"Believing we were Jewish offered me the possibility that my parents were still in hiding, that we were all in hiding, that all the underground emotional tunnels in our house were not just figments of my imagination (P. 22)."

Can you imagine your childhood and everything you thought you knew about your family turned out to be a lie? Helen Fremont (author of After Long Silence) lived more than thirty years without knowing who she truly was. She was raised a Catholic and was told her grandmother died in a bomb explosion, but turns out this is all a lie.

Fremont describes certain events of her childhood, this way setting a background and also giving hints as to what will happen further on in the story. However, she doesn't narrate what happens year by year, or else it would get pretty boring. Instead, she skips twenty years into the future, and starts recounting bits of when she was thirty and began uncovering information. She does this transition in time in a very smooth way. After giving many hints from her childhood she says: "It never occurred to me that someone in my family might actually be Jewish, until a few years ago, when I was already in my thirties and working as a public defender in Boston (P.20)." If it weren't for the fact that she's so much older, the skipping of time would even be imperceptible. It's interesting how she uses time in this memoir. She gives just the right amount of details and then skips forward, never boring the reader. This memoir is, so far, all in past-tense. By writing it this way, it never seems choppy, as it could sound if she were writing in present-tense with bits in past-tense.

I really like the way Fremont writes. She doesn't just tell how someone looks, how something is done, etc. but actually describes it. In other words, she doesn't use "meaningless words" (term from and essay by George Orwell titled "Politics and the English Language." It refers to words that are relative and don't have the same meaning to everybody). There's a part in the memoir, for example, in which Helen is introduced to a woman. Instead of only saying she's "pretty" or "ugly," Fremont describes the woman as a "statuesque high-heeled, slim-hipped woman... When she laughed, her yellow hair seemed to break around her shoulders like waves on a beach (P. 21)." By describing her this way, Fremont is allowing the reader to make his/her own judgements of the woman. In my opinion, she's pretty. But there might be others who disagree, thanks to how the author's technique.

Later on, Helen is talking to her mom while the latter prepared Christmas dinner. Once again, instead of telling, Fremont shows. She could have just said that her mother was preparing the turkey, but she goes for a more vivid description as she writes: "My mother was hacking up the turkey now, twisting its legs with her bare hands. The bone and cartilage broke, and steam poured from the leg sockets (P.23)." With this graphic description, the reader is able to create a mental image of what everything looked like, and Fremont's neutral tone also allows the audience to build their own outlook on what is being described.

Once again, Helen Fremont ends a chapter with important and surprising information. Among the last paragraphs of the second chapter she writes: "My grandmother was Jewish. My grandmother, a woman named Helen Buchman under the Nazi occupation, was writing a postcard that would be read and stamped by the censor, writing for a shred of hope, the trappings of a Catholic cover (P. 28)." This is when Helen Fremont actually discovers and is sure that she is Jewish. The proof has been revealed, and now the best part begins - I hope: She will begin to dig back and discovers Holocaust secrets from her family's past.