Everything is Illuminated
by Jonathan Safran Foer
A young American goes to Ukraine to find his grandfather's savior.
you carry a family history you only know in fragments and need someone to show you how to hold that
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Foer travels to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. The novel braids his journey with the invented history of the Ukrainian village where his grandfather grew up and the letters of his absurdist Ukrainian guide. A visitor dispatch about inherited memory — the way the Holocaust exists in American Jewish families as a presence that was never fully named. Funny and devastating in equal measure. The dispatch that understands that sometimes the only way to approach the unsurvivable is sideways.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Ukraine • Eastern Europe
- Voice
- An outside perspective on Ukraine
- Themes
- GenerationsWitness
