Everything Is Illuminated

In these chapters, the shifting nature of fact, truth, and fiction is once again highlighted with Yankel’s creation of a mother and family for Brod. In the process of doing so, he creates a wife for himself and a relationship with a deep history. Yankel then falls in love with his imaginary wife and the life they had together. He rereads the letters he wrote to support his fiction as if they were real. We also see this blurring of fact and fiction in the villagers’ religion, where they discuss recurring dreams as religious texts. Here, people find meaning in purpose in dreams, which are demonstrably untrue.

In addition, we discover that Yankel’s name before his conviction was Safran. This type of circular reference is apparent throughout the novel, as characters have the same names across generations, highlighting connections between the present and the past. Identity is another reality that can be created, rather than a truth to be inherited. Identity must always be maintained, represented later by the woman in the house who saves Trachimbrod’s history. Despite attempted genocide, she’s kept the memory and culture for Trachimbrod alive, and now Jonathan and Alex are able to pass the story down again.

Yankel’s concept of death is a new note; he perceives the loss of his previous family and life as a death. After feeling his old self die, he creates a new identity. He shields himself from future harm by adopting the name of the man who cuckolded him; he sheds his old, bested self in favor of a strong and appealing one. He also gives up his former profession as an usurer, a predatory money lender, allowing himself to enter his new community without stigma or hatred from his peers. Here, Safran Foer raises the issue of an event so traumatic, so cataclysmic, that life is separated into before and after, and the event itself is a death of sorts. This death is not final, though; in his rebirth, Yankel gets a second chance at family, fatherhood, and purpose.

The strange, fantastical elements that are present in Jonathan’s Trachimbrod narrative are also apparent in Alex’s narrative. His grandfather says he is blind, but he is not. Everyone knows he is not, but they straddle the line between maintaining the fiction and not, giving him a seeing-eye dog while also employing him as a driver. This otherworldly quality is also supported by Alex’s unusual, thesaurus-laden writing style, which gives the narrative a distinctive tone that seems a bit separate from our reality.