Out of Silence: Repair across Generations is the story of one man’s journey through three generations and five continents to find-and heal-a past he didn’t know existed.
Award-Winning Finalist - International Book Awards 2015 Autobiography/Memoirs http: //www.internationalbookawards.com/2015awardannouncement.html
In 1997, Martin Beck Matustik made a dramatic discovery at the age of forty: he was the child of a Holocaust survivor. His mother’s shocking seocret came from the most unlikely of places-shoeboxes full of her literary and personal archives. These dramatic revelations changed his life forever and set him on a path to discover his true identity. His research unveiled his mother’s remarkable life-and the truth behind her painful decision to reject her Jewish heritage and keep it hidden from her family.
Akin to Madeleine Albright’s Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948, Matustik’s Out of Silence is an intensely personal Czech-Slovak-American Jewish journey into the past to understand the present and find hope for the future. Dealing with self-transformation, loss, memory, recovery, and the unsettling reality of living with multiple identities, Matustik’s exhaustive research and selfless prose offer other children of survivors-and the world at large-a remarkable look inside one man’s endeavor to repair the shattered map of his identity.
Early praise for OUT OF SILENCE
From Shoa to Communist Czechoslovakia to post-Communist Eastern Europe to the very human and often overlooked dimensions of how individuals and communities part and reconcile, Out of Silence: Repair across Generations is a powerfully naked, movingly poignant, and courageously liberating portrait. –Lewis R. Gordon, Professor of Philosophy, Africana Studies, and Judaic Studies, UCONN-Storrs; Nelson Mandela Visiting Professor, Rhodes University, South Africa; and EuroPhilosophy Chair, Universite Toulouse Jean Jaures, France
Who will stop the resentments of the era of the two twentieth-century beastly regimes? The stories of our fathers and grandfathers? Matustik’s multigenerational drama leaves visible traces. We should not store them in institutional file cabinets. –Fedor Gal, author, journalist, and film documentarist, and a cofounder and chair of the Public against Violence, the movement that in 1989 brought down Communism in Slovakia, was born at the end of World War II in the Czech concentration camp Terezin
Matustik’s book is a testimony to all of us who live in the wake of disaster, who struggle with its posthumous or Lazarean dimensions, which is to say, to all of us. –Sandor Goodhart, Professor of English and Jewish Studies, Purdue University
After more than twenty-five years bringing works related to the history of the Holocaust and to Jewish culture to the light of print, I can honestly assert we have not read a book which so edifies the theological issues bound up in the history of a family rent apart by war and politics, anti-Semitism and the subsequent clashes of Communist and capitalist cultures. The author’s expertise in philosophical and religious studies and his truly advanced perspective in the philosophical and public aspects of his family’s journey provide an unusual opportunity for readers follow a memoiristic literary nonfiction narrative while engaging the theoretical and historical issues as well. –Alan Adelson, Executive Director of Jewish Heritage Project, the International Initiative in the Literature of the Holocaust, New York
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