SILENCE OF PARENTS

This gripping family saga travels back and forth between the Old and New Worlds, spanning four decades and it explores the lives of Holocaust survivors and their subsequent families from the Second Generation's point of view. The book shows how political changes reshape the life of a family through love, misunderstandings, emigration, and coming to term with reality. The story involves a large cast of characters and takes them over the course of several decades, from Eastern Europe to New York and Boston. Ilona Gabor in the mid 1960s is a romantic schoolgirl in socialist Romania; by the end of the century she is a New Yorker and a writer with a mission. Her mother, Ethel, a Holocaust survivor caught in the impersonal vise of the postwar Iron Curtain, changes from a reticent and worrying mother to a self-assertive educator and author. Andras, Ilona's cast-off lover, changes from a lighthearted bachelor to a hard working Boston doctor obsessed by his newfound roots. The central defining event in the consciousness of each of these characters is the Holocaust.