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Friday August 16, 2002

Search for his grandfather's rescuer takes novice novelist to new heights

ALEZA GOLDSMITHBulletin Staff

There was no particular reason why; he just felt as if the title was "misapplied to me."

So when he decided to take "those things on the inside of me and put them on the outside" by writing his first novel, he was rather surprised that "those things " turned out to be so Jewish.

His novel, "Everything is Illuminated," is not only Jewish in its subject matter, it is also Jewish in its sensibility. The critically acclaimed story of a Ukrainian shtetl combines fiction and reality, past and present to retell the history of Trachimbrod, where Foer's own family originated.

"In the past if you had asked me if I was a Jewish writer I would have said that was the last thing I wanted to be. And yet I am a Jewish writer in the same way that Aretha Franklin is a black singer," said Foer, 25, during a recent book tour that landed him in San Francisco.

"My Jewish upbringing had a huge impact that I didn't even realize. It took writing this book to clearly see what my influences were."

As a result, Foer, who currently resides in Queens, N.Y., has not become an observant Jew. He has, however, learned to be proud of his heritage and to be Jewish in his own way.

In his book, Foer braids the novel of a young writer named Jonathan Safran Foer, who is searching for his family's roots in Ukraine, with the story of the fictional Foer's Ukrainian translator, Alexander Perchov, and the creative history of the shtetl.

It is factually incorrect in its depictions of history -- the shtetl (and Perchov, with his almost-artful butchering of the English language) are somewhat "cartoonish," he explained. But it "wasn't accuracy I was going for," said Foer. "I wanted to create a history."

Although it is a fictional account, it grew out of Foer's actual journey through Ukraine, the summer after his junior year at Princeton -- where he won creative writing thesis prizes all four years he was there.

On the spur of the moment, Foer impulsively went on an unsuccessful search for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He originally intended to write a non-fictional account of the experience, but instead churned out "Everything is Illuminated."

Foer, who grew up in Washington, D.C., is still not entirely certain what led him on this journey. He was never particularly interested in his family's history and genealogy, the war or his connection to Judaism. Foer knew nothing of his grandfather who died long before his birth and "yet, I still made the trip."

When he arrived at Trachimbrod, what he found was "an enormous field of nothing" marked by a black stone the size of a person and reading, in both Polish and Ukrainian: "This stands in memory of the 1,204 Trachimbrod Jews killed at the hands of the Nazis."

It wasn't what he expected to find. But again, "Whatever it was I had found, I'm certain it would have not been that either."

For the next few days, with the help of a translator, he showed the picture of his grandfather's savior to people in the neighboring towns, with no success.

"It was so ill-conceived," he explained, "that it was a failure, as it should have been."

But it wasn't a complete failure. When Foer gave up on the mission, he traveled to Prague where he ended up writing his book.

He realized that the woman who saved his grandfather "wasn't really what I was looking for and neither was my grandfather," said Foer, who is currently writing his second novel. "What I was looking for was myself, and who I was."

His search revealed that "I am a Jewish writer. And Judaism is something I'm proud of."

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