Returning from Silence – Jenny′s Story

“The body of [Sarde’s] work is stunning in volume, quality, and diversity. . . . Her latest book, Returning from Silence. . . . unfolds the painful but liberating journey of being born at the beginning of World War II to a Jewish family in France, forced to hide throughout the Nazi persecutions. . . . Whenever a powerful and unforgettable story of survival of the Shoah emerges into the world in the form of an artistic product, it represents a victory over darkness and oblivion.” * BOMB Magazine *
“In her riveting memoir, Sarde describes how the first immigrant Sephardim (Jews of Spanish origin) struggled to maintain their identity in the face of Christian pressure and unfamiliar Ashkenazi customs.” * Washington Independent Review of Books *
“A touch­ing account that com­bines fic­tion with research and memoir, Return­ing from Silence explores themes of immi­gra­tion, assim­i­la­tion, war, fam­i­ly ties, fem­i­nism, and reli­gion. It begs the reader to con­sid­er ques­tions of his­to­ry and identity.” * Jewish Book Council *
“A deftly crafted and inherently fascinating work of fact-based fiction, Returning from Silence by Michele Sarde is ably translated into English for an American readership by Swyer. An impressive, extraordinary, memorable work of Jewish literary fiction, Returning from Silence is an especially and unreservedly recommended addition to personal reading lists, as well as community, and academic library Literary Fiction collections.”  * Midwest Book Review *
Given the silence that had enshrouded these stories for much of Sarde’s life, every morsel, every family connection, took on the added importance of being a discovery.  If the stories that Sarde persuaded her mother to tell at times seemed unremarkable, consider them nevertheless to be important literary artifacts. Memories of those lives that would have been erased without a trace were now, through Sarde’s efforts, resurrected.
  * San Diego Jewish World *
"[…] in Returning from Silence Michèle Sarde shares with her audience a feminine, personalized, and very private account of the most tragic period in Jewish history. By combining her mother’s memoirs with her own experiences and with general historical knowledge, Sarde provides us with an exceptional opportunity to not only accept her interpretations, but also create our own reconstructions of complex historical processes and their impact on lives of concrete individuals."   * Sephardic Horizons *
“This book is about all that hides behind silence: the history of a family in the twentieth century and how and why for so long their children never heard it. Sarde starts in the lovely, prickly texture of Jewish life in Salonika and its the rich culture; so we know what is at stake. We get to know her family intimately, no cut-out heroes or villains but human figures with their fears, their snobberies, their dreams; so we care very much about these people. Then we’re thrown, in pages that are much too vivid for comfort, into the fate of so many of them murdered by the Nazi machine, and so many fighting in the resistance to the war on the Jews. And then we hear how silence came down, and how it was broken. Sarde’s book is funny, chilling, atrocious and beautiful. It is as various as life.”  -- Michael Pye, author of The Pieces from Berlin and Europe’s Babylon: The Rise and Fall of Antwerp’s Golden Age
"Swyer’s engaging translation brings English-speaking readers Michèle Sarde’s spirited, award-winning saga. Mingling creative writing with family memories and inspired by personal vicissitudes during some of the most tormented periods of the twentieth century, this poignant, gripping, and sometimes humorous novel takes readers from Salonica to Paris and beyond. In Returning from Silence, the setting is historical, but the themes are contemporary: identity, discrimination, emigration and assimilation, and resilience, among others." -- Marva Barnett, author of To Love Is to Act: Les Misérables and Victor Hugo’s Vision for Leading Lives of Conscience and Victor Hugo on Things That Matter; University of Virginia professor emerita