Learn about the siblings she never met and heal the wounds of her past. We are joined by esther and her son awardwinning novelist Jonathan Safran foer, author of everything is illuminated, extremely loud and very close and as well as the nonfiction books feeding animals and we are the weather. Jonathans debut novel was inspired by his journey to trochenbrod in the ukraine to find a family that hidafather and while his search turned up nothing the success of the novel awakened worldwide interest in trochenbrod that led to new careers for esther. Armed with a handdrawn map esther made the trip to ukraine and found more than she ever hoped she would. We are honored to have both esther and jonathan with us tonight for their first public dialogue about thebook. So before we begin a few quick things to note. Tonights conversation will follow with an audience q and a and you can submit your questions into the chat box and we will do our best to get to as many as we can but we have hundreds of
Pandemic started and mister kaplan, i think you reminded me that was the day books and books shut down, is that correct . Thats correct peter. At that point we became a virtual bookshop. The only business we were doing was online and we were just exploring how to do our events virtually as well. Is an update five months into this. Its been like a roller coaster to be honest. Weve had up and down area we , we were able through the ppp loans to be able to bring our staff back. Unfortunately when we brought them back our stores were under, they were so shut down because of the pandemic youre in florida. But toward the end of it we were able to open around the beginning of july june or so. And actually not june, i think it was july that i think about it. It was in july we began to open and we opened all but one of our stores. One of our stores we close permanently on miami beach. Were looking forward to finding another space there as well. Whats it been like to have customers back in the s