I Want You to Know We're Still Here

December 2, 2019
Foer—former CEO of a Washington, D.C.–based arts center and the mother of authors Franklin, Jonathan, and Joshua Foer—documents her quest to gather information about her family’s life during the Holocaust in this skillfully written debut. “I am the offspring of Holocaust survivors, which, by definition, means there is a tragic and complicated history,”
Foer writes. Born in 1946 in Poland, Foer lived in a German displaced persons camp with her parents as a baby, and in 1949 they emigrated to Washington, D.C., where her father ran a grocery business. An enigmatic figure, her father committed suicide in 1954, which Foer attributes to lingering trauma (“I believe the Holocaust killed him”). In unadorned prose, Foer chronicles her efforts to research the lives of her kin and excavate family secrets. The narrative culminates in a trip to Ukraine that Foer took in 2009 with her son Franklin to locate the family of the man who hid her father during the war and confirm the identity of her now dead half sister. This narrative serves as something of a companion piece to Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, which fictionalized aspects of the Foer family history. Foer’s engrossing, well-researched family history will resonate with those curious about their own roots.

March 15, 2020
A family's mysteries inspire a search into a dark past. In the novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Jonathan Safran Foer invented the journey of a 20-year-old Jewish American man who travels to a town in Ukraine in search of his family's past, particularly for the woman he believed saved his grandfather from Nazi persecution. The novel had roots in his own family's history, which Foer's mother excavates in her moving literary debut, a recounting of her own real-life quest to uncover facts about her assorted relatives who fled from the Nazis. Her life, she writes, has been "haunted by the presence of absence": the silence surrounding her family's experiences before they arrived in the U.S. in 1949. She knew that her mother had wandered through Russia for three years and her father had been hidden by a Christian family. But she was stunned when her mother remarked that he had fled after Nazis had murdered everyone in his village, including his wife and daughter. The revelation about a half sister was shocking, but her mother could add nothing more about this first family. Foer needed to know: "I feel a great responsibility to keep the past alive." Combing databases and archives, hiring a researcher in Ukraine, sending saliva for DNA testing, and making trips to Ukraine, the author unearthed more than she had imagined. "The more I learned," she writes, "the more complicated the story became," as the family's struggles emerged from the clouds of history. She met distant cousins she hadn't known existed, and in Ukraine, where her ancestors' village had been obliterated, she trekked into a forest to the site of "unimaginable horror": the mass grave of murdered Jews. Foer, who in her 60s became the director of Sixth & I, a Jewish cultural institution in Washington, D.C., sees her "side career as the family connector," an undertaking in which her husband and sons have enthusiastically participated. "Traumatic memories," she writes, "live on from one generation to the next." A vivid testimony to the power of memory.

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February 1, 2020

Foer, former CEO of the center and synagogue Sixth & I, probes her family's history in this moving personal account. Born in Poland in 1946, Foer immigrated with her family to the United States in 1949 and has few memories of postwar Europe. Her mother and father were the only members of their immediate families to survive the Holocaust. Foer may have grown up in the shadow of their grief, but her parents weren't open to sharing details about their pasts. Foer travels the world to solve the mystery of how her father survived the war and meets distant relatives and old friends along the way. She also, unexpectedly, uncovers the story of her father's first wife and the half-sister she never knew she had. The story is at once beautiful and heart-rending, and sheds light on what happened after the war--an often overlooked aspect of the Holocaust experience. VERDICT Foer explores her family with context and detail. Her story will interest readers of historical and personal narratives, especially memoirs and genealogy.--Rebecca Kluberdanz, Central New York Lib. Resources Council, Syracuse

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2019

Safran Foer grew up in the long, dark shadow of the Holocaust, with parents each the sole survivor of their respective families. Yet it was never mentioned until her mother offhandedly commented that her father had a wife and child who had perished. Safran Foer promptly headed to Ukraine to find the shtetl where her father hid during the war. Here she recounts not only what she discovered, which changed her understanding of her life, but also what it's like for four generations--including her writer sons Franklin, Jonathan, and Joshua--to live with such calamitous events.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.