Shhh: the story of a childhood

Fiction. Jewish Studies. "Shhh, murmured my mother. And the first thirteen years of my life vanished into the darkness of that third floor closet." On a July morning in 1942, Raymond Federman's childhood ended, as his parents and two sisters were arrested by collaborationist French police and sent to their deaths at Auschwitz, with Raymond alone evading capture. In SHHH, his final novel, Federman reconstructs this childhood out of fragments, speculations, and doubtful recollections--the stories of a lost life, enmeshed with a history that can never be forgotten. "Federman is inarguably one of the most significant vanguard writers of the second half of the twentieth century and first years of the twenty-first"--Lance Olsen.