'Everything
Is Illuminated

A conversation with National
Jewish Book Award winner
Jonathan Safran Foer.

DEBRA B. DARVICK

Special to the Jewish News

jr

. onathan Safran Foer's first novel, Everything
Is Illuminated (Houghton Mifflin; $24),
took the book world by storm earlier this
year and rightfully so. The book is a lin-
guistic roller-coaster ride that takes detours into •
haunting Holocaust narratives and forays into a
mythical shtetl destroyed by the Nazis.
In her Jewish News review of the novel earlier
this year, Diane Cole wrote, "[Foer] keeps us
laughing all the way to the inferno. He diverts us
with sly wit, when all the time we should be run-
ning for our lives."
For a man who didn't plan on becoming a
writer and submitted the manuscript of
Everything Is Illuminated to an agent nearly as an
afterthought, the book's success has irony written
all over it. But there is nothing ironic about the
accolades and high praise that have come Foer's
way since his book's debut earlier this year,
including winning the National Jewish Book
Award for Fiction.
The Jewish News recently caught up with the
author at his apartment in the New York borough
of Queens.

JN: What was your reaction upon learning you
had won the National Jewish Book Award?
JSF: I received the phone call at the public library
where I work. My first reaction was total surprise.
I was also humbled and felt very proud.

JN: There were times while reading Everything
Is Illuminated when one can't help but laugh out
loud. Did you laugh a lot while writing it?
JSF: I did, and I've yet to give a reading when I
haven't laughed. When I find myself not laugh-
ing, it will be time to stop giving readings.
There are these fundamental things that go on:
I need to create something that will move me.
One has faith in one's own power to do that for
one's self and I also believe that if it moves me, I
hope it will move others. I recognize that the only
thing I have control over is the first part.
It's very important to me when I work, not
only to make myself laugh, but to make myself
emotional.

JN: Do you think a new Jewish male voice is
emerging, one that encompasses you, and perhaps
`EVERYTHING IS ILLUNIINATED' on page 90

2002

'Three Daughters'

L

etty Cottin Pogrebin has been around forev-
er, or so it seems.
She was a founding editor of Ms.
Magazine and in the vanguard of the feminist move-
ment at a time when the vanguard could look back
and not see many people following in its wake.
In addition to hundreds of magazine articles and
essays, she's written eight mostly insightful nonfic-
tion books on a variety of topics, ranging from aging
(Getting Over Getting Older), being Jewish

Wasserman Safer is the one daughter of Esther and
Sam's union.
Leah grew up with her crazed mother and unbri-
dled anger at her father for not coming to her res-
cue; for a long time, Shoshanna was unaware she
had a third sister.
In preparing for the reunion, the three women
must deal with their own demons. Though they all
suffer in common, each woman is a full-blooded
and, in some cases, bloodied character.
As their stories unfold, and Pogrebin drops
breadcrumbs for readers to follow, they become
as lifelike, as real as, well, family. We love them
despite — or perhaps because of— their faults.
Will Rachel survive the infidelity of her
husband? Will Shoshanna be able to engineer
reconciliation between Leah and Rabbi Sam?
Frankly, I found myself silently cheering for them,
as they slowly discover they have more in common
than a dysfunctional past.
The book is not flawless. The reason Rabbi Sam
allows his daughter to be claimed by his first wife
seems fabricated. There are also occasional bits of
dialogue that seem written rather than spoken.
But on the whole, this is a wonderful novel on any
terms. That it is a first novel makes it all the more
remarkable.

(Deborah, Golda and Me: Being Female and
Jewish in America) and the dynamics of fami-
lies (Family Politics).
All that seems to have laid the groundwork
for her first novel, Three Daughters (Farrar .
Straus & Giroux; $25). It is a book that engages
these same themes in a totally engaging manner, and
is loosely based on experiences in Pogrebin's own life.
Very loosely, she says.
Pogrebin says author Grace Paley told her to
"write about what you don't know you know about.
Don't just write about what you know."
"I found that very liberating," Pogrebin says.
Like the three daughters of the book, Pogrebin,
63, was raised in a household where both parents
had been previously married. A sibling she believed
was a full sister turned out to be her mother's
daughter from a previous marriage.
— Curt Schleier
Pogrebin doesn't go into detail. "None of the
[events in the book] are true," she says at one point
Letty Cottin Pogrebin speaks 1 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 12,
in a telephone interview. "I don't want to talk about
at the Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield.
my own family."
She subsequently sends an e-mail
that reads: "I hope that you are not
focusing too much on the biographi-
cal details of my life or how they
might compare with the characters in
the novel. As I emphasized during our
talk, I began Three Daughters with the
bare bones of autobiography, just the
bones. Everything else is imagined.
"I would not want readers to
approach the novel as a puzzle to be
decoded, but as a story to be experi-
enced."
The story to be experienced takes
place in a 10-month period, from
February to December 1999.
Rabbi Sam Wasserman is returning
to the United States from Israel, where
he lives. The Upper West Side of
Manhattan synagogue where he served
30 years plans to honor him and, with
his wife Esther, he wants his daughters
there.
It will not be easy, for the
Wassermans are not the conventional
nuclear family of the 1950s, especially
the nuclear family of a rabbi.
Rachel Wasserman Brent is Esther's
daughter from her marriage gone bad;
Leah Wasserman Rose is Rabbi Sam's
Letty Cottin Pogrebin writes a remarkable
daughter with his former wife, a
first novel about an a typical 1,950s family.
woman gone mad; and Shoshanna

etty cotun
ogre

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