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Books: The Shtetl Comes Alive
Matt Nesvisky
A search for his Jewish roots in Ukraine takes the author-like protagonist on a fairy-tale romp
"The complete absence that I found in Ukraine gave my imagination total freedom," novelist Jonathan Safran Foer said in a recent New York Times interview. "The novel wouldn�t have been possible had my search been that other kind of success."
Success of another kind has certainly come to the 24-year-old American with the publication of his widely acclaimed first novel, "Everything Is Illuminated." And all because of that "complete absence" he found in his search for his Jewish roots. As Foer tells it, a few years back he took five days off during his junior year at Princeton to search for a shtetl called Trachimbrod. He was carrying with him a photograph of a woman he believed had saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He didn�t find the woman. He didn�t find anyone else. What he did find was that Trachimbrod�s Jews had all been murdered and that the village had been razed to the ground. A commemorative plaque, apparently erected at the behest of prime minister Yitzhak Shamir in 1992, stood in an abandoned field. That�s all Foer found.
Having done no research beforehand and having discovered so little on his hastily arranged visit, Foer returned to the United States with a pretty empty notebook. For most of us that would have been pretty much the end of the affair. For Foer it was the beginning of a richly imagined fairy tale of a book that was to have fairy-tale success: an excerpt in "The New Yorker," 12 publishing houses bidding for the manuscript, a $500,000 advance from Houghton Mifflin, extensive media coverage and a heady ride on The New York Times best-seller list.
What the Princeton undergraduate concocted is a braided hallah of a novel with three central strands. The first concerns a slightly fictionalized character called Jonathan Safran Foer as he conducts his largely futile search for Trachimbrod. The second strand is narrated, in hilariously inept English, by a young Ukrainian named Alex Perchov, who serves as the American�s guide. And the third strand is woven from threads of the historical romance the faux Foer eventually writes about Trachimbrod.
My reaction to this ambitious and busy novel resembles something of a hallah itself, with leapfrogging braids of admiration, pleasure and irritation. Foer is inarguably a natural-born writer with skill far beyond his years; indeed, he exhibits a feel for the music of language far beyond his ears. Moreover, for a Jew who declares himself not only secular but also quite disinterested in virtually all things Jewish, Foer has an uncanny talent for evoking a Jewish atmosphere in his work: His imaginary shtetl, for example, seems as authentically Jewish and as authoritatively recreated as anything in the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and that�s saying a lot.
Yet if Foer�s Trachimbrod is also the source of my irritation, the fault is mine. I simply have little patience with the trendy narrative mode known as magical realism. Gunther Grass was brilliant at it back in 1959 with "The Tin Drum," as was Salman Rushdie in 1980 with "Midnight�s Children," and that�s about it. (I tried Gabriel Garcia Marquez� s "One Hundred Years of Solitude" but couldn�t make it past the second or third year. As for these three authors� countless imitators -- well, beware of imitations.) Magic realism by now is a tiresome and clich�d narrative strategy. Moreover, successfully blending magic and realism is about as difficult as serving up comedy and drama tastily on the same plate; those who can accomplish such a feat are rare indeed.
Whatever the odds, the meat-and-milk clash of fact and fiction surely doesn�t work for me in Foer�s Trachimbrod. One minute Nazi tanks are rumbling in the distance and the next characters are flying through time, dying and being reborn, changing their names or shapes or engaging in rather impossible orgies.
As it does in Singer�s mystical and demonic Jewish world, sex looms large in "Everything is Illuminated." Indeed, one of the sources of that title arises from the instance in which every one of Trachimbrod�s inhabitants is copulating at the same time. The novel posits the notion that lovers emanate a "coital radiance" that collectively can be seen 150 years later glowing on the planet Earth by astronauts orbiting in space. Well, far be it from me to dispel coital radiance. For his part, Foer has told interviewers that the sexuality that runs rampant throughout the novel should be ascribed to his being an undergraduate writer. Fair enough. That may also explain, if not excuse, the magic realism.
But that�s my problem, and "Everything Is Illuminated" has enough to compensate for my irritations. Not the least is the humor, the bulk of which is generated by tour guide Alex Perchov�s mangled English, which is the funniest such mangulation since Malcolm Bradbury�s Eastern European romp, "Why Come to Slaka."
Here, for example, is Alex introducing himself to the reader: "As for me, I was sired in 1977, the same year as the hero of this story. In truth, my life has been very ordinary. As I mentioned before, I do many good things with myself and others, but they are ordinary things. I dig American movies. I dig Negroes, particularly Michael Jackson. I dig to disseminate very much currency at famous nightclubs in Odessa. Lamborghini Countaches are excellent, as so are cappuccinos. Many girls want to be carnal with me in many good arrangements, notwithstanding the Inebriated Kangaroo, the Gorky Tickle, and the Unyielding Zookeeper. If you want to know why so many girls want to be with me, it is because I am a very premium person to be with. I am homely, and also severely funny, and these are winning things. But nonetheless, I know many people who dig rapid cars and famous discotheques. There are so many who perform the Sputnik Bosom Dalliance -- which is always terminated with a slimy underface -- that I cannot tally them all on my hands. There are even many people named Alex. (Three in my house a lone!) That is why I was so effervescent to go to Lutsk and translate for Jonathan Safran Foer. It would be unordinary."
Add to the above Alex�s blind grandfather, who serves as Foer�s driver, granddad�s oversexed dog, who is called Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and an awful lot of sly and wry observation and, Nazi massacres aside, you have a darn funny novel. It is, to be sure, an uneven work, overly ambitious and somewhat overstuffed. But "Everything Is Illuminated" clearly marks the arrival of a distinctive new voice in the apparently ever-renewing genre of American Jewish fiction. Jonathan Safran Foer reportedly has already completed his second novel. I am effervescent for it and willing to disseminate very much currency for same. I�m sure it will be unordinary.
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