I Want You to Know We're Still Here

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My birth certificate says that I was born on September 8, 1946, in Ziegenhain, Germany. It s the wrong date, wrong city, wrong country. It would take me years to understand why my father created this fabrication. Why, each year, my mother came into my room on March 17 and gave me a kiss and whispered, Happy birthday.

Piecing together the fragments of my family story has been a lifelong pursuit. I am the offspring of Holocaust survivors, which, by definition, means there is a tragic and complicated history. My childhood was filled with silences that were punctuated by occasional shocking disclosures. I understood there was a lot that I didn t know, besides the secret of my invented birthday. My parents were reluctant to speak of the past, and I learned to maneuver around difficult subjects.

When I was in my early forties, preparing to give a talk at a local synagogue, I decided that this might be a good opportunity to fill in a few gaps of our family story. I sat down with my mother in the pink kitchen of her 1950s-suburban tract house, on a street where most of the other homes were occupied by families of Holocaust survivors. Sitting at her faux-marble laminate kitchen table, I could see the carefully cut coupons sorted into neat piles by the refrigerator, ready for the next shopping trip. In the cabinet below, there was enough flour and cereal, all of it purchased on sale, to withstand a major catastrophe.

I started with a few questions about my father and his experience during the war. He had been an enigma, a mercurial figure that all conversation danced around, even in my own head. My mother took a sip of the instant coffee that she loved and casually mentioned that my father had been in a ghetto with his wife and daughter. He d been on a work detail when they were both murdered by the Nazis. Absolutely stunned, I blurted out, He had a wife and daughter? Why haven t you ever told me this before? How can you be telling me now for the first time?

Esther Safran Foer was the CEO of Sixth & I, a center for arts, ideas, and religion. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Bert. They are the parents of Franklin, Jonathan, and Joshua, and the grandparents of six.

I Want You to Know We re Still Here is a beautiful exploration of collective memory and Jewish history, of Esther Safran Foer s personal quest to find any trace of a murdered sister, to track down the family who saved her father, and to ensure that the names from her family s past live on. Nathan Englander, author of kaddish.com

Part personal quest, part testament and all thoughtfully, compassionately written. The Washington Post

A riveting search for the truth in a family where the Holocaust shines bright in the background of daily life. Parade

Foer has mastered, indeed pioneered, a difficult genre: synthesizing with skill and passion and humor and humility: memoir, memory, history, commentary. David Nasaw, author of The Patriarch

A moving literary debut . . . a vivid testimony to the power of memory. Kirkus Reviews (starred revew)

A skillfully written debut . . . Foer s engrossing, well-researched family history will resonate with those curious about their own roots. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Esther Safran Foer is a natural storyteller and what a story she has to tell! A tribute to human resilience, her family saga is full of heart and the breath of life. It is a perfect tonic for our cynical times. I loved it. Kati Marton, author of The Great Escape

Stirring and inspiring, this remarkable book is a labor of love and hope. Esther Safran Foer goes on a brave journey abroad and into the past in search of unsettling family secrets buried in the horrible darkness created by Nazism. Her odyssey is both harrowing and heroic. When she returns, she can never see things in the same way, and neither can we. This book is a little triumph over fascism. Congressman Jamie Raskin

Esther Safran Foer has written an honest, painful, and ultimately uplifting story of life after tragedy. This book is, above all else, the redemption song of