![]() “His death became part of the family canon of unspeakable stories” she tells the reader. Above all, she was haunted by her father’s suicide, which happened in 1954, when she was a young girl. Growing up in Washington, D.C., Esther Safran Foer felt the disabling weight of her parents’ silence about the war. Foer was born in a displaced-persons camp in Lodz, Poland in 1946 to parents who had managed to evade death - through sheer luck in the case of her mother, Ethel (“My mother spent the war on the run,” Foer recounts), and through the brave actions of righteous gentiles, who helped her father, Louis, escape invading Nazis after they massacred most of the Jews living in his Ukrainian shtetl, Trochenbrod (an incident detailed by Foer’s son, Jonathan Safran Foer, in his 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated). ![]() ![]() “For much of my adult life I have been haunted by the presence of absence,” confesses Esther Safran Foer at the end of her deeply moving memoir, I Want You to Know We’re Still Here. ![]()
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