“Everything is Illuminated”

By Jonathan Safran Foer

The Yale Course on Postwar American Literature ended with this novel recommended by the students!

It’s about the real story of the author, -and the main character bears his name!- a young American, who travels to Ukraine and with the help of a Ukrainian peer tries to find the woman who saved his grandfather during the war.

There is a second story going on centuries ago with his great great…grandmother in the same Jewish town which was eradicated much later during the Second World War by the Nazis.

There is a lot of laughing with the kind of bookish English the Ukrainian translator speaks, who helps Safran Foer, the character, to find this woman.

It’s an interesting book published in 2002, has also been made into a film. You can feel the fresh air coming from a young writer even on a serious topic like the Holocaust!