Everything is Illuminated
by Jonathan Safran Foer
A young American goes to Ukraine to find his grandfather's savior.
For you if
you carry a family history you only know in fragments and need someone to show you how to hold that
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Foer travels to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. The novel braids his journey with the invented history of the Ukrainian village where his grandfather grew up and the letters of his absurdist Ukrainian guide. A visitor dispatch about inherited memory — the way the Holocaust exists in American Jewish families as a presence that was never fully named. Funny and devastating in equal measure. The dispatch that understands that sometimes the only way to approach the unsurvivable is sideways.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Ukraine • Eastern Europe
- Voice
- An outside perspective on Ukraine
- Topics
- the holocaust
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Everything is Illuminated(2005)
dir. Liev Schreiber
Digging up a family's buried history.
A young Jewish American man travels to Ukraine with an eccentric translator and his grandfather to find the woman who saved his grandfather's life during the Nazi invasion, and a small Ukrainian town that was wiped off the map. Adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in blending absurdist comedy with Holocaust memory without ever trivializing either — the film trusts that grief and humor can share the same road trip. Pedagogical in showing how erased places and people can still be located, if someone is willing to look hard enough.
Indian Horse(2017)
dir. Stephen S. Campanelli
Hockey couldn't save him from what came before.
Torn from his Ojibway family and committed to a Catholic residential school in 1950s Ontario, Saul Indian Horse survives institutional abuse and finds an unlikely refuge in hockey — though the game can't undo what the school did. Adapted from Richard Wagamese's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in refusing to let athletic triumph erase institutional abuse — Saul's hockey talent doesn't heal the residential school system that tried to break him. Pedagogical in showing how trauma and skill can coexist in the same body without cancelling each other out.
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