Helen Fremont was raised Roman Catholic in America, only to discover in adulthood that her parents were Jews who had survived the Holocaust.  Delving into the extraordinary secrets that held her family together in a bond of silence for more than forty years, she recounts with heartbreaking clarity and candor a remarkable tale of survival, as vivid as fiction but with the eloquence of truth. When Helen was small, her mother taught her the sign of the cross in six languages.  Theirs was the tender conspiracy of a little girl and her mother at bedtime, protected by a God who could respond in any language.  What she didn't understand was that she was being equipped with proof of her Catholicism, a hedge against persecution, real or imagined. It wasn't until adulthood that she began to comprehend the terrible irony of her mother's gesture, as she and her sister discovered their parents' remarkable, long-held secret.  She knew that her father had spent six years in the Siberian Gulag, surviving nearly on will alone; that her mother's elder sister, fearless and proud, had married an Italian Fascist whose title and connections helped them to survive during the war.  But their faith, their legacy as Jews, was kept hidden for decades. After Long Silence is a searching inquiry into the meaning of identity, self, and history.  It's about the devastating price of hiding the truth; about the steps we take, foolish or wise, to protect ourselves and our loved ones.  No one who reads this book can be left unmoved, or fail to understand the seductive, damaging power of secrets. In her mid-30s Helen Fremont discovered that, although she had been raised in the Midwest as a Catholic, she was in fact the daughter of Polish Jews whose families had been exterminated in the Holocaust. Fremont's tender but unsparing memoir chronicles the voyage of discovery she took with her older sister, ferreting out information from Jewish organizations and individuals and worrying about its impact on their angry, overpowering father and reticent, nightmare-plagued mother. Fremont has the courage to paint a nearly unsympathetic portrait of her parents' secretiveness and initial reluctance to have their children dredge up the past; as the narrative unfolds, readers comprehend the tormented roots of their behavior without forgetting the psychological problems it created for their daughters. Fremont's re-creation of her parents' ghastly ordeals--her mother narrowly escaping the murder of nearly every Jew in her hometown; her father surviving six years in the Soviet gulag--is a triumph of dogged research and sympathetic imagination. Her book tells a deeply American story of identity lost and reclaimed, complete with Fremont coming out to her parents as a lesbian, yet it also achieves understanding of the dark European past and its icy grip on her family. --Wendy Smith Along with her older sister, Lara, Fremont was raised in an ostensibly Roman Catholic family in the Midwest, although her secretive and tight-lipped parents didn't follow many of the customs. Although Fremont knew that her father had been in a Siberian gulag for six years and that her mother had been in a concentration camp, she and Lara later discovered (through perseverance and detective work) that their parents were actually Polish Jews whose families had been virtually wiped out in the Holocaust. Fremont's voyage of discovery is engrossing, as she not only learns of her family's tragic history and heroic survival but also of the powerful relationships between sisters: she with Lara and her mother with her own strong-willed sister, Zosia, who saved them from the Nazis. Unlocking her family's past helps draw Fremont closer to both her sister and her parents, who had remained silent for 50 years. Recommended for all public libraries and for academic libraries with large Holocaust collections.?John A. Drobnicki, York Coll. Lib., CUNY Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. "[A]n incredible tale of survival, a beautiful love story...a triumphant work of art." -- Publishers Weekly , starred review "Few writers have imagined the lives of their parents as fully and richly as Helen Fremont has done in After Long Silence .  Her memoir is a harrowing journey and a brave attempt to insure that her family's heroic suffering has not been in vain." --Richard Russo, author of Straight Man and Nobody's Fool "Reading this beautifully written memoir, I was amazed all over again by the suffering of the Holocaust and the remarkable power of humans to survive almost anything, except safety.   After Long Silence is a stunning testimony to the power of silence and memory." --Margot Livesey, author of Criminals "A stellar example of the new literary nonfiction.  A page-turning, suspenseful narrative, a canny, wise-cracking narrator, and a subject as pertinent as today's newspaper headlines." --Helen Epstein, author of Children of the Holocaust "Helen Fremont has written a spellbin