Everything Is Illuminated

“But I do not do these things because we are a family. I do them because they are common decencies. That is an idiom that the hero taught me. I do them because I am not a big fucking asshole. That is another idiom that the hero taught me.”

This is Alex’s response to his mother’s statement above. Alex has expanded his mother’s concept to include not just family, but other humans. He is essentially saying that you should love and treat all human beings as you would family if you are a decent human being.

“It is so queer to think of someone injuring Father. I more usually think of the roles as unmovable.”

Alex reflects on the way that new information can change your perception of a person, which in turn invites a reevaluation of that person and your relationship with them. Alex now sees his father as fallible, a shift that will allow him, much later in the story, to confront him and force him to leave. This statement also echoes the reevaluation of Grandfather he will be forced to make later, when he hears Grandfather’s story.

“If you want to know who protects you from the people that take without asking, it is the police. If you want to know who protects you from the police, it is the people who take without asking. And very often they are the same people.”

Throughout the novel, Alex shows an understanding of social dynamics in Ukraine that completely escapes Jonathan’s understanding. While the average American middle-class 20-year-old might not understand the complexities of government corruption, Alex, as a citizen of a post-Soviet country, has an understanding built on common knowledge and personal experience. This disparity will come up several times during the course of the story.

“‘Why do you want to write?’ ‘I don’t know. I used to think it was what I was born to do. No, I never really thought that. It’s just something people say.’ ‘No, it is not. I truly feel that I was born to be an accountant.’”

Alex is just trying to get to know Jonathan, making what he thinks is casual conversation. But he is actually asking very difficult questions that Jonathan has a hard time answering. Also notable here is Alex’s certainty in the face of Jonathan’s uncertainty. It is ironic because later in the novel, Alex has moved on from accounting to thinking of himself as a writer.

“We were like friends. For the first time that I could remember, I felt entirely good.”

With this thought, Alex shows the friendship developing between himself and Jonathan. In addition, Alex reveals through this statement how that type of connection is missing from his life and the effect that has on him. The reader gets a slightly better understanding of the difficulties in Alex’s life, which he at first hides from both Jonathan and the reader.

“I knew why he could not repose. It was the same reason I would not be able to repose. We were both regarding the same question: what did he do during the war?”

Alex and Grandfather are both unable to sleep, thinking about what Grandfather did during the war. Grandfather is restless because he knows what he did, and Alex because he does not know. Very aptly summarized here is the idea that generational trauma affects a family, whether or not they know the specifics of the traumatic event.

“After only ten years of life, she was already the most desired creature in the shtetl, and her reputation had spread like rivulets into the neighboring villages.”

In Jonathan’s fictional history of Trachimbrod, Brod is widely regarded, from a very young age, as a sexual object by the men of her shtetl and beyond. Interestingly, Safran is given this same trait in Jonathan’s treatment of his story. This may be seen as another way to show her as both different and an outsider, almost otherworldly in her attraction, underscoring the magical realism of the narrative.

“Of course, she was only a child, still removing the dust from her first death. What else could she do? And he was already accumulating the dust of his second death. What else could he do?”

Yankel invents fantastical stories about Brod’s birth and history, stories so unreal that she has to believe them. She believes them because she is so young. Yankel thinks of Brod’s birth as her first death. He creates them because he is so old, and is trying desperately to give Brod a family foundation that will outlast his life. His first death, as he sees it, was the loss of his family and former life upon his conviction.

“He would be the subject of many paintings one day, when the children then watching grew old and sat with watercolors on their crumbling stoops. But he didn’t know that then, and neither did they, just as none of them knew that I would one day write this.”

This quote is ostensibly about a young boy on a colorful parade float and how he will be remembered far into the future. But it is also a reflection on the idea that in the present, people are simply living their lives. They do not think about themselves as part of history, nor consider the ways in which they will be represented far into the future. 

“It was seeming as if we were in the wrong country, or the wrong century, or as if Trachimbrod had disappeared, and so had the memory of it.”

During their search for Trachimbrod, Alex is not only surprised that they not able to find the town itself, but that they are met with seeming ignorance and borderline hostility by those they ask. Once the history of Trachimbrod is revealed, this attitude makes more sense to both Alex and the reader. Though the people they ask may know what happened to Trachimbrod, they maintain silence on the subject as if by doing so they can erase a shameful chapter in the region’s history.

“He was a changing god, destroyed and recreated by his believers, destroyed and recreated by their belief…Those who prayed came to believe less and less in the god of their creation and more and more in their belief.”

The statue of the Dial has become a good-luck charm that is rubbed for luck by visitors. Whatever the statue had meant previously, it is now imbued with new meaning by its believers, who have lost contact with the original subject of the statue. This is an idea that Safran Foer plays with throughout the novel—an object or event losing its original meaning and coming to mean whatever people project onto it.

“If you never inform her, she will never be able to forgive you.”

Here, Alex counsels Jonathan to tell his grandmother about his trip to Ukraine. Jonathan fears she will be angry with him, and so keeps his travels a secret. Alex is addressing a larger issue as well, connected to his own generational trauma—that maintaining silence stops the healing process. By addressing the truth, and being open, forgiveness and healing can begin.

“I could imagine in my brain how the days connected the girl in the photograph to the woman who was in the room with us. Each day was like another photograph. Her life was a book of photographs. One was with the hero’s grandfather, and now one was with us.”

In thinking about how the girl in the photograph became the woman he sees before him, Alex realizes that life is a collection of moments. There is also the idea that the artifacts that remain of a person’s life (photos, journals, etc.) become the history that is represented as truth. In the future, the moments between the photographs will not be represented and so will not be a part of the story.

“But I knew that my side was on the outside with the hero. Part of me hated this, and part of me was grateful, because once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.”

Alex is waiting outside with Jonathan while Grandfather and Lista talk. He reflects that once you know the truth about something, you can’t go back to being ignorant of it. As he writes this after Grandfather has told his story, he is painfully aware of the truth of this statement.

“‘This is a nice story.’ ‘It’s true. I’m not making it up.’ ‘Of course. I know that you are faithful.’ ‘It’s just that sometimes we make things up, just to talk. But this really happened.’”

Jonathan told Alex a story about sitting under his grandmother’s skirts when he was small and feeling safe there. Here again, Safran Foer probes the complicated idea of truth and fiction. So much of what is offered up as truth in casual conversation is actually fiction, created to be clever or funny, or just to make conversation. Yet these fictions, presented as truth, assume the weight of it and become accepted as such.

“‘Why did you not ask her what the words meant?’ ‘I was afraid.’ ‘Of what were you afraid?’ ‘I don’t know. I was just too afraid. I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask, so I didn’t.’ ‘Perhaps she desired for you to ask.’ ‘No.’ ‘Perhaps she needed you to ask, because if you didn’t ask, she could not tell you.’ ‘No.’ ‘Perhaps she was shouting, Ask me! Ask me what I’m shouting!’”

Jonathan admits that he never asked his grandmother what any of the Yiddish words she shouted meant. Alex responds that maybe she was shouting the words because she wanted him to ask and wanted to tell him. This exchange probes the silence around generational trauma—how things go unsaid because the people who experienced it are waiting to be asked, and their families don’t ask because they don’t want to cause pain.

“My grandfather wondered if he was nothing more than a dupe of chance. Wasn’t everything that had happened, from his first kiss to this, his first marital infidelity, the inevitable result of circumstances over which he had no control? How guilty could he be, really, when he never had any real choice?”

Here Safran Foer raises the issues of causality and responsibility. If circumstances are beyond your control, are you accountable for your actions? This question is central to Grandfather’s decision as well, as the reader considers the ramifications of Grandfather’s actions and what kind of choice was offered to him to begin with.

“We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes? The both of us? Do you think that this is acceptable when we are writing about things that occurred?”

Alex raises the question of truth versus fiction in his and Jonathan’s respective stories here. He asks an important question, which is whether it is okay to edit the truth, to fictionalize aspects of the story, even though the topic is so serious. Increasingly throughout the story, Alex becomes preoccupied with the question of fact versus truth and the role that fiction can play in representing truth.

“You cannot know how it felt to have to hear these things and then repeat them, because when I repeated them, I felt like I was making them new again.”

It is one thing to hear a terrible story; it’s another to have to retell it. Alex has the unenviable job of translating Lista’s and Grandfather’s stories for Jonathan, which means that he not only has to listen to these terrible stories, he has to repeat them. He acknowledges that by doing so, he is somehow also keeping that horror alive.

“We are talking now, Jonathan, together, and not apart. We are with each other, working on the same story, and I am certain that you can also feel it. Do you know that I am the Gypsy girl and you are Safran, and that I am Kolker and you are Brod, and that I am your grandmother and you are Grandfather, and that I am Alex and you are you, and that I am you and you are me?”

Alex, in a letter to Jonathan, speaks here about a feeling of universality that he has experienced as a result of writing his story while he reads Jonathan’s. He recognizes the commonality between himself and all other characters in both texts and sees how all people are the same. This quote is also a recognition that he and Jonathan are, in fact, working on the same story—the stories are intertwined and will meet in the middle, on the night of the Trachimbrod massacre.

“‘We are not looking for his grandfather. We are looking for Augustine. She is not any more his than ours.’ I had not thought of it in this way, but it was true.”

Grandfather reminds Alex that they can continue to search for Augustine without Jonathan—that she does not belong to him alone. Grandfather has claimed ownership of the search for Augustine and is personally committed to it. He raises the idea that this story doesn’t belong to just one person and in doing so recognizes the many facets of this complex history.

“You are a coward, Jonathan, and you have disappointed me. 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.”

Alex writes a letter in which he attacks Jonathan, accusing him of being afraid. He draws the line between “the actual,” or the factual, and the “faithful,” or the truth. He recognizes that something can be true, while not being factual, and that truth is more important than being factually correct. This quote also shows a shift in the relationship between the two characters, as Alex is no longer in awe of Jonathan, but feels equal enough to openly criticize him.

“‘You had to choose, and hope to choose the smaller evil.”

Before he tells his story, Grandfather prefaces it with this statement. He addresses the complexity of his moral dilemma, being forced to choose between his own life and his best friend Herschel’s. In decisions with no right answer, one is often not even sure which the lesser evil is, and yet has to live with their choice.