet, when she was young, the author saw very little of her prickly Zurich-born grandfather, Armand, a U.N. translator at the Nuremberg trials and a later resident of Geneva. The brainy pair met in the 1930s as students in Strasbourg and fled to Switzerland to escape the Nazis. They picked grapes, scrounged for food, and were eventually smuggled to safety. They immigrated to New York in 1948 with their two children
, but that year Anna left Armand, who had grown emotionally distant after the horrors of war. When she was in college, Richmond Mouillot came to stay periodically at the house in Alba, developing a deep affinity with the place and spending more time with her solitary grandfather in Geneva, even bringing the embittered man back to the rituals of Judaism, as she describes in one moving passage. Her memoir is a wonderful evocation of the way that the Holocaust has haunted many generations.