I love writing. It’s a way for me to understand the bigger picture, “to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” as Joan Didion succinctly put it. For the longest time, I didn’t know what my next writing project would be. My partner suggested memorializing my life story because it was so unusual. She said it would make a fascinating memoir.
“The world needs another memoir?”
“From you, yes,” she said. “But I don’t think you have the necessary ego to write it.”
I disagreed. “It’s something else I’m lacking ...”
She looked at me quizzically, and I was unable to articulate what it was.
The raison d’être of We Used to Dream of Freedom made itself known on Easter Sunday ten years ago, the day that Rubin “Hurricane” Carter died. I was one of the Canadians who helped free the Bob Dylan-celebrated New Jersey prizefighter, who “coulda been the champion of the world” had he not spent twenty years behind bars for a crime he did not commit. I’d written a bestselling book about it with fellow Canadian Terry Swinton. We had moved to New Jersey and, though not lawyers, reinvestigated his case, and wrote the factual portions of the federal court briefs that resulted in his freedom. The book became a basis for the Norman Jewison film The Hurricane, starring Denzel Washington in an Oscar-nominated, Golden-Globe-winning performance. In the film, Liev Schreiber played me.
On hearing about Rubin’s passing, the need to write arose with an insistence I was unable to ignore. I asked myself: was there something still to be written, something I hadn’t said in Lazarus and the Hurricane?
I sat down at my desk, a blank notebook in front of me. Before I knew it, several pages were filled. Of the ideas I noted down, most seemed to apply to my parents, who had also been unjustly imprisoned. My mother and father were concentration camp survivors, both having been prisoners in Bergen-Belsen. But unlike Rubin’s story, which had come to be known world-wide, their stories remained hidden. Their internment also included a period in Auschwitz, a fact I had only recently learned, years after their passing.
The memoir began to take shape when I asked myself why, despite being eager to delve into Rubin’s history, I assiduously avoided my own. I realized there was much I needed to probe, including why I disappeared from my family for nearly two decades. How had my parents’ Holocaust experiences — and their silence — factored into that rift? What role did my work to free the Hurricane play in my ability and drive to unearth family history from the depths of obscurity and expose it to the healing light of day?
Writing We Used to Dream of Freedom became a voyage of self-discovery. Loss was its origin; curiosity, its impetus; distance and time, its opportunity for clarity.
Sam Chaiton, the middle son of Holocaust survivors, is one of the Canadians who helped Rubin Carter gain his freedom. Co-author of the international bestseller Lazarus and the Hurricane, he is portrayed in the film The Hurricane by Liev Schreiber. A founder of Innocence Canada, Sam lives with his partner in Toronto. Learn more here.