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Journalism of Courage
Everything is Illuminated is a first novel by 25-year-old Jonathan Safran Foer. He is the editor of a poetry anthology and his stories are published in The Paris Review, Conjunctions and The New Yorker. An American Jew, he lives in that solid burg of his community, Queens Rego Park?, New York.
Simply put, it is a third generation Holocaust story. The plot is painfully familiar. A young man visits the Ukraine to find the woman who might, or not, be the one who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. All he has to go by is a scrappy photograph and a head-ful of family folklore. A journey, in time-honoured fairytale tradition, needs companions. Our hero and there is a multi-persona hero here goes armed with a useless Ukrainian translator Alex and a mongrel bitch named Sammy Davis Jr. The end of the search is a foregone conclusion 8212; the betrayal of terrified human beings by
one another as the familiar
Nazi kommandant barks aloud for Jews.
Such a situation came up recently on our own screens in Aparna Sen8217;s Mr 038; Mrs Iyer when a Jew tells on a Muslim because he is afraid of being 8220;found out8221;. Why should one bother with yet another tale of Jewish angst, you may wonder, when we ourselves have so much of forgiving and forgetting to get on with. There are three reasons. One, the incredible energy of the story-telling style, which plays surprisingly, breezily, with language not too scandalously short of the manner that Mr Rushdie alone has managed to pull off. Foer8217;s style suffocates sometimes, though, and in places, especially towards the end, where ant-armies of dots separate words and gasps8230; instead of being riveted, one wants to, most regrettably, giggle, because it8217;s grotesquely like Barbara Cartland8217;s happy endings.
Two, the author maps the human heart with great tenderness, especially in the ancestral love story of the woman Brod and her man, 8220;the Kolker8221;. This is the universal aspect expected of every liked book. The story goes beyond the gefilte into primeval folklore that has the power to make every culture shift uneasily on its haunches, because it is anybody8217;s bittersweet story. Children are scorned by a closed community for being different, anyone who bucks the norm is dissected unsparingly, hearts are lost and won, loved ones acquire cutting edges and turn violent or fear they are not loved enough 8220;The Gypsy girl and when my grandfather asked her what was wrong, she did not say, I am jealous of your mother. I want you to love me like that, but instead said nothing, and laughed as if: how silly8221;. Lust for life, and its corollary, fear 8220;Iamsoafraidofdying, Iamsoafraidofdying8221;, result in dreadful deeds 8220;Heisajew8221; and the eternities that must then be made place for 8220;Canheeverbeforgiven8221; for 8220;whathisfingerdid8221;.
In the end, though one is battered by unrelenting grief, this is a new young writer8217;s story and one reads and lets go of it with brief but real interest.
