I Want You To Know We’re Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir

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. (Mar.)