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Here is a sentence from an old letter from 1930s

das Osterfest steht vor der Tür, und da müssen auch wir nach dem langen Weiterschweigen wieder zur Vater (or Fater?) Feder greifen.

I haven't found the word Weiterschweigen in any dictionary. Can this mean "a long period of silence"? Also can "zu jemandem greifen" mean "to reach out to someone"?

I think I got all the vowels right but "Wiederschweigen" is also plausible.

Update: I managed to take a reasonably good photo

enter image description here

I concur that this is most likely Winterschweigen. Although Weiterschweigen appears to be more attested basing on google search. The dot above i's is always shifted to the right like this.

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    German tends to make up words on the fly out of bits and pieces, more than most other languages. "Weiterschweigen" does not appear in dictionaries because it's one of these made-up words. Parse the compound into components and look them up individually. Then put them together and try to make sense of the whole. Try looking up "weiter" and "schweigen" individually.
    – RDBury
    Commented Jun 20 at 20:18
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    What you read as Vater or Fater, could it be "Feder" (pen)? "Zur Feder greifen" figuratively means to start to write and would make a lot of sense here.
    – ccprog
    Commented Jun 20 at 20:43
  • You're right. 'e' and 'a' are often indistinguishable in old German cursive and I didn't know the word "Feder", nor the expression.
    – Some Student
    Commented Jun 21 at 0:13
  • Would be helpful to post the part of the original letter. I'd guess it's Winterschweigen.
    – Olafant
    Commented Jun 21 at 10:21
  • @olafant read my answer?
    – Karl
    Commented Jun 21 at 11:24

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I would guess that you misread the word. In my opinion it is Winterschweigen. It would mean then after the long silence in winter. These are my five cents.

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  • I think you're right.
    – Some Student
    Commented Jun 21 at 18:29
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German speakers have no qualms inventing compounds on the fly. This is especially true for nouns but another large group is separable verbs.

E.g. to watch TV is fernsehen in German, literally to far-see. That's exactly what TV means: tele-vision.

And it's the same with weiterschweigen. The author had invented that on the spot from weiter and schweigen as he needed such a combination. It's not in the dictionary because it hasn't been overloaded with meaning as fernsehen has. It still means simply to keep slient further.

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