INSIDE:
Summer Festival
In Ann Arbor
70
`Swing' Time
At The Fox
76
Eric Bloom Of
Blue Oyster Cult
80
Young author Jonathan Safran Foer burst on the
literary scene this year with a multi-layered novel
based on his search for his Ukrainian roots.
Now, "Everything Is Illuminated" is garnering
comparisons to the works of the most renowned
Jewish writers of the last century.
JOURNEY
Imagination
DIANE COLE
Special to the Jewish News
ust 25, author Jonathan Safran Foer
gives new meaning to the phrase tal-
ent to burn.
In his extraordinary first novel,
Everything Is Illuminated, fire and light appear
everywhere, and especially in the Polish-Ukrainian
shtetl of Trachimbrod, the tiny village whose fan-
tastical history Foer hypnotically dramatizes.
There, festive boats sparked by fireworks sail
along the deceptively quiet River Brod.
Bucolic fields, are showered by lightning
storms. Ultimately, a satanic firestorm, ignited
y Nazi invaders, obliterates the town so thor-
oughly that its name disappears from memory.
Or almost. More than half a century after
Trachimbrod's destruction by Hitler's army, a
young Jewish-American writer
"Everything named Jonathan Safran Foer
Is Illuminated" reverses the journey taken by
has been touted as his grandparents, and embarks
"the century's first on a search for the obscure vil-
great American lage from which they nearly
Jewish novel:" failed to escape.
His only clues to its location are a long out-
dated map and a 50-year old photograph of a
young woman. She may or may not be named
Augustine; she may or may not have saved his
grandfather's life; she may or may not still live
in the area, or, for that matter, still be living.
So far, the novel is based on fact. The sum-
mer after his junior year at Princeton —
where he majored in philosophy, became
interested in art history and racked up cre-
ative writing prizes — the real Jonathan
Safran Foer, a native of Washington, D.C.,
did travel to the Ukraine.
Like the fictional Foer, he was seeking the
woman who, according to family lore, had res-
cued his maternal grandfather from the Nazis.
However, unlike his fictional namesake, the
author, whose short stories have been published
in the literary journals Paris Review and
Connections, found no trace of anyone or any-
thing connected to the tragedy of Trachimbrod.
After five days of aimless travel through the
bleakest parts of the Ukraine, he ended up in
Prague, where he had intended to spend the
summer writing the true story of his travels.
IMAGINATION on page 74