Shhh: The Story of a Childhood

By Raymond Federman

Shhh is Federman's last novel and was only published posthumously in English in 2010. The text is a "self-transaction" and expansion of the French version of the novel, Chut (2008). Shhh was originally uttered in French as chut by Federman's mother the day she pushed her son into the closet in July 1942. More than 65 years and thousands of pages of prose and poetry later, the signifier shhh is the last word of Federman's final novel, with the ending and the beginning of his life-story merging into one another: "what I'm in the process of telling is the final chapter of the great story I've been muttering and scribbling for the past forty years."

RAYMOND FEDERMAN (1928-2009) were many persons: Holocaust survivor and WWII orphan, farm worker, paratrooper in the US Army, Korean War veteran, interpreter in Tokyo, sporting ace (swimming, tennis, golf), jazz musician, black marketeer, gambler, bon vivant, inventor of surfiction, bilingual author, translator, teacher, renowned Samuel Beckett scholar, Distinguished Professor, and father. Federman was born in Paris, France, in 1928. When he was fourteen years old, his parents and two sisters were arrested during the 1942 roundup by the Nazis and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp for extermination. The boy survived because his mother had pushed him into a closet for hiding. In different versions, and both in English and in French, Federman again and again told various parts of the life story of a man called "Federman," trying to decipher the gesture of his mother that saved his life. He received the American Book Award, and his books have been translated into 14 languages.

Invisible Starfall Books' RAYMOND FEDERMAN EDITION is a series of republications of the author's books in their definitive version, spiced up with first editions of unpublished and uncollected texts. Carefully proofread and with a new design, each book was produced in close cooperation with Simone Federman, the daughter and literary executor of Raymond Federman.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0G6W6V519
• ISBN13: 9798876392510
• Release Date: December 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 8.0"