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Dial Statue
The Brod River symbolizes the cycle of life—which involves birth, death, and renewal after death—as well as the impact of grief on people’s lives after they suffer loss. The Brod River runs through Trachimbrod. In one of the novel’s opening scenes, Trachim B’s wagon careens into the river and traps him underwater, causing him to drown. Miraculously, though, a baby (whom Yankel later names Brod, after the river) rises to the surface. In that way, the river symbolizes the cycle of life, as Trachim B’s death is followed immediately by a birth, and life continues in the wake of tragedy and loss.
Later in the novel, when the Nazis bomb Trachimbrod, Safran and Zosha flee to the Brod River to try to escape the bombing. While Safran floats down the river to safety, Zosha and the child she is pregnant with both drown. The Kolker, in the form of the Dial statue, then counsels Safran about grief. The Kolker explains that once he and Brod lived near a waterfall on the Brod River. At first, the sound of the waterfall was overwhelming, just as grief is initially overpowering after one experiences loss. After a while, though, Brod and the Kolker got used to the sound of the waterfall and stopped noticing it, just as grief, over time, often fades into the background. However, the Kolker adds that after he and Brod grew accustomed to the sound of the waterfall, they continued to speak loudly even when not near the waterfall, symbolizing the way that grief can lead to irreparable and often debilitating changes in people who experience it.
The Brod River Quotes in Everything Is Illuminated
The Everything Is Illuminated quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Brod River. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 9 Quotes
She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.
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She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.
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Chapter 16 Quotes
So it was because of his teeth, I imagine, that he got no milk, and it was because he got no milk that his right arm died. It was because his arm died that he never worked in the menacing flour mill, but in the tannery just outside the shtetl, and that he was exempted from the draft that sent his schoolmates off to be killed in hopeless battles against the Nazis. His arm would save him again when it kept him from swimming back to Trachimbrod to save his only love (who died in the river with the rest of them), and again when it kept him from drowning himself. His arm saved him again when it caused Augustine to fall in love with him and save him, and it saved him once again, years later, when it prevented him from boarding the New Ancestry to Ellis Island, which would be turned back on orders of U.S. immigration officials, and whose passengers would all eventually perish in the Treblinka death camp.
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Chapter 25 Quotes
And this is what living next to a waterfall is like, Safran. Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night’s sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn’t hear her husband’s ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren’s will be. But we learn to live in that love.
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But it’s not the entire story, the Dial continued. I realized this when I first tried to whisper a secret and couldn’t, or whistle a tune without instilling fear in the hearts of those within a hundred yards, when my coworkers at the flour mill pleaded with me to lower my voice, because, Who can think with you shouting like that? To which I asked, AM I REALLY SHOUTING?
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Chapter 26 Quotes
This is what we’ve done we’ve killed our own babies to save them.
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The Brod River Symbol Timeline in Everything Is Illuminated
The timeline below shows where the symbol The Brod River appears in Everything Is Illuminated. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2
...Trachim B’s wagon “either did or did not” pin him under the water of the Brod River after the wagon crashed. The Well-Regarded Rabbi’s two young twin daughters, Chana and Hannah, are...
(full context)
...wife. Then, the Well-Regarded Rabbi’s daughter, Hannah, points to something that has risen in the Brod River . Everyone looks to see what she’s pointing at. It’s a baby girl. Everyone in...
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Chapter 9
...women in town often denigrate Brod and insult her because she was found in the river as a baby. Brod reads indefatigably. Brod also does not feel like she loves anyone...
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Chapter 11
...From the Trachimbrod float, Brod begins the festivities by throwing sacks of coins into the river that people then dive for. A man from Kolki, referred to as the Kolker, finds...
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Chapter 26
...on Trachimday in 1942, as German bombs fall, Safran and Zosha flee to the Brod river to try and avoid the bombing. Safran floats down the river, but Zosha is pulled...
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