Volume 67, Issue 7

Illuminating a Lost World Through Humor
by Hillel Broder

Everything is Illuminated
By Jonathan Safran Foer
Houghton Mifflin, Co., 2002
Hardcover; $24.00; 288 Pages

On the spellbindingly loud cover of Jonathan Safran Foer’s first and as-yet only book, Everything is Illuminated, Nathan Englander describes the work as “Intricate in structure, fantastical in its story, and irreverent in 100 different ways,” and told with an “unwavering charm and wit.”  Although this description accurately captures the spirit of the work, Foer’s literary genius also lies in his ability to discombobulate story narrative and structure and still form a coherent, enjoyable, and multi-layered story with a meaningful essence – an essence that tells a shocking, stimulating, and intense Holocaust story in an original style. However, unless Jewish readers are willing to suspend any sort of reverence for their religious, European ancestors, as well as upset their sensibilities towards Jewish practices and customs, I would not recommend they read this book.

A story told through three, alternating forms, Everything is Illuminated is at first a treacherously difficult story to follow. The narrative begins with an entry from the journal of a young Ukrainian adult, Alex Perchov. Writing in a broken, thesaurus-driven English, Alex misuses verbs, idioms, and conventional writing styles, making for often humorous, though sometimes irritating, reading. In his first entry, dubbed “An Overture to the Commencement of a Very Rigid Journey,” Alex introduces himself and his family: Father is the owner of Heritage Touring, a travel agency that caters to Jews exploring their European heritage; Mother is “a very, very humble woman” who “toils at a small café one hour distance from home”; Little Igor is Alex’s “miniature brother”; Grandfather “is retarded and lives on our street,” but whose “final employment was at Heritage Touring, where he commenced to toil in the 1950s and persevered until of late”; and Alex’s dog, the “seeing eye bitch, Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior.”

Through Alex’s narrative, we learn that “the hero,” Jonathan Safran Foer, a college-age American, is employing Heritage Touring to locate a woman from the Ukranian shtetl  of Trachimbrod, who saved his grandfather from the Nazis during WWII.  The next, alternating chapter-form of the narrative, and by far the largest section in the novel, is Safran Foer’s (that is, the fictional “hero,” not the author) mythical/historical tale of the shtetl of Trachimbrod. In this second form of narration, Safran Foer attempts to trace his fictional family history from his great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Brod in eighteenth century Europe, after whom the shtetl was supposedly named, to his grandfather Safran.

Unfortunately, the legendary story of Trachimbrod is told in a manner beyond “cozily ethnical.”  Indeed, Jewish readers will be shocked to read how Safran Foer (the author) casually humanizes and even de-humanizes shtetl life. He portrays religion in the shtetl as entrenched in politics very similar to modern day political rifts; indeed, in the shtetl there are two synagogues – the Uprights’ Synagogue and the Slouchers’ Synagogue. Religious figures, and all acts of religion, are depicted in all-caps writing, mocking the sensibilities of religious figureheads. Consider the following derision of a Jewish sermon, as delivered by the “Well Regarded Rabbi”: “AND WE MUST ALL BE FAMILIAR WITH THAT MOST PORTENTOUS OF BIBLICAL PARABLES, THE PERFECTION OF HEAVEN AND HELL. AND AS WE ALL DO OR SHOULD KNOW, IT WAS ON THE SECOND DAY THAT THE LORD OUR GOD CREATED THE OPPOSING REGIONS OF HEAVEN AND HELL, TO WHICH WE AND THE SLOUCHERS, MAY THEY PACK ONLY SWEATERS, WILL BE SENT, RESPECTIVELY.”  The narrator frequently mocks Jewish forms and laws of prayer; adherents of the upright synagogue are portrayed as “men in long black suits” who “hollered prayers at the top of their lungs,” and the synagogue had separated men and women for prayer, because as “GOD DROPPED THE SHADE, FOREVER CLOSING OFF THE PORTAL BETWEEN KINGDOMS, AND SO MUST WE, IN THE FACE OF OUR TOO TEMPTING WINDOW, DROP THE SHADE BETWEEN THE KINGDOM OF MAN AND WOMAN.”

The final, alternating chapter-element of the book consists of Alex’s letters written in response to reading the fictional-historical narrative. These letters are quite entertaining, and provide us with deeper insight into Safran Foer’s mythological narrative, acting as a surprisingly sensible, though naïve, critique of Jewish shtetl life.

These three very different and alternating methods of tell-a-tale-within-a-tale storytelling then wind down to their inevitable conclusion. As Safran Foer, Alex, and the Grandfather slowly come closer to discovering Trachimbrod and the Ukranian woman who saved Safran, Safran Foer’s fictional narrative gradually merges with real-life events, as described by the Ukranian woman. In truth, it turns out that the entire fictional history of Trachimbrod that Safran Foer had built was an unfounded wisp of imaginary prose. Indeed, when the characters reach Trachimbrod, they discover that nothing remains of the village save for an open, grassy field, and that nothing at all can be used to substantiate anything Safran Foer had described. The subsequent recollection by Grandfather and the Ukranian woman of the real events that occurred in the shtetl tells, in contrast, a most shocking and realistic story completely dissimilar to Safran Foer’s portrayal. It is a Holocaust story that shocks to the extreme, because the reader is no longer reading flippant, jolly narratives of shtetl life – he is reading the real, horrific stories of Nazi brutality. In Foer’s description of the reality of life within the Nazi-dominated shtetl, the reader is faced with the true experience of a world possibly beyond even Safran Foer’s imagination.

If you are willing to suspend your respect for prior generations of European Jewry, you may enjoy Everything is Illuminated.  However, for all of the genius, insight, and entertainment within the book, as well as for the novel approach towards creating the startling resolution of the story, those who are more traditionally minded may want to exercise caution. Although the historical insight of twenty-four-year-old Jonathen Safran Foer is tremendous, Everything is Illuminated too frequently disregards any sort of reverence for our European ancestors and for general Jewish practices and customs. ♦

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