55 pages • 1 hour read
Jonathan Safran FoerEverything Is Illuminated
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Effects of Generational Trauma
In Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer uses the relationship between Alex and Grandfather to explore and illustrate the effects of generational trauma: The effects of traumatic events that are passed from the person who experienced them to their children, grandchildren, and descendants. Generational trauma shapes a family dynamic and has damaging effects on even those who did not experience the event or, as in Alex’s case, do not even know that it happened.
Trauma is often surrounded by silence—deeply traumatic things are often not spoken of, even if they are known. But that silence does not mitigate the effects on family members and their relationships. It does, however, create distance, because there are questions that are off limits or topics that are too painful to be approached. For example, Alex and his father are aware that something is wrong with Grandfather, but they do not talk about it: “It is rigid not to talk about Grandfather’s melancholy with Father, because we have both encountered him crying” (32). Both Grandfather and Jonathan’s grandmother are faced with the perceived choice of either being unknown by their grandsons or sharing their history and passing their trauma to the next generation. However, trauma gets passed along regardless of whether it is intentionally shared.
Another effect of generational trauma is that younger members of the family may feel a need to protect those who suffered the trauma. When Grandfather tells Alex that he does not need to lie, Alex responds, “That is what you always fail to understand. I present not-truths in order to protect you. That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person. Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected” (244). In the same way, Jonathan attempts to protect his grandmother by not telling her of his trip to Ukraine. He also does not ask her the meanings of the Yiddish words she screams because he does not want to cause her pain. Alex challenges this logic even as he acts similarly to Jonathan, suggesting that she needed Jonathan to ask her about the words so she could tell him about her past.
Because of this silence, the reasons behind behaviors are often unknown. Alex does not know why his Grandfather cries at night, and yet he deals with the effects of the trauma. Jonathan’s relationship with his grandmother is shaped by her trauma, even though he does not understand how. He does not realize it at the time, but his grandmother weighs him at the beginning and end of every visit because of her trauma from starving as she fled the Nazis.. Once he realizes what she is doing, it impacts his understanding of what she went through. But before he even knew the story behind her actions, his life was affected just the same. Safran Foer points out here that generational trauma causes children to have the effects of a memory without having experienced it:
But children had it worst of all, for although it would seem that they had fewer memories to haunt them, they still had the itch of memory as strong as the elders of the shtetl. Their strings were not even their own, but ties around them by parents and grandparents—strings not fastened to anything, but hanging loosely from the darkness” (280).
Even if they don’t have the memories themselves, the effects of the memories ripple through their lives in ways that they cannot understand or escape.
Grandfather sees the effect his trauma has had on his family and attempts to resolve the issue by completing suicide. He believes that without the effects of his trauma resonating through their lives, Alex and Igor will be free to shape their own futures. As he says in his letter to Jonathan, “They must begin again. They must cut all of the strings, yes?” (297) Whether or not Grandfather is right in his actions, he recognizes the damaging effects of generational trauma on his grandchildren’s’ futures. Safran Foer explores these effects in a variety of ways throughout the novel, exposing the damage that generational trauma, and the silence that surrounds it, can cause.
Representing Truth Through Fiction
Throughout Everything is Illuminated, Safran Foer explores the concepts of truth versus fact and how fiction can be used to represent truth. He argues through both Alex’s and Jonathan’s narratives that fiction sometimes does a better job of representing the truth than facts do. He blurs the boundaries between fact, truth, and fiction throughout the novel, not only in the events of the story themselves but in the novel’s construction itself.
Jonathan’s fictional history of Trachimbrod is rooted in fact; the events that happen there during the war closely parallel the events that destroyed a real Ukrainian shtetl named Trochenbrod during World War II. Yet he goes to great pains to represent his history as fictional, using magical realism to highlight and remind the reader of the story’s fictional aspects. Trachimbrod seems fairy tale-like, beginning with a baby girl rising out of the river. Brod is clairvoyant and the statue of the Kolker talks. The population is quirky and their traditions unconventional and/or absurd. They have several important books in the community: The Book of Antecedents, The Book of Recurrent Dreams, and The Book of Past Occurrences. Every year for the Trachimday festival, they festoon the shtetl with string. These fantastical images create the impression of a village that exists in a slightly different reality than our own. With this use of magical realism, Safran Foer reminds the reader that this is an imagined history, but also uses these fictional elements to try to represent the truth of the town’s life and its destruction.
In Jonathan’s fictional history, the characters create fictions within their own lives, withholding truths even from themselves, editing and reshaping the facts to better represent the truth. Yankel uses the name of the man who stole his wife rather than his own name, and he tells Brod made-up stories about his wife and children. In turn, “Brod keeps her own life a secret from herself. Like Yankel, she repeats things until they are true, or until she can’t tell whether they are true or not” (96). Jonathan’s grandfather, Safran, does the same thing as he records his days in his journal while omitting all mention of sex, even though his life, as told by Jonathan, seemed to revolve around it. Which representation of Safran are we meant to accept? Both Jonathan’s and Safran’s versions of the story are equally believable, and yet they both seem to represent different truths about the man.
In Alex’s narrative, Safran Foer uses metafiction to remind us that we are reading a story, but this also has the effect of conflating the real author, Jonathan Safran Foer, with the fictional character of Jonathan Safran Foer. This causes one to wonder how much of the novel is factual. Is the character like the real man? Which of these things actually happened to him? By blurring the line between the novel and the real world, Safran Foer gives us a more layered way to look at the truth, but he also reminds us that the results of his actual trip to Ukraine may not represent the truth of what he discovered as well as his fictional representation can.
Even Alex’s job as translator shows the ease with which fiction can be represented as fact; when Grandfather says something that Alex does not want to tell Jonathan, he simply fills the gaps with harmless tourist information. Alex edits the interactions between Jonathan and Grandfather regularly, mediating in both directions. The difference between fact and truth is an issue that Alex comes to terms with throughout the novel. By the end, Alex urges Jonathan not to be factual, but to be faithful, in his writings. He tells Jonathan, “I would never command you to write a story that is as it occurred in the actual, but I would command you to make your story faithful.” (258). Alex distinguishes between “the actual,” or factual, and “faithful,” or truthful. He sees that there are times when the actual does not represent the truth of a matter, and that sometimes fiction is the more faithful way to represent the truth. This idea is central to the novel, and Safran Foer utilizes Alex’s growth and self-realization as a way to reflect on his own exploration.
The Incapacitating Power of Memory
Throughout the novel, Safran Foer illustrates the incapacitating power of memory, using a variety of strategies to show how memories can overpower the present and how we can become trapped in the past, unable to move forward. A clear example of this is Lista, the woman who lives with all of the artifacts from now-extinct Trachimbrod. Lista is still steeped in memory, represented by the carefully preserved artifacts and that she believes her unborn baby is alive and living in her house, needing to be cared for. Lista escaped the massacre and Ukraine, and yet she returned, unable to let go of the past and move forward with her life. She is so removed from the present time that she has never ridden in a car and does not even know that America exists, which is unthinkable to Alex.
Staying lost in memory can also stop action and decision-making. When the area around Trachimbrod is attacked by Nazis, the people of Trachimbrod fall into apathy instead of taking action, becoming lost in their memories. “Activity was replaced with thought. Memory. Everything reminded everyone of something…Memory begat memory begat memory” (277). They hold town meetings in an attempt to decide what to do, but the meetings peter out without any decisions being made. The villagers have retreated into thought and memory, hiding from the terrifying reality they are facing and, in the process, preventing any escape plans from forming.
But Trachimbrod’s tendency to fall into memory at the expense of reality occurs much earlier than the Nazi attack, as evidenced by The Book of Antecedents. One of the fundamental texts of their village, this book begins as a documentation of the major historical events of Trachimbrod, but over time becomes less a history than a recounting of the daily minutiae of their lives. This text becomes so specific in recording every action that there comes a point where they are simply reporting upon their own writing rather than living and creating memories to report on. Memory, or the recording of it, has taken precedence over reality and creates another type of paralysis, where they are simply recording their efforts to record.
With the example of Sofiowka tying a string around his finger, Safran Foer explores the ways in which memory can remove one from an event, and eventually cause one to forget the original event entirely: “[he] used his body to remember his body, but in the end could remember only the string.” (23). When memory becomes more important than the event itself, or the present, everything is considered only in reference to its connection to the memory. The actual things that are taking place in the present are diminished, important only as a jumping-off point from which to remember other things. This theme recurs throughout Safran Foer’s novel: It is far too easy to let memory, not presence, become one’s central concern, paralyzing any movement or decision-making in the present.
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