I WANT YOU TO KNOW WE'RE STILL HERE

A family’s mysteries inspire a search into a dark past.

In the novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Jonathan Safran Foer invented the journey of a 20-year-old Jewish American man who travels to a town in Ukraine in search of his family’s past, particularly for the woman he believed saved his grandfather from Nazi persecution. The novel had roots in his own family’s history, which Foer’s mother excavates in her moving literary debut, a recounting of her own real-life quest to uncover facts about her assorted relatives who fled from the Nazis. Her life, she writes, has been “haunted by the presence of absence”: the silence surrounding her family’s experiences before they arrived in the U.S. in 1949. She knew that her mother had wandered through Russia for three years and her father had been hidden by a Christian family. But she was stunned when her mother remarked that he had fled after Nazis had murdered everyone in his village, including his wife and daughter. The revelation about a half sister was shocking, but her mother could add nothing more about this first family. Foer needed to know: “I feel a great responsibility to keep the past alive.” Combing databases and archives, hiring a researcher in Ukraine, sending saliva for DNA testing, and making trips to Ukraine, the author unearthed more than she had imagined. “The more I learned,” she writes, “the more complicated the story became,” as the family’s struggles emerged from the clouds of history. She met distant cousins she hadn’t known existed, and in Ukraine, where her ancestors’ village had been obliterated, she trekked into a forest to the site of “unimaginable horror”: the mass grave of murdered Jews. Foer, who in her 60s became the director of Sixth & I, a Jewish cultural institution in Washington, D.C., sees her “side career as the family connector,” an undertaking in which her husband and sons have enthusiastically participated. “Traumatic memories,” she writes, “live on from one generation to the next.”

A vivid testimony to the power of memory.