But where were the post-Holocaust Jews trying to find their way after the Holocaust? Where were the grand and great grandchildren of the survivors, struggling to connect with their heritage in a society that canonizes the victims of the Holocaust without acknowledging its own complicity in perpetuating Antisemitism still today? There were stingy, greedy Jews playing small parts in Shakespeare and Edith Wharton, and a smattering of “Christ-Killers” in Middle English works. In whole of my pre-collegiate academic career, I never saw an accurate portrayal of someone like me in literature.
And all that was only compounded by the equally unavoidable stream of commercial Christian holidays. I became disillusioned because I never saw myself in the works I studied during my formative education. One day of Hebrew School and religious education per week at the Temple could not compete with that. I had had twelve years’ worth of school focused on Christian authors and Christian mythology. It was the first novel written by a Jew that I had ever discussed in a classroom setting. I first read Foer’s novel in my second year of university, at UNC-Chapel Hill, as part of my English Literature degree. We have no further knowledge about their lives in Europe beyond that and our pre-anglicized names. You see, the shtetls where my great-grandfathers came from were bombed and burned to the ground by the Nazis during World War Two. I felt as if I was reading my own fictionalized family history I was vicariously answering questions whose answers are otherwise unattainable.
When he sees and feels what shtetl life was like for his ancestors, I imagined mine there too, living there alongside his family. When Foer traces his grandfather’s origins back to the shtetl of Trachimbrod, a fictionalized version of Trochenbrod in Ukraine, it felt as if I had discovered the name of my great grandfathers’ shtetl. I answered questions about my own history, my own Jewishness, through Foer’s quest. This novel gave me a character I could empathize with, one who attempts to answer questions about his family left in the wake of the Holocaust. Francine Prose claimed (and Scott Veale reiterated) that “not since Anthony Burgess’s novel, ‘A Clockwork Orange’, has the English language been mauled and energized with such brilliance and such brio.” (Veale 28).įoer’s novel sticks out in my mind for a much more personal reason. It was Foer’s blend of magical realism and his use of language that got the public talking about his book.
The novel’s story is rather straightforward: the protagonist, also named Jonathan Safran Foer, goes on a quest to find the woman who helped to save his grandfather during the Holocaust.
When Everything is Illuminated came out in 2002, Jonathan Safran Foer was praised by literary reviewers for writing an autobiographical novel that, among other things, “blends laughter and tears” (Abramowitz 130).
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