Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated is the first novel by the American writer Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2002.

The novel moves between two narratives, both of them autobiographical in different ways. One is the fictionalised history of the town of Trochenbrod, also called Trachimbrod, a shtetl in Poland that was exclusively Jewish before the Holocaust and where the author's grandfather was born; the other follows Foer's own journey to Ukraine in search of the remains and the memories of that town, along with his account of writing the book. The young man at the centre of the search arrives with a photograph and is helped by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into new forms, by a blind old man who is haunted by memories of the war, and by a guide dog named Sammy Davis, Jr, Jr. The real Trochenbrod was an exclusively Jewish shtetl in western Ukraine, and after the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 a Nazi ghetto was established there.

Foer's structure keeps the two stories running against each other, so that the invented history of the town and the account of looking for it in the present are read at the same time.