"What I didn't understand was that my mother was equiping me with the means of survival: proof of my Catholicism to anyone in a dozen countries." (P. 12)

"Don't judge a book by its cover." People say this all the time. Sometimes they're actually referring to books, but they usually use this while talking about other people. Regardless of how common this phrase is, we all judge things by their appearance. When we see somebody on the street, we kind of create an idea of who that person is just based on what they look like. When we want to watch a movie, we pick possible ones based on the movie posters. When we're going to choose a book, we do so by looking at the cover and then reading the blurb. Almost everybody I know does this, and so do I. 

However, while picking the memoir I would be reading for Language, for some reason I ignored the "judging-by-the-cover" part of choosing a book. I picked-up one that, to be honest, doesn't look that great. The cover is black, with yellow letters that spell out the title: After Long Silence. Below this, there's a medium-sized, grainy, black and white picture of four young girls with their arms around each other. Judging by this picture, the book could be about a woman's childhood and her friends, which I would not be very interested in. Despite this, I didn't put the book down. I read the blurb and was surprised at how interesting this book actually seemed. So I chose it.

I began reading the book and was not disappointed at all. I like how the author, Helen Fremont, writes. She definitely has a neutral tone which I would consider intimate, as she takes the reader into her life and confides things she has probably never said to anyone. There's a moment, for example, when she tells a friend about how her dad was in a concentration camp in Siberia, and gets really sentimental. Afterwards she regrets ever mentioning it and confesses to the reader that she "was amazed and embarrassed by [her] emotion, which seemed to have arrived like an alien invasion (P. 17)." "I realized," she adds, "that I must never speak of our family, that our story must be kept a secret (P. 17)."

Although she is dealing with a serious subject, Fremont does add humor, and this way relieves the tension or reduces the shock her words cause on the reader.  She reveals that her parents were in a concentration camp on the third paragraph from the first page of her memoir, which catches the reader off guard. However, she follows that with a sentence in which she explains that she used to think that in a concentration camp, "inmates were consumed by intensely focused mental activity (P.8)."This way, she uses a type of gentle humour to reduce the surprise. It's a great way to do so, and it keeps the reader with just enough happiness and somberness to continue reading.