I Want You to Know We're Still Here

by Esther Safran Foer

  Maybe my father felt the same way. He must have been haunted by the past, too. For all we know, he might have been suffering from a clinical anxiety and depression, something people in the 1950s didn’t openly discuss. Perhaps his restless ambition had hit a wall with the purchase of the new store—the one he had come to understand would not be successful and into which he had already sunk a considerable part of our family’s wealth. Perhaps this was the last straw.

  Even with all of these factors in mind, I believe the Holocaust killed him in the end. Or maybe that’s what I want to believe. There have been studies suggesting that suicide rates among Holocaust survivors were no higher than that in the general population, but there were nevertheless some notable suicides among them, including Primo Levi, Paul Celan, Bruno Bettelheim, and Jean Améry. Outlasting the war didn’t necessarily mean you’d survived.

  My mother chose to handle this tragedy by moving forward and not looking back, at least not in conversations with me. The three of us quickly moved out of the store where we had lived with my father and into a one-bedroom apartment in a building in southeast Washington, on South Capitol Street, that was owned by my mother’s Aunt Jean and Uncle Bob. My mother became the resident manager, collecting rent, managing building operations, and taking out the trash at each tenant’s apartment if the custodial help didn’t show up. I tried to make myself useful. I was good with my hands and discovered a talent for fixing the venetian blinds, taking apart the broken slats, replacing and restringing them.

  Quarters were tight: My mother and I shared the bedroom that accommodated her beloved mahogany bed and, beside it, a twin bed for me. My brother slept on the pullout sofa in the living room.

  My mother and I used to sit on the lawn in front of our apartment and search for four-leaf clovers; I still have a sheet pasted full of the ones we found because my mother saved it. I’m sure it was a terrible time for my mother, but around her children she was always stoic. I don’t think I ever saw her cry—not just then, but at any point in her life. It was only many years later that she told me she often thought during that time, “How come the sun shines for everyone else but not me?”

  When I think back on how I dealt with this enormous tragedy in my life, I remember that I tried even harder to not cause trouble, to be a good girl and a diligent student. And to fit in. My classmates bestowed on me the superlative of having the most school spirit and elected me to give the class speech at lower school graduation. Subconsciously I must have known that I had to be the sun that shone for my mother. We protected each other. She didn’t tell me about my father’s suicide, and I didn’t ask. This was our unstated pact.

  * * *

  —

  A little over eight years after my father’s death, my mother remarried. A cousin fixed her up with Rubin Kaplan, an easygoing man with a quick laugh. He was also a Holocaust survivor and, like my father, was in the grocery business. A recent widower, he had two young daughters: eleven-year-old Frances, and Judy, who was nine. I was sixteen at the time, my brother twelve.

  We were two families of three, each missing a parent. Then, rather suddenly, we were a family of six. We packed up and moved to suburban Maryland, and my mother registered all of us in our new schools. There was no attempt to deal with the subtleties of blending our families, no conversations about the ways in which things might be touchy, or rough, especially considering that Frances and Judy had just watched their mother die of cancer. I’m sure there was love between my mother and Rubin, or love of a sort. But it was also a useful merger of two widowers, pooling their strengths and resources. Consider two Holocaust survivors, both widowed, working seven days a week in a small grocery store to raise four kids. The Brady Bunch we were not.

  In many ways, this transition was probably easier for me than for the others. I was already well into my teens and relatively independent. I was active in a Jewish youth group, United Synagogue Youth, which meant that I had friends all over the country, including in our new neighborhood. I had one foot out the door, anyway—I was about to begin college, even though I’d be living at home while attending the nearby University of Maryland, and I’d spend summers working at the State Department and weekends on dates.

  We all helped out at Kaplan’s Market, at 17th and Florida Avenue, an area that saw its fair share of crime in those days. One Sunday I was working there with Mr. Gotkin, an older Jewish man who helped out on occasion. At closing time, we locked up as usual and headed out to the car. I had my driver’s license by then and was going to give him a ride home. But as soon as we stepped outside, I was held up at gunpoint. The robber grabbed for the bag I was carrying, thinking it contained cash. I handed it over and he ran. Apples began falling out of a tear in the bottom of the bag. Mr. Gotkin and I quickly got in the car and locked the doors, the money safely in another bag.

  This incident left me on guard—on the very rare occasions that my mother and Rubin went away alone, I kept a baseball bat by the front door, to protect the house and the other kids, just in case.

  I’m sure there were happy times, but there were also constant low-grade anxieties—crime, finances, running a business, and managing four kids—and most of the time, my mother and Rubin were exhausted. Still, they created a nice home, a place for all the family to gather on holidays, a place for out-of-town visitors to come for dinner, which was always home-cooked.

  * * *

  —

  After college at the University of Maryland, I went to graduate school at Boston University, to study political science. My mother wanted me to be a teacher, to raise a family and take the summers off. I had other ideas. I held a series of political jobs, including a stint at Congressional Quarterly. That’s where I was working when I was fixed up on a blind date with Bert Foer in 1970. He was in the army at the time, drafted out of law school during the Vietnam War. We married a year later, and together we moved to Chicago so that he could complete his studies at the University of Chicago. I found a job as the Illinois state press secretary for George McGovern’s presidential campaign. It was a great opportunity and an exciting job; I even had the chance to go to the Democratic convention with the Illinois delegates. But I was in my mid-twenties, young and possibly in over my head. There was the time, for example, when I told reporters that the helicopter ferrying the Illinois campaign manager from Chicago to Springfield, where he was possibly going to file McGovern’s election papers, had been stranded in a cornfield due to bad weather. This happened to be true and yet it was my first lesson in less is more, as journalists and political cartoonists looking for a little levity in their routine campaign coverage seized on the imagery of the helicopter mired in the cornfield instead of in Springfield, the state capital. It became the butt of jokes, including a cartoon in the Chicago Tribune and a mention on the national evening news.

  After law school and the election, where my candidate was soundly defeated, we returned to Washington to be near both of our families. Our first son was born in 1974, then two more sons within the span of eight years. I worked a handful of different jobs in the public-relations and public-affairs arena, including running my own firm. We settled into a comfortable Washington neighborhood, joined a synagogue and became engaged in our children’s schools, and while every aspect of it was remarkable to me as a wife and mother and a woman—each bris, each bar mitzvah, each soccer game and school performance and dinner-table conversation a wonder—it was also a relief to have it all be largely unremarkable.

  * * *

  —

  Rubin, who had become a religious man in his later years, died on Christmas Day, December 25, 2003. They had been married for forty-one years. After his death my mother continued to live alone in the house for nine years.

  She kept herself busy, going to exercise class and to synagogue and getting us to take her shopping. Because she didn’t drive, and she knew that none of us had the time or the patience to stop at the s
ix or seven different stores that would enable her to get the best deals, she strategically split the shopping among us, enlisting me, my brother, my stepsisters, and the grandchildren. I was probably the least tolerant and most frustrated of all. Eventually she realized that her friends in the neighborhood—many of whom were also Holocaust survivors—were dying and she no longer wanted to live there alone.

  She decided to move into independent living in a nearby Jewish community complex in 2012. When she went in to discuss arrangements for an apartment there, she insisted on going without me or my brother. She knew we would just pay the going rate, and as always, she was determined to negotiate. A friend of mine, who was visiting his mother at the time, laughed and said, “There are no deals here.” This was almost certainly true, but, regardless, my mother got a deal.

  After three years there, she wanted out. She told me that she was afraid to stay in the apartment alone. In early 2015, I took her home for one weekend and that was it. Although we kept the apartment for several months, we could never convince her to go back, and she lived with us for the next three and a half years.

  When it came time to move her permanently out of her apartment and into our house, my brother volunteered to take care of everything and said he’d arrange to get rid of the furniture and most of the clothes. She had never been big on material goods; she was not a collector of tchotchkes, like china or figurines. But she kept track of what was important and had detailed notebooks of her medical history and valued correspondence, all organized and neatly labeled, her photographs categorized in envelopes. I was grateful for my brother’s help, but I sensed this was an opportunity to learn more, to possibly even discover more secrets, and I wanted to get into the apartment first, before it was dismantled. I wasn’t after any possessions, and besides, she had already given away the few valuable things that she owned. She had given my stepsisters a gold watch and a gold necklace. She gave my sister-in-law the diamond ring that she brought with her from Europe. And she had given me a string of pearls, albeit with specific instructions to never have them restrung or to change the clasp. If they were refurbished, her thinking went, they would become just another string of pearls and not the ones from her.

  In addition, she had always been very diligent about her finances, gifting money to her children and stepchildren, calculating what she needed to hang on to in order to complete her life. So it wasn’t money or jewelry that I was after. It was something very specific: I wanted my father’s suicide note. To be honest, I didn’t even know for certain that one existed, but I suspected that it did. This was probably my last chance to find it.

  Her sunny apartment was filled with furniture from the home she had shared with Rubin, including that expensive mahogany bedroom set she’d bought in 1949. She still had the same desk, and it was still stuffed with all of her old papers, including canceled checks, all carefully organized and labeled. Some dated back to 1949, when we first arrived in America. She had also clipped together copies of savings bonds that she’d long ago cashed. I looked through everything I could find, to no avail.

  We kept working and packing and organizing her things, and after a few hours my mother and I sat down on her bed to rest.

  “Where is it?” I asked, taking a leap of faith.

  “Where is what?”

  “Dad’s note.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember,” she replied.

  I was pretty sure she was bluffing, so I pushed a little harder. “Okay,” I told her, “let’s just sit here until you remember.”

  She didn’t move or say anything, and neither did I, for at least five long minutes.

  Finally, she broke. “It’s on the top shelf of the bedroom closet.”

  I walked to the closet and stepped onto a stool to reach the shelf, and sure enough, there it was. It was a sturdy box, 8½ by 10½, and 5 inches tall, and it contained much of what mattered to her most. It wasn’t just an ordinary packing box but one that she had covered with Con-Tact paper that resembled a wood grain. I felt like I’d just unearthed treasure. Inside was a record of my mother’s life: dozens of envelopes, each carefully labeled, containing letters and canceled checks. Some recorded the loans she had made. She had evidently been quite the financier, my mother, lending money and then recording the repayments and keeping the canceled checks. She also kept the letters thanking her for the interest-free loans. One was a heartfelt note from the wife of a grocer to whom my mother had lent money—she thanked her and pleaded with her to never reveal they had once had financial problems.

  I suppose this wasn’t surprising—that she would hang on to records like this. When she had moved out of her house and into the retirement community, she presented me with a shoebox, also covered with Con-Tact paper, containing letters sent to me by old boyfriends, organized chronologically and by the name of the sender. Obviously, she’d gone through them all.

  I also found the canceled check for half of the down payment on the house she and Rubin bought. Other envelopes were organized by the names of her children, stepchildren, and grandchildren and contained the cards—even the Hallmark greeting cards—and the occasional personal notes they had sent to her over the years. One envelope was labeled Ketubah, in Hebrew, and sure enough there it was, the large decorative ketubah from my parents’ wedding on Lag B’Omer in 1945 in Lodz, Poland.

  There was also the largest and most elaborate Mother’s Day card I’ve ever seen, dated 1950, and signed “Louis and Esther” in a fancy script that looked like it was written by a professional calligrapher. It had been our first Mother’s Day in America.

  And then, there it was, the envelope I was after, labeled, simply, “July 30, 1954.” The date of my father’s suicide.

  There were actually four different notes, all written in Yiddish and in a mixture of Yiddish and English—Yidglish, we called it. On them was written the address, “1822 N. Capitol Street.” Each note was numbered; the first two were written on pieces of the butcher paper he used to wrap meat in his grocery store. The last note was on paper torn from a small pocket spiral notebook, and he’d written different notes on the front and on the back.

  “He said he loved me,” was all that my mother told me about the notes on that day as we sat on her bed. She was strangely matter-of-fact in her delivery. But I can see now that this was what was most important to her—that he’d loved her. Or perhaps it was what she wanted me to know. Of course, she didn’t need to tell me that; it was clear from the pictures taken in Lodz, and at their wedding, and during their time at the DP camp, that they were in love.

  She couldn’t know that what I longed to hear was that he’d loved me, too. When he killed himself, I was just a little bit older than the daughter he had lost, and my brother just a few years younger. When he looked at us, did he think of his first child? Were we too much to bear? These were not questions that I ever asked aloud.

  I later had the suicide notes translated.

  The first note begins: “My Etele is the best wife in the world. Forgive me for everything, my dear.” He then asks my Aunt Jean and Uncle Bob to “take very good care of my dear little children and my dear Etele. Therefore, you will, God should help us, be rewarded.”

  The next note starts in much the same way: “My dear Etele and sweet little kinderlekh [children]. Etele, be good to our children just as if we were together….They are diamonds. Etele, I wish for your happiness in your future. I end my suffering. The world is narish [absurd]. To my whole family I ask that you should please take good care of my little children…Also especially Etele. I ask everyone to forgive me for my terrible death.”

  The notes go on in the same vein. The final note says, “My sweet and dear little children. Be healthy and happy….I am very sorry you have this misfortune. It must be this way. I am a mess of nerves and it is unbearable. My dear little children, you should listen to your mother.” Signed, “Your father, Leibel.
”

  7

  On March 17, 1986, my sons surprised me with what they called a “coming-out party” to celebrate my fortieth birthday. We are big on celebrations in our family, commemorating occasions large and small, with everything handmade, hand drawn, home baked. The weeks of preparation are often more fun than the parties themselves. But no one was ever sure what to do on this particular date, the date of my actual birth. The boys—then twelve, nine, and three and a half years old—decided it was time to change that. They invited all of their friends and their friends’ parents to our house, and they baked cupcakes and cookies with the help of one of our neighbors.

  This was right about the same time that many Holocaust survivors and their families were reaching their own kind of tipping points. Anniversaries of pivotal moments from the war, like Kristallnacht, were at last being commemorated publicly. In 1980, Congress voted unanimously to form a council to create a memorial to the six million Jews and millions of other victims who died during the Holocaust, resulting in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The first world gathering of Holocaust survivors took place in Israel in 1981, and Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Popular culture took note, as well, when documentaries, TV miniseries, and major films on the Holocaust premiered: The Diary of Anne Frank was released as a TV movie in 1980; the film Sophie’s Choice came out in 1982; and in 1985 came Shoah, a nine-hour-long French documentary about the Holocaust.