My Father’s Secret War, by Lucinda Franks was our selection
of the month by our Book Club.
The book is a memoir of the author, Lucinda Frank’s search
to learn of her fathers past. Like all
memoirs she makes not claims that the story she is telling is truth… only that
it is how she remembers and perceived the events and conversations. And what she remembers is growing up in a highly
dysfunctional family…. What makes this book so very compelling is the honesty
and poetic telling of naked truths in a truly real family drama. Everything is
here: searing hatred and long-awaited forgiveness ,love's disappointments,
parents failings, alcoholism, psychological torture, adultery, rebellion,
revelation and resolution.
Her bi polar mother is one minute the perfect mom… the next,
a jealous harpy trying to spitefully smother her husband and children with
rage.
She also remembers adoring her father early in life when she saw
him as intelligent, courtly; and she remembers learning to hate him as he
distanced himself both physically and emotionally. She blames his unavailability on his
alcoholism, his adultery, his shrewish wife.
Then, when he was old, ill, showing signs of dementia , she stumbles
across a Nazi hat amongst his WWII memorabilia.
She begins digging for answers, and ultimately concludes that her father
was a secret operative for the military.
How does war, and the especially savage nature of
concentration camps and assassinations, affect the life of a young man? How
does keeping all of that pain bottled inside for decades alter every
relationship he will ever have? How did it destroy the love he had for her
mother, who waited for him while he was fighting?
Throughout, Franks does not pull her punches. The memoir is
packed with honesty, from the deep-rooted spite and contempt to the ultimate
understanding and love, and a return of the hero she had long lost. After
hunting for the man who was her father, she sees him "through eyes that
have no memory" and exposes a great and difficult story with an ending that
is not so much happy as it is bittersweet.
This as a engrossing but emotionally difficult book to read.
Like so many, I have a difficult time getting my parent’s generation to open up
and tell us of their experiences during that time. It is difficult to love and respect someone
you cannot really know. Ultimately, the story Ms Franks spells out, should instill
an even higher respect for those of
“The Greatest Generation”.
No comments:
Post a Comment