Adas Library Reviews

I Want You to Know We're Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir by Esther Safran Foer

Throughout Esther Safran Foer’s childhood, her parents’ past was a closed subject, rarely discussed. She knew little of their wartime lives in Europe. They came to the United States in 1949, bringing three-year-old Esther. Her father’s family history was a particular puzzle because he died when Esther was only eight. Yet even if not talked about, the ghosts of relatives lost in the Holocaust hovered in the house.

Esther was in her early 40s when her mother chanced to mention that Esther’s father’s first wife and daughter had been murdered by the Nazis. Stunned by this revelation, Esther became determined to learn more, particularly about the half-sister she never knew she had and the Ukrainian family that had hidden her father during the war. She searched databases, made connections through her son Jonathan’s 2002 novel, Everything Is Illuminated (loosely based on what was then known of the family’s history), picked up clues in Brazil and Israel, and eventually traveled to Ukraine with her eldest son Frank. There, with the help of a colorful cast of characters, they found some of the answers they sought.

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend by Sanford Greenberg

Born to a struggling Jewish family in Buffalo, New York, Sandy Greenberg was proud to win a scholarship to Columbia University. In 1961, he was in his junior year, rooming with a would-be architect named Arthur Garfunkel, when Sandy’s eyesight began to fail. Before long, he was completely blind. A social worker proposed to the despairing Sandy that he become a justice of the peace in a quiet, backwoods town, as other blind men had done, or else train to make screwdrivers or cane chairs.

Arthur, on the other hand, urged Sandy to return to Columbia, promising to help manage the complicated logistics of Sandy’s new life. Bolstered by Arthur, and the boundless love and support of his Buffalo girlfriend, Sue (later his wife), Sandy defied his worried parents and returned to school. He not only graduated Columbia (as president of his class), but went on to study at Oxford and Harvard, where he earned a Ph.D. in government. While in graduate school, Sandy and Sue scraped together $400 to help Arthur (unhappy in architecture school) and Arthur’s friend, Paul Simon, get a start in the music business.

Sandy launched his own highly successful career in government and business, determined to carry on as if his disability didn’t exist. He traveled the world, learning to live with fear and risk, not to mention innumerable falls, cuts and bruises, and sutures. In 2012, Sandy, together with his wife Sue (whom Sandy calls his “center of gravity”) established the End Blindness by 2020 Prize. This $3 million prize will be awarded this December 14 to the person, group, or institution deemed to have made the greatest contribution toward advancing vision science.