Out of Silence: Repair across Generations

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 Matuštík 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, Matuštík'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, Matuštík'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, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France

Who will stop the resentments of the era of the two twentieth-century beastly regimes? The stories of our fathers and grandfathers? Matuštík's multigenerational drama leaves visible traces. We should not store them in institutional file cabinets. --Fedor Gál, 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

Matuštík’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

PUBLICITY, BOOK EVENTS http://newcriticaltheory.com/out-of-silence-repair-across-generations/publicity/

Born in Slovakia in 1957, Martin Beck Matuštík grew up in Prague behind the communist Iron Curtain. A firsthand witness of the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, Matuštík was raised in an atheistic home by communist parents until he was orphaned at the age of fourteen. Fleeing Prague in 1977 at the age of nineteen, he spent five years in training with California Jesuits, studied with Jürgen Habermas in Frankfurt a/M, and returned to Prague after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Matuštík received his PhD from Fordham University in 1991 and went on to teach in Purdue University's philosophy department. In 1995, he was a Fulbright fellow at Charles University in Prague. The author of six books and the editor of other distinguished works, Matuštík is on the faculty at Arizona State University as the Lincoln professor of ethics and religion and professor of philosophy and religious studies.

For more information about the book, please visit the author’s Publisher's page.