Everything Is Illuminated Study Guide

Jonathan Safran Foer was born in Washington, D.C., on February 21, 1977. His mother, Esther Safran Foer, is now an advisor at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue and is also the child of Polish Holocaust survivors. Jonathan Safran Foer attended Princeton University. During his first year at Princeton, Safran Foer’s writing caught the attention of the writer Joyce Carol Oates, who encouraged him to pursue writing more seriously. Safran Foer graduated with a degree in philosophy from Princeton in 1999. He also wrote a creative writing thesis that went on to become his first novel, Everything is Illuminated, which was first published in 2002. After that, Safran Foer published three more novels, including Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), which is about the September 11 attacks, Tree of Codes (2010), and Here I Am (2016). Safran Foer has been a vegetarian since he was 10 years old, and he wrote a nonfiction book in 2011 titled Eating Animals about the ethics of factory farming and consuming animals. He is also the author of the book We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, published in 2019, about what moral obligations individual people have in the face of climate change.

Everything is Illuminated details centuries in the fictional town of Trachimbrod before the Holocaust, as well as the impacts of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the genocide of Jewish people carried out by Nazi Germany and its collaborators from 1941 to 1945. The Nazis rose to power in 1933. Nazi Germany then invaded Poland in 1939 and the Soviet Union in 1941. The Nazis aimed to murder all Jewish people who lived in Europe, and during the Holocaust, the Nazis and their collaborators killed approximately 6 million Jewish people. The novel is loosely based on Safran Foer’s real-life trip to the town of Trochenbrod, where his grandfather was born. At the time of World War II, Trochenbrod, which was originally known as Zofiówka, was located in what was then Poland and is now Ukraine. During World War II, the Nazis established a ghetto (a site where Nazis segregated and imprisoned Jewish people) in Trochenbrod. The Nazis imprisoned all of the Jewish people from Trochenbrod and the surrounding towns in that ghetto. In 1942, German soldiers carried out a series of massacres in the ghetto, killing almost all of the Jewish people from Trochenbrod and the nearby towns.

Everything is Illuminated is Safran Foer’s first novel and shares similarities with his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Both novels feature ample use of postmodernist and metatextual techniques, including a collage-like approach to narrative and calling attention to themselves as written objects. Though Safran Foer’s most recent novel, Here I Am, still carries many of his stylistic signatures, it has often been described as a more straightforward novel. Safran Foer has cited many influences on his work, including Gabriel García Márquez, Franz Kafka, and Bruno Schulz. Gabriel García Márquez is often cited as one of the founders of magical realism, a genre that Safran Foer makes use of in Everything is Illuminated. García Márquez’s most well-known novel is One Hundred Years of Solitude. Franz Kafka, whose stories are often considered progenitors of magical realism, is perhaps most well-known for those short stories. His novels include The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika. Bruno Schulz was a Polish writer who was killed during World War II when a Gestapo officer (a member of the German secret police) killed Schulz in the Drohobycz Ghetto in what was then Poland and is now Western Ukraine. Using erasure (an approach in which one erases some words and letters from a book while leaving others), Safran Foer adapted Schulz’s book of short stories, The Street of Crocodiles, into his 2010 novel Tree of Codes. Safran Foer also wrote the preface to a nonfiction book titled The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod by Avrom Bendavid-Val, which is about Trochenbrod, the real-life town on which Trachimbrod is loosely based.