Esther Safran Foer was born in Poland, shortly after the end of the war, to Holocaust survivor parents. Her family emigrated to the U.S. in 1949, when she was around 3, and Esther built an only-in-America life.
“I was a refugee. I was one of those refugees,” she said.
She served as the press secretary for George McGovern in his 1972 presidential campaign and spent many years running a public relations firm in Washington, D.C., and later as the executive director of the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue, also in Washington, D.C. She has three sons — Franklin Foer, Joshua Foer, and Jonathan Safran Foer — all of whom are prominent writers.
“I’ve spent my time focusing on the Jewish future,” Esther told the Chronicle in an interview. “On building opportunities for young Jews to become engaged to become welcome in the Jewish world on whatever terms they wanted.”
“But it was late in my career,” she said, “I knew I had to come to terms with my own Holocaust history.”
In recent years, she has been telling that history, including in her 2020 memoir, “I Want You To Know We’re Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir” And she’ll be telling a version of that story as the keynote speaker at the annual Yom HaShoah commemoration, organized by three partners: Milwaukee Jewish Federation, the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, and the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center.
The address is set to take place on Sunday, April 12, at 3 p.m. at the Harry & Rose Samson Family JCC in Whitefish Bay.
Esther’s son, Jonathan, wrote a bestselling novel, “Everything is Illuminated,” in 2002, about a young man who travels to Ukraine to try to find the people who saved his ancestors from the Holocaust. It was published as a fictionalized treatment of the family story, with magical realist elements, and was made into a movie in 2005.
Esther’s memoir, published nearly 20 years later, took a nonfiction look at that same history, involving multiple trips to Ukraine, DNA tests, and even the hiring of an FBI agent and a “fixer.” Esther learned relatively late in life that she had a half-sister, from her father’s first marriage, who was killed by the Nazis, but she had no idea of her sister’s name, what she looked like, or other details of her brief life.
“One thing I’m always passionate about is storytelling and people capturing these stories, especially now that, you know, with generations passing,” she said. “There’s a lot of work that’s been done on storytelling and the importance of these stories, whether they’re Holocaust stories or whatever the story is being passed down from generation to generation.”
Esther’s parents hadn’t wanted to talk much about their experiences; her father died at a young age, and she acknowledges that “I may not have known how to ask the right questions.” So that left it to her to research herself, leading to some answers about her family and the ones who hid them.
“I didn’t find all the answers. But I found the answers to questions that had lingered in my mind for decades,” she said of her research.
Esther hasn’t determined yet exactly what she’ll say when she speaks in Milwaukee. But she does plan to reflect on what she’s learned.
“History is one thing and these personal memories are another,” she said. “And the importance of memory, of telling these personal stories. History is somebody else’s story, it’s the broader story. But taking your own story, the kind of thing you pass down from generation to generation, it’s not abstract, it’s very personal.”
“Today I am blessed. I had no grandparents, no cousins,” she said. “Today I have eight grandchildren – and one of them bears the name of my half-sister.”
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Yom HaShoah commemoration
- Keynote speaker Esther Safran Foer
- Sunday, April 12, at 3 p.m.
- Harry & Rose Samson Family JCC in Whitefish Bay
- Register: Milwaukeejewish.org/Yamim
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