Here I Am - Book Review

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There's a lot to unpack in Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Here I Am. I can see people not liking it because it's 500+ pages and written in a very different way, using multiple storytelling devices. I have to admit that for the first four or five chapters, there was stuff I didn't understand, even after re-reading a passage. I felt like the author assumed the reader already knew stuff. How, in 2020, was I supposed to infer a character was playing Other Life? Is that still a thing? Was it even when the book was written four years ago?

But once I started figuring some things out, I became more invested in the characters and their story. And the story of their ancestors. And the story of their ancestral homeland.

The book is called "Here I Am", but maybe a better title would be "Who Am I" because that seems to be what everyone is trying to figure out. Jacob writes for a successful TV show, but he's not going the writing he wants to be doing. Julia, his wife, designs homes she'll never live in and wonders who she could be outside of a wife and mother. Sam, their oldest son, created an alternate world for himself in Other Life.

And then there's the secondary question of who these characters are from a religious perspective. Sam doesn't want a Bar Mitzvah, but his parents want him to do it even though they aren't particularly Jewish. They identify as Jewish, but what does it mean to be Jewish? Jacob's father and cousin would have some things to say on that matter.

There's a parallel between the breakdown of the Bloch family and the (fictional) destruction of Israel by earthquake and war. What are you willing to do or become to save it? Or not?

Here I Am is published by Farrar, Strous and Giroux and is on bookstore shelves now. I bought the book at Dollar Tree.