Now everything really is illuminated

Esther Safran Foer solves the family mysteries at the heart of her son’s novel in a superb memoir, says Paul Kendall

TI WANT YOU TO KNOW WE’RE STILL HERE by Esther Safran Foer 384pp, HQ , £16.99, ebook £6.49

he joke in the title of Jonathan Safran Foer’s award-ladened debut novel Everything Is Illuminated was that everything was, in fact, fabricated. The book’s central character, Alex, a Ukrainian translator with a tenuous grasp of English, was made up, as was his bad-tempered grandfather, who drove a fictitious “Jonathan

Safran Foer” on a journey to find a woman who had saved Jonathan’s Jewish grandfather from the Nazis.

The rambunctious history of the grandfather’s shtetl, which took up at least a third of the novel, was also imagined. As, sadly, was the existence of the Ukrainian duo’s flatulent dog, Sammy Davis Jr, Jr. The real Safran Foer had been to Ukraine, and he had hoped to discover the identity of a family who had hidden his grandfather from the Nazis. But his investigation had come to naught. When he finally arrived at the place where the shtetl, Trochenbrod, had once stood, he found nothing – not a wall, not a paving stone, no sign whatsoever that the former Jewish town had ever existed. And so he filled the void with invention.

Now, in a powerful new memoir written by Safran Foer’s mother, Esther, we discover that the novelist’s fiction did, in the end, help to produce fact. I Want You to Know We’re Still Here is the real story of Esther’s father, Louis, which she pieced together after a flood of phone calls, emails and letters from readers about Trochenbrod in the weeks and months after Everything Is Illuminated was published in 2002 (the name of the town was one of the few things Jonathan didn’t make up in the novel). It is also the story of Esther’s mother, who came from Kolki, a town 15 miles north of Trochenbrod, and of the thousands of Jews from the area who were marched out of their homes, taken to open pits and shot by Einsatzgruppen – Germany’s mobile killing squads.

Everything Is Illuminated was the catalyst, but Esther, the family’s self-appointed archivist, would probably have written this book anyway. In a clear, direct style very different to her son’s tricksy prose, she describes how ghosts visited her “from the shtetls in Ukraine” long before Jonathan became a writer and how she always longed to know more than her mother,

Ethel, was willing to tell her about her father, who committed suicide in 1954 when she was eight. Not only was there the mystery of the family who had hidden him during the war – the name of which her mother swore she didn’t know; there was also the revelation, casually dropped into a conversation when Esther was in her early 40s, that he had had a wife and daughter before Ethel and that they had both been murdered by the Nazis.

This news – that she had lost a sister in the war – drove Esther to hire researchers in Ukraine and even employ an FBI agent to analyse photographs, but to no avail. “Of the person closest to me killed in the Holocaust, my half-sibling, I had not one detail, not a name, not a picture, not one piece of a memory,” she writes. “Here was a child, one of almost 1.5 million children who were murdered during the Holocaust, and there was no way to remember that this child had even lived. How do you remember someone who has left no trace?”

For years, this sister was represented by a question mark on the Safran Foer family tree. But, in 2007, after retiring from her career as a public affairs consultant in Washington DC, Esther had time to pursue the new leads thrown up by Everything Is Illuminated, which had gained even more attention thanks to a 2005 film adaptation.

There had, she discovered, been a group of “Trochenbroders”, in addition to her father, who had escaped the massacre of the town’s Jews, fleeing into the forest and taking up partisan actions against

A vanished shtetl is reconstructed before our eyes through her painstaking research

ALASTAIR COOK by Alastair Cook 384pp, Penguin, £9.99

In this likeable (if generic) memoir, the former England cricket captain reveals that he was “schooled with brutal humour”. He says: “To this day I’m known as Woggle, because of my slightly wonky left eye.” He deals candidly with his “draining” public bust-up with Kevin Pietersen, which left Cook “isolated and persecuted”.

‘VISITED BY GHOSTS’ Esther Safran Foer with a photo of her father (top left) and the family who hid him