At the Heart of a Post-Holocaust Memoir, a Paean to American Jewish Success

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: