Esther Safran Foer

Monday, November 9 · 1pm

Consortium series · in memory of Kristallnacht

Esther Safran Foer I Want You to Know We’re Still Here: A Post Holocaust Memoir · in conversation with her son

Esther Safran Foer, the child of Holocaust survivors, grew up in a home where the past was too terrible to speak of. For Esther, the Holocaust loomed in the backdrop of daily life, felt but never discussed. The result was a childhood marked by painful silences and continued tragedy. Even as she built a successful career, married and raised three children, Esther felt herself searching. When Esther’s she learns that her father had a previous wife and daughter killed in the Holocaust, Esther resolves to find out more. Armed with only a black-and-white photo and a hand-drawn map, she travels to Ukraine to find the shtetl where her father hid during the war. What she finds reshapes her identity and finally gives her the opportunity to mourn. This deeply moving story is not only of Esther’s journey, but of four generations of survivors, storytellers, and memory keepers determined to keep the past alive and imbue the present with life.

Esther Safran Foer was the CEO of Sixth & I, a center for arts, ideas, and religion. The parents of Franklin, Jonathan, and Joshua and the grandparents of six, she lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Bert. According to Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, “Esther Safran Foer is a force of nature: a leader of the Jewish people, the matriarch of America’s leading literary family, an eloquent defender of the proposition that memory matters. And now, a riveting memoirist.”