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I Want You to Know Weâre Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir
Maybe someday
27
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
37/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Esther Safran Foer
Publisher:
Tim Duggan Books
Date:
March 31, 2020
Esther Safran Foer grew up in a family where history was too terrible to speak of. The child of parents who were each the sole survivors of their respective families, for Esther the Holocaust was always felt but never discussed. So when Esther's mother casually mentions an astonishing revelation--that her father had a previous wife and daughter, both killed in the Holocaust--Esther resolves to find the truth.
What The Reviewers Say
... poignant.
The nooks and crannies that don’t fit a historical narrative are important. The book is steeped in history but, crucially, not concerned with history. It is concerned with family, with memory. This, as they say, is personal.
As the events themselves recede, the rich literature of second- and third-generation Holocaust memoirs continues to grow. But the terrain it charts — including the inevitable journey back to the Old Country to find traces of a vanished world and mourn the dead — has become increasingly familiar. Foer’s rambling, repetitive narrative, marred by pedestrian prose and a profusion of mundane details, is, at best, a minor contribution to this burgeoning genre.
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.
