Back in the seventies, I got to talking with a dour young woman my age, who usually kept herself to herself, interacting little with our fellow schlubs at the studio. But we ended up being the volunteers to hold down the fort in that dead week between Christmas and New Year’s, when the film industry is pretty much a ghost town. She asked why I stayed, and I admitted that I needed the golden time pay as my car had thrown a rod and the engine needed complete rebuilding, then I asked her why she stayed, and to my surprise she answered—said she had nowhere to go, as her family was all on the East Coast, or spread equally far apart.

So we chatted. I don’t remember how we got around to the subject of weddings, but I admitted that the last one I’d been to, I’d been the only goy at a very conservative Jewish wedding, brought as a plus one by one of the wedding party. I ended up sitting by myself pretty much the entire evening; though people were perfectly polite, they didn’t know me, and it was clear that this was a very close-knit community. I ended up people-watching, and admitted that I was pretty sure I could tell the Holocaust survivors among them (I knew there were some) from those who’d grown up in America. There was a tightness in their faces, the grooves carved much harder by silent suffering.

Whereupon she unlocked the gates, and talked about what it was like to be the child of survivors. She, and her siblings, had ended up dispersing as far from home as they could get just to preserve their sanity—though they loved their parents deeply, all the more because there were no other relatives. Everyone else had been gassed, shot, or starved to death.

She ended our conversation by saying that somebody ought to do a study on the second generation of survivors, though nobody would (she said bitterly), partly residual anti-Semitism, but also because that elder generation kept silent. What they went through didn’t come out through stories, but in ways they saw the world, and interacted with it. Including at home.

This incident sprang to mind when I read Helen Fremont’s second memoir here. I hadn’t remembered that I’d read the first one years ago, which I had found problematical. Not the writing, which is superb, but in other ways: for example, it seemed clear that Fremont’s family was not a party to this wish to air the family secrets, and in assumptions like “we were raised Catholic” when it seemed clear that no, Helen and her sister were given the label “Catholic” while growing up, as part of the family disguise. I had been given to understand by Catholic friends that being “raised Catholic” means that the religion is a part of family custom and daily life.

Those issues came back to mind as I read this book, which I thought would be more about her father’s experiences (I really wanted to know how he managed to survive six years in a gulag, a second hammer after the horrors of WW II, and the title, “The Escape Artist”, seemed to hint that that would be the subject) but actually what we get is a caroming back and forth between the far past, present, recent past, childhood, present again, and so on, as Fremont delves more deeply into what is clearly a deeply dysfunctional family.

The book begins with Fremont discovering, shortly after her father’s death, that she has been not just disinherited, but in effect legally declared dead. Though at the funeral, everyone was full of loving words.

And so we launch into the past, and what it was like to grow up in that household full of secrets. Fremont writes such vivid prose, it’s easy to fall right into the book as those secrets come out, some of which may or may not be true.

I had two problems with the book, first the jumping around in time, which kept throwing me out of the narrative, and secondly, Fremont keeps repeating how much they all loved each other, then goes on to detail behaviors that were anything but loving.

But I wouldn’t say these problems are negatives when evaluating the memoir. They were problems that made me more conscious of what I was reading. The fragmentary nature of the story underscores how memory, especially of trauma, can be fragmented, distorted, confused, like those secrets that may or may not be true. Repeating how much they loved each other shows how much they might have wanted to love each other, or maybe this is how it looks when intense emotion binds people together, even when they long to escape. It’s called love, when to someone else it might look more like desperation.

What becomes abundantly clear is that this family is a very vivid example of the long shadow that war casts over the generations left in the detritus.

The Escape Artist is an absorbing read. I read After a Long Silence several years ago. Fremont follows up with the warped story of her family. Her family life was based on secrets, some that even after her book was published, she had yet to discover. She reveals the turbulent childhood she had and the roller coaster relationship she had with her sister and her parents. Estrangement seemed to be normal in her family. Fremont wrestled with being disowned by her mother after her father' death. It's a sad story, but a mesmerizing read.

I LOVED this book. It's a great WWII story of survival from the Nazis, immigration to The USA, and the daughters born here that didn't find out about the truth about their parents escape until they were in their 40's. Beautifully written.

The Escape Artist by Helen Fremont

Lies, lies and more lies. Growing up with family secrets about the holocaust is as emotionally damaging as the holocaust itself.

Helen Fremont finds herself on the outs with her family, where mental illness and denial abound in this small nuclear group. Helen battles her own demons as she tries to
figure out this thing called adulthood.

The story takes place in the 1960s to present in Boston and Schenectady N.Y, as Helen and her sister Lara fight and make peace with each other as often as you brush your teeth. They just can’t let go.

It is a gripping memoir as Helen tells of her lifetime of rejection and acceptance from her mom, sister, father, and surely, even herself. Life is complicated.

Coming to a logical realization in the end as to the cause of all this deception, Helen comes to peace with her story and, I believe, with herself. She is a wordsmith with a real talent for expression, so while her tale may make you uneasy, her writing will leave you wanting more.