As the remaining survivors of the Shoah dwindle in number, the era of the Holocaust memoir has largely come to an end. But the 21st century has seen the rise of a new genre, in which the author tells the tale of his or her search for information about the experience of parents or grandparents during World War II, and perhaps learns something profound along the way. A fictionalized version of such a work—Everything Is Illuminated—launched the literary career of Jonathan Safran Foer, and was later turned into a movie. Now his mother, Esther Safran Foer, has written a nonfiction work about the same story, I Want You to Know We’re Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir. The book, in Steven J. Zipperstein’s estimation, conveys something profound not about the Shoah, but about the American Jewish experience:
Whatever joy she has felt over the course of her life “is tempered,” Foer writes, “by shadows of the past.” One doesn’t doubt it. But, then again, this memoir-cum-genealogy is chock-full of indefatigably American nachas. . . . Amid all this joy, the shadows that haunt this memoir feel insubstantial, immeasurably less pertinent than the daily life that Esther Safran Foer so clearly relishes. Just beneath the surface of this Holocaust memoir is, in fact, an altogether different tale: a paean to the good life in America.
[I]t seems what most “haunts” [Foer]—a term repeatedly used—is not the Jewish past so much as the unsettling reality that this past intrudes so little on an ever-vital present. It is its absence that most disturbs—the simple fact that, although she was born in a European displaced-persons camp to a family of survivors, the past doesn’t bear down very heavily on Foer’s everyday life.
This speaks to one of the more oddly perplexing aspects of the American Jewish experience: its disjuncture from that long and winding road viewed overwhelmingly by Jews, whether wholly justified or not, in the darkest hues. With the exception of intermittent spikes in anti-Semitic sentiment in the interwar years and the recent increase in attacks on Jews—from street violence to far-right terrorist attacks—what is one to do with an American Jewish story that is, by and large, so disarmingly benign that even its darkest moments have rarely been all that dark?
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/9490/at-home-in-america/