Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to review this book. This is the story of Esther Safran Foer in which she shares her journey to Ukraine in search o where her father’s life was saved during the Holocaust. This was a very insightful, well-written, and interesting book.

I had the opportunity to hear Esther Safran Foer speak at a Sixth & I event here in DC, and this is a story that needs to be told. As time passes and we are losing more and more of the generation that directly experienced the Holocaust, it's important that these stories continue to be given voice. I am glad I had the chance to read this book.

Many thanks to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book. All thoughts are my own.

3.5 stars
I feel a bit bad not giving this a higher rating, but i just couldn't.  At times, this seemed more like a mom living off of the coattails of her successful author son who just "happened" to fictionalize his family's history and town history without ever knowing anything.....I don't know how to feel about that.   Also, there is such a thing as too much info....much of the time I felt like some intruder to a story that should have only been shared with close family members.  Don't get me wrong, it's heartbreaking and powerful in it's own way, but there was something about the delivery that just lacked for me..

I've often wondered how people who survived the holocaust managed to continue on and live a normal life. This book was so personal. The story of Foer and her family will be with me for a long time.

What a remarkable book from a remarkable woman! I live in the Washington, DC, area and the author was well respected even before this accounting of her family's life.
This unbelievable story, but one of too many that are incomprehensible but so truthful, continue to add to the history of the Holocaust. The silence of survivors has been well- documented and Foer's desire to discover her past will serve to add to the collection of Holocaust histories, hoping that such unimaginable atrocities won't happen again. Her perseverance and devotion to uncovering her history and the results that came forth are memorable.
The beauty of family, her present and past, are proof that some things can not and will be destroyed, under the worst circumstances. This is a must read for everyone so "never forget" will always be remembered.

Thanks to Tim Duggan Books and NetGalley for the chance to read this book.

I have a hard time writing reviews of memoirs. I don't want to critique anyone's personal story.

So I will say only this about Esther Safran Foer's memoir...

- it was stunning to find myself to caught up in her personal story. I cried a couple times. I don't know that I've ever cried over a memoir.

But read this book if what the title and the synopsis say are things you're interested in reading. It's as simple at that. You won't be disappointed.

Thank you #crownpublishing and #netgalley for the opportunity to read and review #iwantyoutoknowwerestillhere
This book touched my heart in a deep way. The author is the daughter of a holocaust survivor and is searching for answers about her parents families who were murdered in Ukraine. Her mother refused to tell her much about her life, and her father died when she was eight years old. She researches and through many serendipitous events finds the answers to many of her questions about her family. As she tells us her heritage is saved through memories. I definitely recommend this book, as its important we #neverforget

I picked this up for the same reason mostly everyone will - I'm a huge fan of JSF. I recently finished another WWII family-history-style memoir that was AMAZING (When Time Stopped) and this might have suffered from the comparison. I thought it was disjointed and confusing, but liked hearing more about JSF and the truths that shaped Everything is Illuminated.

Esther Safran Foer’s family history, as related in I Want You to Know We’re Still Here, is mostly a mystery. There is a very good reason for this. Like so many other people of European Jewish ancestry, most of Esther’s family in Trochenbrod and its neighboring villages in Ukraine were killed during the Holocaust. Her own parents, Leibel and Etel, were so traumatized by their experiences that they only rarely spoke about what they went through. But Esther has a few clues, from her mother’s reluctantly told stories and from a trove of family photographs. After her son had great success with his book Everything is Illuminated, Esther began to seriously track down everyone she could find who might be able to give her more information about her parents and her lost family members.

Esther reveals early in I Want You to Know We’re Still Here that she has three birthdays. The confusion is a result of all the paperwork her parents filled out (more or less truthfully) to relocate from Łodz, Poland; to a displaced persons camp outside of Berlin, Germany; to New York, in the United States. Esther’s parents had managed to survive the destruction of Trochenbrod and the other nearby villages and met, by chance, in Poland, after the war. Continuing acts of anti-Semitic violence led them to join the hundreds of thousands of survivors in the DP camps; the idea was to emigrate and start over outside of Europe. Decades later, after years of research, Esther travels back to where Trochenbrod was, to find the mass graves where her family members were buried, and to say kaddish for them.

I Want You to Know We’re Still Here is a meandering memoir. Esther wanders back and forth through her own history and what she knows about her parents’ histories. (To be blunt, there are some repetitive sentences that could’ve been cut. We only need to be told all the names of Trochenbrod once.) It was interesting to see the stories of the Safrans and others start to take shape as Esther collected more information. Esther seems to collect cousins the way she picks up rocks, soil, and plant souvenirs of the places she visits on her research trips and her pilgrimage to Trochenbrod. I lost track of all the connections, to be honest, but I had to marvel at the way that all of these survivors are related to each other and how much they can remember about people and places from before the Holocaust.

It’s very satisfying that Esther manages to resolve the biggest mysteries about her family history. Overall, the ending, that describes Esther’s trip with another son to Trochenbrod, is very cathartic. I was so happy that Esther was able to learn so much, in spite of the devastation visited upon her family and the Jews of Europe. The realization that Etel and Leibel Safran had so many descendants to carry on their names and memories made me tear up. I Want You to Know We’re Still Here is not a perfect book (it needed more editing and structure), but I enjoyed it a great deal because it tells a story that I don’t often see in Holocaust memoirs. This is not just a story about survival. It’s a story about a family that survived and thrived in spite of all that the Nazis threw at them.

“Outlasting the war didn’t necessarily mean you’d survived.”

Esther grew up in a home where the past was to terrible to speak of. Holocaust loomed in the backdrop of their daily life.
Armed with a black and white picture and a hand draw map, Esther travels to Ukraine, determined to find the shtetl where her father hid during the war.

I Want You To Know We’re Still Here is a powerful memoir; a beautiful and touching journey of discovery to search the truth of their family history.

Thank you Crown Publishing and NetGalley for giving me an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Esther Safran Foer, thank you for sharing your family story with us, it was an honor to read it.

“From Jewish perspective, action is what counts. You do the right thing. The feelings come later.”

“If you wanted to survive, you had to pick yourself up.”

“A name is not a life, but sometimes it’s the best we can do, and even in flattened form, this recitation is my way of mergin memory with history.”

Thank you to the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book. I unfortunately am not going to review this book because I am not ready for the emotional impact at this time. Sorry for wasting your time.

WOW. It's hard to put into words the way I felt when reading this. In so many ways, this book felt like a spiritual experience (even though I am not Jewish) because of the way that Safran Foer writes these memories into a history, as she emphasizes as important in Jewish culture. I felt completely moved by these stories and the determination to give dignity back to each affected person of the Holocaust.

The only reason for 4 stars instead of 5 (I really wish I could do 4.5) is due to the fact that I found some parts of the texts difficult to follow without a visual of a map or family tree somewhere. At certain parts, this made it hard to actually understand what was going on, who was being talked about, or why a certain person was being mentioned at that particular part (because truly, each person Safran Foer mentions hold their own importance in this history). If these moments had not detracted from my complete understanding of the text, I would have easily given the book 5 stars.

BONUS: I got so many book recommendations for what to read next because of this book!!

***I was provided with an e-ARC of this book from Crown Publishing through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions below are my own.***

Words and stars cannot do this book justice. Beautiful, haunting, and inspirational all at once - a testament to memory, ancestry, faith, and family. I can't recommend it enough.

Esther Safran Foer, mother of three famous authors including the one and only Jonathan Safran Foer, is a child of two Holocaust survivors. Her mother and father were both from two small Ukrainian shtetls (villages with large Jewish populations) and narrowly escaped mass shootings from the Nazi Einsatzgruppen or mobile killing squads. Every relative of her mother's and father's - their parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins - were killed.

Her mother went on the run with a friend for three years, a refugee moving constantly deeper into Russia and Asia Minor. Although she doesn't know the exact trajectory of her father's journey, she knows he was kept safe and hidden by a Gentile family for a long time.

It took Esther years to even get this level of detail - her father tragically died when Esther was just eight years old, and many of these memories were too painful for Esther's mother to recount for more than minutes at a time. Esther savored any small detail she could get about her family's history, life in the shtetl, the hardship of a life spent in hiding. One day, her mom revealed that her father had a wife and daughter in the Chetvertnia ghetto: Esther had a half sister whose name she didn't even know.

This book is about Esther Safran Foer taking on the challenge of remembering. Over her life, she becomes an amateur historian and genealogist, collecting documents as small as cancelled checks and ship manifests, documenting her family tree across the world, connecting with distant-distant-distant family members to piece together their shared memory. She recognizes that, in order to truly do justice to her family tree, she needs to go back to Ukraine. She sets off on finding and experiencing the shtetls that her parents came from, tracking down the family who hid her father in their house with only one photo as evidence, and learning something - anything - about her half-sister.

Safran Foer perfectly weaves in why exactly this means so much to her: she unfolds to the reader the importance of Jewish memory. She discusses that for Jews, the world is a small world - everywhere you go, you can find distant relatives or in-laws, and Jewish people have stopped being surprised at these b'shert coincidences. She also emphasizes that the responsibility of the living is to affirm, celebrate, and remember the existence of the dead - this is something that she strives so hard to dedicate her life to, a task that seems insurmountable when she considers the number of family members who died with no photos, no stories, nothing to remember them by. Her ancestors have no idea that she is here - that she remembers - that their legacy lives on in her family.

The book ends beautifully: after going on this journey of discovery, Esther sums it all up by mentioning how many of her children and grandchildren carry her father's legacy in their names. She duplicates an excerpt from her son's speech at his son's bris, a speech that ends in the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful and poignant way imaginable.
"Leo, your mother and I pray that you will never forget where you come from, nor the generations who came before you. May your life be a credit to your ancestors, just as way pray that you will someday have descendants as numerous as the stars, whose lives will be a credit to you."

This was such a powerful story, the characters were so compelling and you become so invested in them you want to keep reading even way after the story ends!

Such a beautiful, short nonfiction piece. The concept is what drew me in, but hearing the first hand experience of a woman not really ever knowing her parents and what they went through ... it was just a beautiful read.

I was not sure what to expect when I decided to request this book. There was so much information that I was unaware of concerning the holocaust victims and survivors. Thank you for allowing me to read this remarkable book.

Thank you to Crown Published and Net Galley for an advanced copy of this book.

It's not often I go to write a review about a book and end up not knowing where to start.

Firstly, I am saddened and horrified to not know so much about the Holocaust. I thought I was educated, but reading this book opened my eyes to atrocities I had never heard of, had never imagined, could never imagine.

I was captivated by the premise of this book, so was excited when I was granted advanced access to it. I had expected this book would play out giving answers to the situation posed in the premise. And it does, sort of, but it also does not. Which I think made everything about this book, and a different realization about the Holocaust so much realer to me: there are no longer ways to get answers to questions of the past for millions of people because six million people were wiped out. Their history went with them. Their generational history. Their stories.

I can't imagine the atrocities that occurred then. That still exist in places today. I can't imagine turning in one of my neighbours or helping to eradicate people from existence. I just don't understand it.

It's hard for me to recommend this book as a good read, but I do think it is an important read. And for that, I would recommend picking it up.

As soon as I read the synopsis of I Want You to Know We’re Still Here I knew I needed this book in my hands as soon as possible. Thank you so much Crown Publishing for granting me this early copy.

Esther Safran Foer-I usually do a quick thank you to the author as well but thank you is not enough. It has been such an honor and a privilege to read your memoir. Thank you so much for sharing your family history and journey to uncover the truth. This book is something that will stay with me for a long time. When I am able to purchase a physical copy upon its release, it will have a permanent home on my shelves.

Things I loved About This Book-

The History/ Subject Matter- I love history. Especially anything to do with WWII and the Holocaust. It just fascinates me. There are so many people and accounts- so many stories to be told. Each one so unique and important.

The Honesty- Esther Safran Foer is very open and honest about her family in this book. It is something that I admire. The book opens with a revelation. With a family secret. Her father was previously married during the war and she had a half sister. Both of them perished.
The author also touches upon her fathers death and the circumstances surrounding his death. I imagine that it was not an easy task putting some of her words to paper. I was emotional myself at certain points just reading what was written.

The Journey- The author travels to Ukraine to find family and witnesses. Anyone she may be able to talk to in order to piece together her fathers life before and during the war. Anyone who may have information on his previous wife and child.
I felt like I was on that journey with her. I was eager for the answers she was searching for.

That is all I can say at this time. I urge you to read this book. If you are a fan of history, non fiction, memoirs or genealogy I recommend this highly.

I feel very bad about not giving this memoir 5 stars. The reason it did not make it there has to do with the beginning of the book. At times it was hard to follow. I don’t want to use the words info dump but a lot of names and connections were explained towards the beginning. It was just a lot at first but once I made my way past that section all was good.