SHHH tells the incredible story of Raymond Federman s escape from the round-up of French Jews in Paris in 1942, during the Holocaust. As French police came up the stairs to the family s apartment, Federman s mother said, 'Shhh,' and pushed the then-14 year-old boy into a closet. The other members of his family, his father, mother, and two sisters, perished in Auschwitz. But no story by Federman has ever been simply told, and SHHH is no exception. Defying conventions of both the memoir and the novel, Federman tells stories of his childhood that may or may not be true, but can never simply be called false, either. The result is a complex and masterful work by a writer whose final works may be his best - an author who, while too avant-garde for the tastes of American publishers, is considered a major writer in Germany, France, and elsewhere in the world, and has had a small but dedicated following in the US for more than three decades.