Wednesday, November 11 at 7:00 pm on Zoom 

The determined search of Esther Safran Foer to learn about her parents’ Holocaust experiences as the sole survivors of their respective families is the journey she will share with us during our annual Kristallnacht service with St. Alban’s Episcopal Church and Annunciation Catholic Church. Foer, the former CEO of the Sixth & I, will speak via Zoom in an Amram Scholar Series lecture about her newly published memoir, I Want You to Know We’re Still Here.

Born in a displaced persons camp in Lodz, Poland, Foer grew up in Washington, DC with the Holocaust looming in the background of daily life, but never openly discussed. The result was a childhood marked by painful silences and continued tragedy, including her father’s death by suicide in 1954. Years later, her mother casually mentioned an astonishing revelation—that her father had a previous wife and daughter, both murdered in the Holocaust. Foer was left with even more questions and virtually no way to get them answered. Foer wrote, “I had grown up surrounded by ghosts—haunted by relatives who were rarely talked about and by stories that no one would share.” Foer committed herself to finding out who his wife and daughter—her half-sister—were and how her father had survived.

Armed with a photograph, a hand-drawn map, and a few leads that only came to light after the publication of her son Jonathan’s novel, Everything Is Illuminated, she traveled to Ukraine with her journalist son Franklin to locate the shtetl where her father hid during World War II. What she found reshaped her identity and gave her the opportunity to finally mourn. Foer’s poignant story is of four generations of survivors, storytellers, and memory keepers living in the shadow of the Holocaust, resolved to keep the past alive and imbue the present with deeper meaning.

Esther Safran Foer comes to the Amram Scholar Series in cooperation with the Jewish Book Council.

CLICK HERE TO RSVP.

Click here to purchase this book through WHC’s Mitzvah Mall