Here I Am
Jonathan Safran Foer, 2016
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
592 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374280024
Summary
In the book of Genesis, when God calls out, "Abraham!" before ordering him to sacrifice his son, Isaac, Abraham responds, "Here I am." Later, when Isaac calls out, "My father!" before asking him why there is no animal to slaughter, Abraham responds, "Here I am."
How do we fulfill our conflicting duties as father, husband, and son; wife and mother; child and adult? Jew and American? How can we claim our own identities when our lives are linked so closely to others’?
These are the questions at the heart of Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel in eleven years—a work of extraordinary scope and heartbreaking intimacy.
Unfolding over four tumultuous weeks in present-day Washington, D.C., Here I Am is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. As Jacob and Julia Bloch and their three sons are forced to confront the distances between the lives they think they want and the lives they are living, a catastrophic earthquake sets in motion a quickly escalating conflict in the Middle East.
At stake is the meaning of home—and the fundamental question of how much aliveness one can bear.
Showcasing the same high-energy inventiveness, hilarious irreverence, and emotional urgency that readers loved in his earlier work, Here I Am is Foer’s most searching, hard-hitting, and grandly entertaining novel yet. It not only confirms Foer’s stature as a dazzling literary talent but reveals a novelist who has fully come into his own as one of our most important writers. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 21, 1977
• Where—Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist. He is best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). He teaches creative writing at New York University.
Early life and education
Foer was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Albert Foer, a lawyer and president of the American Antitrust Institute, and Esther Safran Foer, a child of Holocaust survivors born in Poland, who is now Senior Advisor at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue.
Foer is the middle son in this Jewish family; his older brother, Franklin, is a former editor of The New Republic and his younger brother, Joshua, is the founder of Atlas Obscura and author of Moonwalking with Einstein (2011). Jonathan was a "flamboyant" and sensitive child who, at the age of 8, was injured in a classroom chemical accident that resulted in "something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years," during which "he wanted nothing, except to be outside his own skin."
Foer attended Princeton and in 1995, while a freshman at Princeton University, he took an introductory writing course with author Joyce Carol Oates. Oates took an interest in his writing, telling him that he had "that most important of writerly qualities, energy."
Foer later recalled that "she was the first person to ever make me think I should try to write in any sort of serious way. And my life really changed after that." Oates served as the advisor to Foer's senior thesis, an examination of the life of his maternal grandfather, the Holocaust survivor Louis Safran. For his thesis, Foer received Princeton's Senior Creative Writing Thesis Prize.
After graduating from Princeton in 1999, Foer attended briefly the Mount Sinai School of Medicine before dropping out to pursue his writing career.
Writing
In 2001, Foer edited the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, to which he contributed the short story, "If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe."
He also traveled to Ukraine to expand his Princeton senior thesis, which grew into his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated. The book was published in 2002, winning a National Jewish Book Award and a Guardian First Book Award. In 2005, Liev Schreiber adapted the book to film (writing and directing); the movie starred Elijah Wood.
The year 2005 also saw the release of Foer's second novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. With 9/11 as a backdrop for the story, Foer uses a technique known as "visual writing" by including photographs of doorknobs and other oddities, and ending the novel with a 14-page flipbook. The technique garnered both praise and criticism. This book was adapted to film in 2012; Tom Hanks, Thomas Horn, and Sandra Bullock starred.
Foer wrote the libretto for an opera titled Seven Attempted Escapes From Silence, which premiered at the Berlin State Opera in 2005. In 2006 he recorded the narration for the documentary If This is Kosher..., an expose of the kosher certification process that advocates Jewish vegetarianism.
In 2009, Foer published a work of nonfiction, Eating Animals, an examination of factory farming. The book asks how humans can be so loving to our companion animals while simultaneously indifferent to others. Foer explores what this inconsistency tells us about ourselves.
Foer published his third novel, Tree of Codes, to mixed reviews in released in 2010. His fourth novel, Here I Am, came out in 2016—this one to high praise. Publishers Weekly claimed it showed "the mark of a thrillingly gifted writer."
Other
In 2006 Foer recorded the narration for "If This Is Kosher...", PETA's undercover investigation of the world's largest glatt kosher slaughterhouse. The New York Times referred to the 30-minute video as "grisly." Foer also serves as a board member for Farm Forward, a nonprofit organization that implements innovative strategies to promote conscientious food choices, reduce farm animal suffering, and advance sustainable agriculture.
In 2008, Foer taught writing as a visiting professor of fiction at Yale University. He is currently a writer-in-residence in the graduate creative writing program at New York University.
Personal
Foer married writer Nicole Krauss in 2004. They lived in Park Slope in Brooklyn, New York, with their children. The couple separated amicably in 2014 and now live in different homes elsewhere in Brooklyn, but in proximity to one another. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9.5.2016.)
Book Reviews
Brilliant, always original.... Certain set pieces...show a masterly sense of timing and structure and deep feeling.... Foer strews small, semiprecious comic and gnomic gems all along the trail he is breaking.... "Here I Am" is not only the novel's title but also, maybe, an announcement of its ambitious and crazy-talented author's literary residence―an announcement that not only his location but his basic sensibility and very identity are to be found in this work.
Daniel Menaker - New York Times Book Review
Dialogue pings, as animated as an Aaron Sorkin script, and is often, very, very funny.
Jonathan Dean - Sunday Times (UK)
"[A] startling and urgent novel.... There are scenes so sad and so funny and so wry that I texted a friend repeatedly as I was reading it, just to say "goodness me!"... [T]he soul, if you will, of this novel is not in its technique, but in its soulfulness. It is a novel about why we love and how we love and how we might stop loving. It is humane in that no character is a caricature. Foer has become the novelist we deserve.... [He has] stretched and expanded the possibilities of the novel without losing either intellectual integrity or emotional honesty. Here I Am is not just bold, it is brave.... That this book is not on the Man Booker shortlist is nothing short of a disgrace: it will be remembered when all the second-rate crime fiction and dinner party novels are long forgotten
Stuart Kelly - Scotsman (UK)
Here I Am, an epic of family and identity...offers an unflinching, tender appraisal of cultural displacement in an uncertain age.
Rebecca Swirsky - Economist (UK)
Here I Am is one of those books, like Middlemarch, or for that matter Gone Girl, which lays bare the interior of a marriage with such intelligence and deep feeling and pitiless clarity, it’s impossible to read it and not re-examine your own family, and your place in it.
Lev Grossman - Time
Foer tests his own boundaries of spirituality and sexuality, ambition and sacrifice, originality and influence, revisiting themes and techniques from his earlier books. With this novel, he is stepping up to compete for his place in literary history.... Foer rises to the rhetorical challenges of this plot, paying full attention to its comic, apocalyptic, psychological, emotional and historic possibilities. It’s an exciting, masterful performance and his energy and power of invention never flags.
Elaine Showalter - Prospect (UK)
Brilliant.... The book ends on a sorrowful and deeply poignant scene, but even the moments of pain and loss do not diminish the vital spirit, so authentically Jewish, that is the real glory of Here I Am.
Jonathan Kirsch - Jewish Journal
[Here I Am] is at once painfully honest and genuinely hilarious―and full of emotional surprises that will leave you reeling.
Elle
(Starred review.) [A] teeming saga.... [Foer's] dark wit drops in zingers of dialogue, leavening his melancholy assessments of the loneliness of human relationships and a world riven by ethnic hatred.... [A]t once poignant, inspirational, and compassionate...the mark of a thrillingly gifted writer.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Julia and Jacob Bloch's marriage, once buoyed by the determination always to act with purpose, has been worn thin by a slow withholding and the demands of daily life.... Verdict: Rigorous questions within an accessible story; highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Foer’s....polyphonic, and boldly comedic tale of one family’s quandaries astutely and forthrightly confronts humankind’s capacity for the ludicrous and the profound, cruelty and love.
Booklist
[Here I Am] showcases Foer's emotional dexterity even as it takes place across a wider canvas than his previous books.... This is great stuff, written with the insight of someone who has navigated the crucible of family, who understands how small slights lead to crises, the irreconcilability of love.... Sharply observed
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. From Isaac and Irving to Jacob and Sam to Tamir and Barak, the male characters of Here I Am complicate simple notions of Jewish masculinity. How do the expectations of manhood differ across generations and nationalities? What do the Bloch and Blumenberg men all have in common?
2. Jacob and Julia are not traditionally religious, but early in their relationship they practiced a "religion for two"—their own Friday Shabbat, Wednesday strolls, and Rosh Hashanah rituals, among others. What do rituals mean for the characters of Here I Am? How important are rituals—in religion, in relationships, and in everyday life—for you?
3. Irv tells his son, Jacob, "Without context, we’d all be monsters" (page 24). What are the contexts that the characters refer to in order to explain their behavior? Are they being honest when they do this? Does the context for behavior make a person more or less responsible for his or her actions?
4. What did you think of Julia’s reaction upon discovering Jacob’s secret cell phone? How would you have reacted?
5. Technology is central to the lives of the characters of Here I Am: texting, virtual worlds, tablets, the Internet, television, Skype, podcasts, blogs, and so on. What are the different roles that technologyplays in the lives of these characters? How does technology affect your own life and the ways you communicate?
6. What do Sam and Billie learn about love and conflict at Model UN? How does the students’ imaginary leadership differ from the responses of world leaders when an actual crisis erupts in the Middle East?
7. In the chapter "Maybe It Was the Distance" (beginning on page 219), we learn that Isaac and Benny (Tamir’s grandfather) were the only siblings out of a family of seven brothers who survived the Shoah. After a few years together in a displaced persons camp, Isaac settles in America, and Benny in Israel. Foer writes, "Isaac never understood Benny. Benny understood Issac, but never forgave him." Did Isaac evade his responsibilities to the Jewish homeland by moving to Washington, D.C.? What did you think of Jacob’s decision not to go to Israel? Was he being cowardly or courageous? How do the other characters, like Tamir and Irv, define courage?
8. "Before [Jacob and Julia] had kids, if asked to conjure images of parenthood they would have said things like ‘Reading in bed,’ and ‘Giving a bath,’ and ‘Running while holding the seat of a bicycle.’ Parenthood contains such moments of warmth and intimacy, but isn’t them. It’s cleaning up. The great bulk of family life involves no exchange of love, and no meaning, only fulfillment. Not the fulfillment of feeling fulfilled, but of fulfilling that which now falls to you" (page 466). If you are a parent, do you agree? Did this vision of family life ring true to you?
9. At Isaac’s funeral, the rabbi says: "And so it is with prayer, with true prayer, which is never a request, and never praise, but the expression of something of extreme significance that wouldotherwise have no way to be expressed. As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, ‘Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.’ We are made worthy, made righteous, by expression" (page 350). What is the role of prayer for the characters in the novel? What does prayermean in your own life?
10. Compare the early version of Sam’s bar mitzvah speech, which begins on page 101, to the final version, which begins on page 450. How has his view of the world, and of himself, been transformed?
11. The novel takes its title from passages in Genesis in which God calls out, "Abraham!" before ordering him to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham dutifully responds, "Here I am." When do the novel’s characters let each other know "Here I am," bound by duty? How does this kind of duty both make us free and constrain us?
12. How does Jacob and Julia’s divorce affect their three sons? Does it bring them together? What did you think of the "family conversation" between the brothers that begins on page 437?
13. After viewing a documentary on concentration camps, Sam is wracked with the notion that "his life was, if not the result of, then at least inextricably bound to, the profound suffering, and that there was some kind of existential equation, whatever it was and whatever its implications, between his life and their deaths. Or no knowledge, but a feeling.... The feeling of being Jewish, but what was that feeling?" (pages 338–39). How does the legacy of the Holocaust affect the Blochs? How do they define their Jewish identity?
14. How did you react to Jacob’s terrifying, exhilarating experience in the lion’s den (page 390)? What was Tamir’s motivation in insisting that Jacob make the leap? How does that moment serve as a metaphor for their adult lives?
15. Discuss the "How to Play" instructions that make up part VII, "The Bible." What autobiographical details do they reveal about Jacob? Has everyone in his family spent their lives performing an invented role? How do the different characters use humor to express their feelings?
16. Should Julia have run away from Mark, or should she have run to him even sooner? Could Jacob and Julia have saved their marriage? Was it the texts that undid their marriage, or was it something else? Why do you think Jacob wrote the texts?
17. "More than a thousand 'constructed languages' have been invented—by linguists, novelists, hobbyists—each with the dream of correcting the imprecision, inefficiency, and irregularity of natural language. Some constructed languages are based on the musical scale and sung. Some are color-based and silent. The most admired constructed languages were designed to reveal what communication could be, and none of them is in use" (pages 427–28). The characters of Here I Am struggle to express outside what they feel inside, to overcome the inadequacy of language and say what they really mean. What conflicts in the book are rooted in failures of communication? Do you struggle, like Julia, Jacob, Sam, Isaac, and the others, to express yourself, to speak hard truths?
18. Do you think the book stakes out a position on Israel and its relationship with the United States?
19. What makes Argus’s story a fitting conclusion to the novel? What has Argus taught Jacob about
finding fulfillment in life?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)