It is no small feat for a young writer to have his novelistic debut excerpted in the fiction issue of The New Yorker. But 24-year-old Jonathan Safran Foer is no ordinary writer. With Everything Is Illuminated, Foer has constructed a structurally clever, thematically wise, and overall engaging work of fiction.
Inspired by a real-life trip Foer took to the Ukraine during college, Everything Is Illuminated revolves around the interactions of Alexander Perchov, a Ukranian translator, and a fictional Jonathan Safran Foer, an American who has come to the Ukraine in search of his family’s past. In alternating chapters, the author integrates three different narrative techniques. There is a first-person narration by Alex himself, recounting Jonathan’s journey in the Ukraine. There is a third-person retelling of a whimsical history of the Foer clan, beginning in 1791 and ending with the Second World War. And finally there’s an epistolary form of narration in which Alex writes letters to Jonathan after the trip’s conclusion. While the technique of switching narrators does, at times, impede the novel, Everything Is Illuminated still pulls the reader into a world at once distant and readily imaginable.
The fictional Jonathan Safran Foer is determined to locate Trachimbrod, the town where his grandfather Safran was born, as well as find the woman he believes saved his grandfather from death during the Holocaust. “I want to see Trachimbrod,” Jonathan explains to Alex. “To see what it’s like, how my grandfather grew up, where I would be now if it weren’t for the war.” Ultimately, it is this search—the search for traces of the life the protagonist’s grandfather once lived—that drives the novel.
Initially, Alex and Jonathan have no luck in locating Trachimbrod. The locals whom Alex asks have never heard of the village, and maps seem to offer no assistance. Indeed, what was formerly Trachimbrod is now only an empty field. Alex concludes, “It was seeming as if we were in the wrong country, or the wrong century, or as if Trachimbrod had disappeared, and so had the memory of it.”
But as it turns out, the memory of Trachimbrod has not disappeared. Jonathan never finds the woman from the photograph, but he and Alex eventually encounter a woman named Lista who had once known his grandfather. Lista recounts her memories of Safran, telling Jonathan, “We talked about Shakespeare, I remember, a play we had both read. They had them in Yiddish, you know, and he once gave me one of them to read.” It is a small memory, no more than a hiccup in time, but such small memories—such small reminders of an era that has been all but erased from history—are in fact what Jonathan has come to the Ukraine to find.
What Jonathan discovers is that, despite war and destruction, Trachimbrod will always exist, even if only in memory. The mere retelling of this story points to the strength of memory in keeping a place alive. In the end, what Jonathan needs lies not in the streets and buildings of his grandfather’s youth, but in the history of his grandfather’s youth, in the stories and legends that constituted one man’s life. “For Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger,” Foer writes. “The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks…that the Jew is able to know why it hurts.”
In this ambitious first novel, then, Jonathan Safran Foer urges his readers to read on, to link the past and the future and all of the space in between, and most of all, to remember. As Alex writes in one of his letters to Jonathan, “With our writing, we are reminding each other of things. We are making one story, yes?”
