REVIEW: I Want You to Know We’re Still Here by Esther Safran Foer

by |June 4, 2020
Esther Safran Foer

I Want You to Know We’re Still Here is a new memoir of love, loss, hope and memory by Esther Safran Foer – one that I deeply enjoyed.

Growing up in the Washington D.C. area, Esther Safran Foer and her brother were loved and nurtured by Holocaust survivor parents who never spoke about their past and the horrors they had experienced. Both the sole survivors of their immediate families, Ethel and Louis/Leibel Safran were products of bygone Jewish shtetl life in small Ukrainian villages. They married in Lodz, Poland (where Esther was born) just a few months after meeting. After three years in a DP camp, they were finally able to start a new life together in the United States.

Esther Safran Foer

Esther Safran Foer

It was only when Esther was in her ’40s that her mother revealed her father had been married before the War and that his wife and young daughter had been killed by the Nazis. Esther was flabbergasted at this bombshell news that she had had a half-sister. Louis had died when Esther was just eight years old, in circumstances never discussed. No one knew the name of his first child and no photograph of her survived.

Esther, determined to find “something to document her short life” to prove that she had once existed, set out to follow the family trail and dig up some evidence to help her remember someone who had left no trace. How had her grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins met their fates? Who were the unnamed ‘Righteous Gentiles’ in an unmarked surviving photo who had hidden and cared for her father when he had escaped the Trochenbrod village massacre? How had Louis really died when just 44?

After tracking down and interviewing distant relatives in Israel and South America, Esther and her eldest son Frank embark upon a meaningful pilgrimage back to Ukraine with other Trochenbrod survivors and their descendants.

Her novelist son Jonathan had already recreated a fictional Trochenbrod life in his bestselling novel, Everything is Illuminated. Now, after painstaking research and her incredibly moving return to the birthplaces of both her parents, Esther is here able to reveal the true story of her family’s past and how she miraculously unravelled the mysteries of their identities and fates.

I Want You to Know We’re Still Here pays appropriate homage to Esther’s half-sister and many other relatives who, no doubt, are now looking down on her with pride and the knowledge that their family IS ‘still here’, keeping their memory alive and paying them the eternal respect they deserve.

‘With each story’s recounting, history was turning into memory, and memory into history’ she tells us in this intimate detective story, full of twists and turns culminating in a hugely gratifying emotional resolution that mandates a box of tissues by your side.

I Want You to Know We’re Still Here by Esther Safran Foer (HarperCollins Australia) is out now.

I Want You To Know We're Still Hereby Esther Safran Foer

I Want You To Know We're Still Here

by Esther Safran Foer

A moving and powerful inter-generational memoir about story and memory.

Mine is a family of readers and writers. Our house is filled with books. There are contemporary design books on the coffee table in the living room, legal books in my husband's home office, and piles of children's books for when my grandchildren visit. However, the side table next to my bed is piled with books about the Holocaust. Framed maps of shtetls line my office walls and pictures of relatives killed in the Holocaust are displayed on our family gallery walls...

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