Review: "We Used to Dream of Freedom" by Sam Chaiton

We Used to Dream of Freedom by Sam Chaiton
Published October 2024 via Dundurn Press
★★★

Chaiton knew his parents had survived the Holocaust: he knew it in their tattoos and the people who surrounded them and the few stories they told. But those stories were few: his parents locked away their memories, built a life in Canada, and tried to move on. They tried. And Chaiton, too, moved on: away from his parents, away from his brothers, to a chosen career and chosen family where he could breathe free of those stories untold.

Chaiton's parents didn't talk about the Holocaust, and he didn't really think about it, either—not until much later. He knew bits and pieces, of course (it's hard to erase your history entirely, even when a genocide has done its damndest to do just that), but even as Chaiton draws connections between his parents' extensive trauma and his own actions and traumas, he describes pushing away from that history, letting himself stay blinded to it. It is late, late in Chaiton's story—and late, late in the book—before he is able to get truly curious, to ask questions and reach out to relatives and find out more. That both my parents were prisoners in Auschwitz I could easily have determined from their number tattoos had I done even a cursory search online; but I hadn't. Why not? Out of deference to their silence or to my not being ready, prior to this, to deal with what I may have found? (loc. 2530)

When Chaiton did start to do that research, what he found was devastating. I won't get into the details here, but it's no wonder that his parents didn't talk about their experiences; the scale of their losses was nigh on unfathomable, and when they had talked about their stories in the past it...hadn't helped. The bulk of the book is Chaiton's autobiography rather than his family's story; although there is no question of the role that that generational trauma played, it's also clear that he did an expert job of detaching himself from that history as much as he was possibly able in order to live a life on his own terms. I'm not sure the book description is doing a service to the book; the impression I had going in was that there would be quite a lot more about his parents, but for various reasons (no spoilers!) there was a limit to how much he could learn, and how he could go about doing so, and because he keeps the story largely chronological, those learnings come close to the end of the book. I would have preferred a different balance—more of Chaiton's family's stories and fewer lists of people he lived and worked with over the years. (Maybe also less about Rubin Carter? His story is an important one, but Chaiton already wrote a book about him, so the emphasis on Carter's story in a book about Chaiton's family feels a bit off.)

One thing that the book does remind me of is how important it is to hear and record older people's stories now—it's not so long before there will be nobody left who has living memory of the Holocaust, but also not so long before we will be saying the same of people who experienced the Korean War or the Vietnam War (as soldiers, as nurses, as civilians), or even, you know, less violent things like the moon landing. Chaiton's parents could not give voice or permanence to their memories, and there is so much that is lost to time.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.