Silent Letter
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More About This Title Silent Letter
English
Written as an introspective, lyrical letter to her missing husband, the novel begins one night in January 1943, when Roszy’s husband Moritz, a member of the French Resistance, is hauled away by the Gestapo in Marseilles. Roszy is left alone and seven months pregnant with their two sons, Erwin (the author, Yitzchak Mayer) and Jackie. Unable to locate her husband, who later will die in Auschwitz, Roszy decides to escape from Nazi-occupied France to Switzerland. They board a train to Saint-Claude, on the Swiss border, carrying false French documents and, in Roszy’s bag, diamonds embedded in a bar of laundry soap. After an exhausting trek through the snow, the three sneak across the border into Switzerland, but their difficulties are not over. Mayer cinematically recounts the details of the locations, the myriad characters, and the dialogue with care and accuracy. Silent Letter is a rare book that recounts an unforgettable chapter of history, one which has powerful contemporary relevance as it confronts the saga of desperation, of people on the run, trying to escape from danger and certain death, driven by hope of finding at a safe place.
English
Yitzchak Mayer was born in Antwerp in 1934 and immigrated to Palestine in 1946. After working as a teacher, he became director of the Yemin Orde Youth Village. Later, he served as ambassador to Belgium and Switzerland; he was also head of Jewish education in the Diaspora and adviser to the Minister of Education on International Affairs. Today he is senior adviser to the Center for Strategic Dialogue at Netanya Academic College. The French edition of Silent Letter was awarded the WIZO Literary Prize.
English
“This is the essence of the Holocaust, and perhaps, as the human condition taken to an extreme, this is life itself, replete with contradictions and painful to the point of horror, or absurdity… This is a book written by a person who loves people, yet who has every reason to hate them.” —Maariv, a daily Israeli newspaper“A remarkably mature literary work…[about] a mother whose personality pervades the book…The author’s impulse is to tell the story the way that it happened, and to memorialize a remarkable mother... But through her, [the book] also illuminates the uniqueness of the author…[The narrative] has a breathtaking flow.” —Hillel Weiss, Professor Emeritus of Literature at Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv“A book like this has never been written… This is an almost breathless stream of consciousness, in which facts, memories, dream fragments and thoughts are woven together into a single delicate, sensitive tapestry, with latent suspense… The author recreates a conflicted and intense feminine awareness…in a marvellous manner, and penetrates the heroine’s tender and tortuous thoughts...Thrilling and out of the ordinary.” —Shmuel Faust, editor of Makor Rishon, a weekly Israeli newspaper“This superb storyteller creates a whole world and skillfully relates the painful chronicle of his family from a totally surprising perspective, and a complex dialogue with various worlds…Unreservedly recommended to anyone interested in the endless complexity of the Jewish family, and in engrossing documentation of the days of the Second World War.” —Rachel Elior, Professor of Jewish Philosophy at Hebrew University, Jerusalem
