Author of everything is illuminated, extremely loud and incredibly close and here i am as well as the nonfiction work eating animals and eating the weather. Jonathans book everything is illuminated was inspired by his journey to ukraine to find a family that hid esthers father. The success of the novel awakened worldwide interest that led to new careers for esther. Armed with a tattered black and white photo and a handdrawn map, esther finally made the trip to ukraine herself found more than she ever hoped she would. We are honored to have both esther and jonathan with us for what is to be there for public dialogue about the book. But before we begin a few quick things to note. Tonights conversation will follow with an audience q a and you can submit your questions into the chat box and we will do our best to get to as many questions as we can but bear with us because we have hundreds of your snide and very many questions to get through. This program is being recorded live and will be available for viewing on youtube and that link will go out to alternates registrants somake sure to look out for it. And finally, if youre joining tonights program please consider making a donation to the museum of jewish heritage or joining us as a member. We are an institution dedicated to preserving survivors stories like those of the followers and your support iscrucial to continue our work and present programs like this one. Thank you so much and now without further ado, please join me in getting a big virtual welcome to tonights esteemed speakers, astor and Jonathan Safran foer. Thank you. That didnt sound very big but of course it didnt. The First Reading i ever did as a writer was at the museum of jewish heritage. This is in the very beginning of 2002. And that was before my first book. Everything is illuminated had come out and in a way it was a low point for me as a public speaker cause i had the most embarrassing moment ive ever had as a public speaker which is i mean, i intend to use the word repertoire and i got very nervous and as it was coming out of my mouth i started to doubt myself, doubt the pronunciation and i said it like that and it continues to want me every time i about to do a public event. So i have to admit im a little bit nervous to do this. Me to. Ive done a lot of readings before and i dont really get nervous before then. You and i have had who knows how many conversations in the four decades that weve known each other and yet ive been resting outabout this. For the last couple of days. I know that in part its because i care a lot about it and i want to you know, show everybody how great your book is, participate in that but theres Something Else going on as well which is the subjects are very hard to talk about. Theyre very hard to talk about directly. Jewish people are sort of known for talking a lot but in my experience, both in terms of how i grew up and in terms of what you told me about how you grew up and the Jewish Community that iknow , my experience is that people jewish people have a hardtop time talking about difficult things, aboutsad things. Do you find that to be the case as well . Oh my gosh, its always been the case. I spent most of the early part of my life not being able to talk about any of this. I dont know whether i was suppressing it. I dont know. While you know me well, for the last four decades , i meant upbeat happy person. But i have these goats that are with me all the time even in the happiest moments. She didnt want to tell me those stories but as her brother frank reminded me i use child labor to get the story. When he had a project in high school i encouraged him to interview her and to do the things that i couldnt do and to get from her the stories that i think she wouldnt give me and he did a pretty good job of putting the framework of her history together. And then of course when you wanted to spend the summer having fun but have the senior project to do i wanted to see if we could find these people my father and my grandfather. In many ways i had other folks do what i couldnt do. Somehow i couldnt ask those questions. I couldnt talk about these things do you guys, to your father. It was all in their and i didnt have the emotional wherewithal to undertake the journey you guys took for me first. You know it should be noted you encouraged me to go seek this family history. You also told me not to tell grandma that i was doing it. We will get to that in a little bit. The challenges of layering communication and whats okay to say that this person and whats not okay to say to that person and all of the problems that can entail but just to take a step back because i never really introduced you but we are here to talk about your book i want you to know were still here which i was speaking about a good way to summarize it not as any kind of literary critic which i am not anyway and not as a dispassionate reader which im obviously not but as myself and it was treating our family like sheep music. The central story that the book tells simultaneously in the past in the present and also in the future. You tell the journey of your going to look to learn about our parents and particularly your father who committed suicide when you were like seven . Seven or eight depending on which birthday you count. We will get to that as well. The book is something that i think is really amazing and i think is what distinguishes it from the memoir or from a work of history which is that it transcends the story that its telling and it becomes about the telling itself. Engaging with questions of how we talk about where we come from and how we talk about painful things and how we talk about who we are and how that talking will determine who we have become. Its a really wonderful book and its not uncomplicated for me to say that he coase the child is always a child no matter how old you get and i have always been used to thinking that i was the story that you are telling and then confronting all of your other stories, your parents stories, your struggle and your hope is something that was frankly a little bit scary but that i was really grateful to have. If you hadnt written this book i dont know that i ever would have seen you in quite that way as an individual in the world. So lets kind of started the beginning of your process. Theres an old joke, once upon a time there was a person whose life was so good there was no story to tell about it so there are some really profound problems that are in part of your book, the is the most obvious one, the murder of your halfsister, the suicide of your father and the recent death of your mother, the secrecy that shrouded those losses and also the holes in your life story. Do you feel that there was something in particular that you wanted to solve or to resolve by telling your story . I think when you talked about the whole thats really an accurate way to describe it. After i wrote everything that was eliminated you helped me fill the hole in my life. Somehow it seemed to fill the hole for a while and then i realized that wasnt enough. What was the whole . I dont know what the hole was. There were so many holes in so many holes that id couldnt tell people about. The writing of the book became a really profound experience for me not just the journey. The journey was amazing and i found things that i never expected i would find that the process of sitting down and writing and the ark of the story never changed. I had written an outline and it was there but getting into the motion of the story and im getting into it now as you can tell, that took time and one thing that is really interesting for me is that your grandmother, my mother died december 18, 2018 and i knew my book was due in february so i really made sure that i had it done. I didnt know how long she would live and what would happen and what the situation would be. After she died i went back to look at it and i found that i was able i didnt change the story but i was able to put details and emotions into it and i couldnt while she was alive. That may sound strange you know. She was almost 99 years old and she was in the last few months not even getting up out of her bed which was upstairs so im writing this book and she is upstairs. Her mind was good until the end but we really didnt talk about the book. She knew i was writing about a family like ours. Okay so youre writing a book, okay. She didnt ask me a lot of questions. I think she knew what i was writing about but it wasnt until she died somehow that i was able to let go of things that i was able to put words and feelings that i wasnt able to do while she was still alive. Maybe because i felt like she was always looking over me and these were the story she didnt want to talk about. Just a return to what we were talking about in the beginning when i went to ukraine and it was really entirely your ideal that i do that i mean it was a great idea. You didnt have to persuade me. Its not one that i would have had at the time but i do remember. So what came out of that . Well was interesting because what came out of it was a response to what wasnt there rather than what was there and they think thats the real difference between my book and yours. I didnt know how to look and i maybe was too young to look and there was so much secrecy about this journey from grandma that my Research Expedition was really like today johnson around the ukraine. There is no hope that id find anything so i had to imagine where you, maybe you can tell a little bit about what youre researching was like. So it was what was really unusual about this story and jonathan and me is that created this work of fiction. I didnt know much. We couldnt tell my mother that he was going to hear her precious grandson was going to ukraine when the worst thing happen to her and her family. So i didnt know what to tell you. But it was when you wrote that book and i guess when i thought that you were helping me fill my whole thats people started to call me. First people went to you and you would would say soandso called may your pass me a card or a note and say they have information but im moving on. At first i was nearly ready to pursue it out slowly i would pick up some of these pieces of paper. I would make a call or two when we traveled. I would meet people largely because of your book. I went to the israeli Literary Festival and people came there and they started telling me these stories. Well you know first people were really outraged about your book. I just wanted to tell you that. How could he have done that . How could he have told these crazy stories with and Everything Else . Those were the first calls i was getting and those were the ones i didnt want to really return. People were telling me you got it all wrong but then people started to say well i knew the real story and on the strips it wasnt like it was a systematic hunting but i went on a trip than i had people i was going to see but i kind of seized every opportunity while i was there. For example in brazil my mother suggested i meet with an owner of a jewelry chain in brazil. I didnt want to bother with this but i went in to one of the stores and i said you know i want to show you the snow. He said i know who you are and im going to send a car and pick you up. Here i met a guy and his brother who grew up in the same place as my father. Their cousin married my fathers sister and they were partners of his after the war and they were able to give me addresses. They gave me of address of a store they had which was an interesting kind of business anyway was supposed to be like a deli or a bar but it was really money changing and these refugees were quickly changing currency from one country to another making the exchange and that was the real business. Then when i went to israel i met these truffle brothers and they said would you like to meet other people who may come from the village whom they have none in their family . I said sure and i remember was a year old and it was the night before is going to leave and i said can i get out of babysitting . Hes in 95 drove men and theres no sense waiting for another trip. But i never brought you another trip again. He went with me all over israel and we would speak with one person after another and it was like an onion. Every layer brought something new, new piece of information. This 95yearold man and just a terrific guy, funny. He insisted before we left that both of us kissed him goodbye and i said you must have known my father. He lived in this village. The mistake i was making was i was using his name. It wasnt the way people refer to them. They had nicknames, descriptive nicknames and in the books i wrote some of them down and not even all of them and some were described by their girlfriend but it turned out my fathers nickname was label my father who was living in another village. That became a breakthrough. He told me thats where he lived and died could actually send you on your first journey to the wrong place. Thank you mom and then the nurse and i was with started making phonecalls and said well did you know and at the end of the day i met a woman who knew my father before the war who was able to tell the stories about him that i had never heard before they were so precious to me. She asked me to come back and stay with her for a week. I never did and i regret that. But she gave me more information. She told me my fathers wifes name. I said they had a child and she didnt know there was a child. So many people that i asked they said there were so many babies that were killed. There were so many People Killed whose names we dont know. I scoured all the databases trying to find my ancestors names and i couldnt find anything. Anyway i went back to d. C. And im armed with all this new information. I started returning some of the phonecalls using the numbers that i had. I hired somebody who from ukraine who had worked with some friends with mine and asked her to do an advanced trip. I sent for this picture of my father and her grandfather with his family that supposedly hit him and hitt him. By the way a side story and what this man and he looks at me and he says you know i was married to your fathers cousin but nobody knows so heres a guy who 95 years old telling a total stranger a story that he had told his children and there are so many stories like that. They just somehow buried the past that they could. Anyway so i hired this young woman and she went to the village and almost immediately an old woman said thats label he was hiding in the house. She said one of his grandchildren still lives in the village. This young womans name was anna. Read the book and youll see most of the women we met in ukraine were named anna and it really got confusing. Anna was my translator and the old womans name was anna so the young anna went down to see the house. She met the grandson who we are told, i met him later, a lovely guy but unfortunately he won but the year he gets totally stoned drunk and this was the month. She went in and asked him questions and he couldnt handle anything but she took pictures on the wall. She made a match and she sent me the pictures and you know i thought it was it that i wasnt prepared to believe it. And this whole journey i didnt expect to find anything. At the advice of a friend of ours who is an investigator he said i know guys who are friends of photography experts. Ill let you talk to them so i called this guy who by the way was involved in land investigations of top protector free a top photography expert. Enough for us. I went to see him and he said you are going to waste your money. 250 an hour and youre going to waste your money and going to ukraine another 250. I met with him and we looked at the pictures and young anna sent me the picture we had. He said you know i cant tell you at which point i was just dejected and he said i cant tell you its not them and they started to give me clues of what i could look for when i went to ukraine to look at pictures that are taken of the exact same angle to measure all these features but also if you look at the clothing people wear. These are not people with huge wardrobes and they might be being photographed in the same outfit in that became a critical clue. Should i go on . What i find so adjusting in addition to the content of what you are saying and what i was trying to say earlier about your book the story is so fascinating but the storytelling is also so fascinating. You are talking about hiring a forensic investigator when we are also not talking about it with our parents. With your parents. You talk about this guy who sends for a car and they want you to come over and is desperate to tell you a story and gives you a piece of information that is absolutely fundamental to his own life that he didnt tell his own children. These people have two shovels and with one they are trying to uncover and with the other they are trying to bury. Why are we like that . Do you think we are all like that or is it typical of Holocaust Survivors and their families . My mother and your grandmother at the end of her days still was upset that she didnt say goodbye to her mom. These stories are with him but bringing them forward and telling them, you want to put that behind you. You want to take that shovel and just shovel those stories in the ground and try to let them go. Sometimes we just cant let them go. I tried and then i took this journey and was able to find my own peace with the story. What do you think grandmas reaction would have been if i had said im going on this trip. Here are the reasons not to worry. Help me, be a part of this. I want to hear were you have to say or if you would have gone to her and you know you expressed it as if it were casual like you are in the face of writing a book and she is upstairs but information travels quickly in the house. Theres just a couple other people so its not just that its going to come up readers of secrecy going on, right . What is the alternative to that kind of secrecy or do you believe there is an alternative . When you look back to you feel any regret and i dont use that word lightly. I didnt mean to imply that people really have a choice. Psychology is so fraught and the trauma may have been so severe that there wasnt really a choice but when you look back to the look back with any regret that things more were more open . Of course and having written the book i have come out as a different person. I have come out as a person who is more open for the rest of my life. I guess i will able to pull the plug and i dont even know how to describe it but you wonder what grandma would have said if we had told her i was going. I will tell you what she said that when i told her its going. I had made the arrangement i was meeting the brothers and everything was planned. I had an airline that would fly in and the only airline i could find by the way whose name i knew which was kind of ironic to i was flying to my ancestral homeland. It was safe but the hardest part of this was calling her up to tell her that i was going. Because i knew what her reaction would be. I didnt know would be as profound as it was. I called her up and i said mom ive done all this work and im going to ukraine and im going to go with them. She screamed into the phone, how can you do this to me . I was leaving her. Everybody who had been in this place had left her and now i was leaving her. I said well you know its okay. Im taking frank with me. She said you were taking your child . How can you do this . And then the next day she understood that her response wasnt totally rational and she called me and she said try to understand where all of my fear is coming from. Then i called her and the final call are ready to board the plane and i have to call her to say goodbye. Its kind of interesting and its one of the things that is haunted her most of her life. She never said goodbye to her mother. She had escaped and hear her one and only precious first daughter was going to go and say goodbye to her. She was very rational. She knew that she couldnt talk me out of it. Turns out we were both too strong women and when you put them up against each other its quite a scene. And she said well okay, take a good book, bring some granola bars and whatever you do dont do anything stupid. Thats when she really knew me well. And she told me this after you had come back and she knew we had made it safely. That response of hers trying to understand where all of my fears were coming from could almost have been a title for your book as well. And maybe it gets at what we are talking about within ees of a certain kind of common occasion and the difficulty of another and wanting this desire to uncover one kind of thing in bury another kind of thing behind it is a really deep fear that is inherited. I dont think its a fear of physical safety. I think its a fear of emotional safety. And i dont think this is particular to us because i know so many friends who had very similar situations. They dont do a whole lot of kissing. They dont do a whole lot of saying i love you. Its interesting i thought about that recently and i discussed it but i have been thinking about that recently. And what did you think about the . I thought about my mother. I dont remember how many times she told me that she loves me. I know she did passionately but that wasnt something she was able to say. She did write it in my birthday cards though. Yeah, mine too. No, no clearly the inability to say that nothing at all could deal with the feelings, if anything its an overwhelming desire to say it that can sometimes make saying it very difficult because it does expose you. It exposes you and people who have been hurt. Like to be exposed. Was there anything that you didnt include in the book collects we have talked about the need to bury certain things and the need to keep certain things distant than having different audiences for different ideas and different emotions and conversations. When grandma passed away you said it freed you up and you started to include things that you werent able to include otherwise. You dont even have to get into what the agile material might be but was there anything you just felt he could not put into this book . Not so much that area and everything that was already in the book before she died but was able to dig deeper emotionally and was able to talk about how i felt as an 8yearold. It was Digging Deeper into myself. And if there was something i didnt include why would i tell everybody now . Time is past and things get strange on zell. Youve often said when you are working on the book in when youre conceiving of it and when you are working on it and up to the point was about to be published to would say im doing it for my family. To be honest i never quite fully believe that because i thought maybe thats just the way to create less exposure and make yourself less available to the kind of hurt. You expose yourself only to your family and not to a large reading world. Then something funny happened which was coronavirus and your bulk to her which would take you all over the state and the world was canceled and the sad reality is that bookstores are closed and the literary marketplace decimated and its been a very tough thing your book and what surprised me was your reaction which is as far as i can tell you really dont seem to care very much. You love talking to people. I talked to my agent this morning and im enjoying the zoom talks and a surprise me. I thought it would love the reaction of seeing people and i would have but the intimacy of these conversations like the one we are having. He said to me its not about enjoying the talks, its about selling the look so he told me to urge everybody to buy the book. Nobody invites agents over for breakfast by the way. How did i feel . You know i think since my mothers death i have learned i have got a lot of first drink. There are things you cant change so you just go with it and you make the best of it. Why do i love the zoom talks . Would i have rather been at the dublin book festival where i was invited to be your ad to tourism festival . Guest theres nothing i can do about that. What i could do is make the best of this time. Its what she did and i think its the stories of what her family has been through that we draw life lessons. Theres nothing i can do. The book itself has humor in it and as you said its about the past, its about the present and about the future. I can bring my family back or they cant undo what was done but i can build the future. I can look ahead. I can look at the amazing family that we have, at the grandchildren that we are blessed with and look ahead but try to preserve those stories so that they will always know where they came from. Did that answer your question . Beautifully. 90 last question i will open up to everybody thats here had to do the future. You are just alluding to the future. The mantra of my education and maybe my identity. The inadequacy of your education . No, the mantra i will never forget it if i had to boil it down to a phrase that was the phrase i heard most often and that was the phrase that was just presided over my experience as a young person. Never forget because its where you come from and dont forget because it can happen again and you do forget and my sense is that you never despite someone whos so invested in memory you never wholly approved of that slogan or not as an identity so maybe you can end this part of the conversation by talking a little bit about that idea of never forgetting as opposed to perhaps remembering or never forgetting or remembering what it will look like for people like my kids who i can tell you right now are not going to have the same instincts to go way back in the family tree and arent going to have the same instincts to travel the world and interview people to find out the nittygritty of their cultural jewish heritage. Its not going to be their connection so what do we make of that . First of all they wont have to because i have done it for them. It will be on long after the bookstores all open up it will be i hope in the libraries. My grandchildrens grandchildren in writing the book i dont want my children or grandchildren to because of the. Because of the holocaust. A want them to know what happened but i want them to find the joey in judaism and in writing a the book and reading about jewish memories and one of the things that i came across a talked about is that jewish or not a people of history. We dont look at the broad, we do but you know there is no word in hebrew for history. They just adapted the english but we are told over and over in our holidays, remember, remember its all about remembering, remembering. Passover was not too long ago. I cant remember how long ago it was that we were supposed to see ourselves and we came out of egypt. We are talking about where it happened and how many people. We were talking about visualizing ourselves on this journey and remembering the journey from the very personal point of view. I write in the book that when you think about its history is about the end of something. Its about something that happened and somebodys story that happened way back when but the memories are story and its the beginning of something. Its not the reason to celebrate judaism but its our story and we have to remember that story. As i said the book certainly tells a very sad story but the story is being told so that it can be remembered and towards the end of the book i come back to memory and i come back to the fact that memory is going to live on. Your children are other grandchildren who were named for Holocaust Survivors and, im sorry people who perished, not survivors. A number perished but thats the memory i want them to Carry Forward but i wanted to be a joyful jewish experience. I spent most of my professional life in Public Relations and politics and then helping to build an Institution Designed to build the jewish future. Thats what this is all about. We have to keep those memories. Superb. I think we are opening it up now write some at the . Exactly. Thank you esther and jonathan for that than esther i want to echo what you said. Definitely a difficult time that we are all experiencing and coping with but the Silver Lining is that we are booked to put them together and now have hundreds of people access these incredible talks and we are just so, so honored to have you here. I will start off with this first question that allen sent in. Her question is what would he do first reaction in finding out about your fathers former family and did you share this knowledge with your other relatives and if so what was their response . You know i was just days. I did didnt know what to say. Can you imagine . I was somewhere in my 40s as the mother of three and i had been living with all of these other ghosts. I had been living with my grandmothers and my grandfathers and my aunts and my cousins and there was this other ghosts who who would have been biologically closest to me. I wasnt quite sure where to put it. I had to absorb it. It took me time to deal with it. Then i scour databases trying to find something and couldnt and ultimately i found i was really lucky for jonathan to have opened the door. Its really interesting to talk the other day that i gave in dallas and in the book i talk about myself as being the hinge in his family. Thats the way i always saw myself in the hinge between my mother who lived this heroic life and a little tiny woman who was bigger than life to everybody prince some of her grandchildren called her superhero and some who were storytellers. I wasnt sure what my place was and this person who was interviewing me said so i was able to put my appropriate place into the story. Definitely antimentioned about your research from the on line information. Can you expand on that . Tell us a bit about your research method. We have some questions here. Someone asked it was basically wiped off the map and forgotten. How were you able to go back and find it in the residence to interview and when you found them how were you able to communicate with them . Their member when jonathan came back and youve seen the book i start and he said what did you bring and i said nothing pray theres nothing there. It doesnt exist. I met with survivors and other parts of the world. This gentleman was jewish and it was wiped off the face of the earth. You can even get there on a the road now. But what was interesting when i took this trip in 2009 there were survivors who went on the trip and i write about that journey in the book. It was hysterical. There were survivors who were walking down this place where nothing existed, where there was no road and said you lived here and i lived there and soandso lived there and another survivor would say no, i lived here. They would visualize what it must have been like with these powerful people telling these stories and arguing with each other. Nothing is there. The people i met were other places. I did meet people who knew my mothers family in her village. Young a knot versus the old anna and the middleaged anna. The young anna was my translator on the trip and i was really lucky that she was so invested in it that she had done all this research and found people from a to talk to so thats how i communicated with people, through her. Whats really interesting is the family visited my father i had communication with them. They would write to me and say his this year ukrainian family. This is your american family. We wouldnt exist if her grandfather hadnt taken the risk which was a risk to himself and his entire family. Its a link red bull and there are so many stories from testimonies. One persons decision change the course of family history. Its really incredible that you were able to discover that piece. We have a question here from rebecca heard rebecca asks in one part of your memoir he talked about how you use jonathans novel to find so how do you see the intersection between fiction and nonfiction and jonathans novel the leaders. I should probably asked jonathan that question to but let me say this. He didnt find anybody but he went to these places in the town i guess what could fill his hole. I was looking ultimately for something different. I think what is so important about this, the story needs to be told through fiction and through the real stories that jonathan was able to speak to a different generation and a different audience for that work of fiction and i think it inspired people to think about where they came from and fortunately because of his work and because of the things i found i was able to write, the true story but i dont know another situation where action becomes the impetus to find reality and thats kind of interesting. Very unique. A question. You think its harder for children of survivors to deal with a secondhand information as opposed to their own memories and experiences . How is it different . There are has been a lot of work done about the transmission of trauma through dna. I havent read into that. Theres not much i know about it. I think so much depends on personality two. I look at my father who clearly could not survive and my mother who is the ultimate survivor and kept going and kept moving forward. Im a natural optimist and i think that trauma is of the stories come i know my mother survived and i know my father survived. I could see strength. Your optimism definitely shines through. Can you tell us a little bit about the story behind the title, i want you to know we are still here. What does that mean . Jonathan suggested the other title. Ultimately when i went to ukraine i had prepared myself to find them. Other people who had taken these journeys try to come i was managing my expectations that it would be enough to walk these dirt roads and breathe the air that my ancestors had. Fortunately i found so much more than i have ever hoped. I also decided in the same way that i took facts in a bag with me and took bags of dirt that now sits on what looks like an art installation in my living room. I thought i could leave something of myself at this place and what can i leave and who am i leaving it for . Ultimately we take an annual picture. Its very important to me that we are altogether in the year my mother died 2018 there were 14 of us in the picture. I said far in wide and just so proud of the survival that came out of this terrible piece of history. So i decided to take those pictures. At the same time i was picking up dirt i buried the picture. We just dug in and who was i leaving this picture to . In my mind i was saying to mike grandmothers and my aunts and my cousins you dont know were still here and that was a message of optimism. As i said earlier i cant change what happened to them but i can talk about the future is we are still here. Sheila in the comments section in the chat says she references this song we are still here. Thats good. Ive learned something from each of these talks. Absolutely. We have a question for jonathan actually. Jonathan how does reading your mothers book make you reconsider your own fiction, your own journey back to ukraine . The book that i wrote about it . Not at all. I read the book 20 years ago. I have changed so much in my life has changed so much. I havent reread the book since i published it. I would have a hard time remembering to be honest whats in it. There are a lot of ways that i was changed from my mothers book and im sure it will influence how i write in the future but for me what is in the past as in the past and im glad , im glad that life brought me to where i am. Its another thing that im proud of and another thing that im embarrassed about and there are both of those in that book. I dont have any desire to revisit it. They could have done it without you. So many of us are so glad that you did it and esther likewise. We are running out of time. We have time for just one more question. Im sorry that we wont get to so many Great Questions and comments but we have so many hundreds of people watching that its just impossible. I will close with this one question that comes from andrea and she is wondering if you think that there are any larger lessons to be learned from reading this story and above the importance of preserving the stories for the future what do you want your leaders to take away from it overall . You know i think the message we are still here, i want them to know what happened but i was able to put those memories down for my grandchildren and im able to share it with anybody else who wants to read the book and im delighted with that. Among the things i found when i was in ukraine was there were divorces and there were abortions and all sorts of things that i didnt expect to learn about. And to look to the future. I said something a little different in a way from your book which is as it should be you know. Thats a the nice thing about sending a book into the world. Everybody takes from it what they take from it. For me, the book had a moral which was its better to talk. Its better to talk about things. We dont have a large amount of time with people and their ability to know them and to have their help in knowing ourselves is limited. We need to make the most of it even when its very scary. Our family has a lot things that were scary like every other family. I think with you and grandma and me and grandma and with all of us sometimes the fear expresses itself in silence. To me your hook is an argument against that kind of silence. Anybody who is thinking about it, not even just going on these journeys on the search but to write and tell their stories. Its so important. Now is the grandmother i am a different person from having gone through the process of the writing. If theres one lesson particularly right now is we are still here. We are resilient. Its an important lesson right now going through this crazy situation in this country and in the world that you can make it. Absolutely and thats something resonates with everyone watching tonight. Thank you once again esther and Jonathan Safron foer. This was an incredible program. Thank you to all of our viewers. Please make sure you go out and buy esthers book i want you to know were still here a postholocaust memoir. Its out now on amazon and also at politics and prose the bookstore. The web site is politics and prose. Com. Definitely go out to buy the book and if you want to learn more about the area that they are from you can visit our partners jewish gent. Com. They have an ancestral town feature in the core Location Finder a function that esther encountered in her research and im sure that will reveal a lot of fascinating information about your own family history. As i mentioned this program was recorded and it will be up on youtube most likely tomorrow and we will be setting up that link. Look out for it and finally if you enjoyed what you saw here, please donate to the museum. We are so grateful for any donations coming in especially now that this critical time for us. Sign up to become a member and if youre interested in learning more about our upcoming programs our web site is mjh nyc. Org. We would love to see you at one of them so thank you guys once again. Thank you. Thank you. I think i came to the idea of nixon with my own implicit bias. I did not think that someone struggling with the drug addiction who look like peter would be earning a salary he is earning and would have to advanced degrees and a highly successful partner in a prestigious Silicon Valley law firm. Maybe they were homeless and im Mental Illness that was untreated. Someone i would see on the side would see on the side of the road living under a bridge panhandling on the subway. I was very wrong. Although addiction is part of the trinity there are plenty of people at the top of the socioeconomic ladder struggling as well. What i didnt know then was i hadnt really educated myself in the symptoms of drug addiction. I hadnt thought it would affect me or my family so when peter was clearly suffering from those i attributed it to Everything Else. Maybe he was psychotic. Maybe he had an eating disorder. Maybe he had an illness that i didnt know about like cancer. Nobody says a drug addiction can i never considered it. I thought hes just working to hard. Welcome to my aei conversation with matt ridley. Matt is the awardwinning and bestselling author of numerous books many of which are on my bookshelf here at home by the way including the abolition of everything. His new book the primary focus of our conversation today is how Innovation Works white versus and freedom. Matt has been a member of the well done. Good to chat with you today