At the time when most writers his age are still trying to find
their creative voice, Jonathan Safran Foer has already written his
first novel.
A native of Washington, D.C. and Princeton alumnus, Foer wrote
his best-selling debut novel, “Everything is
Illuminated” at the age of 19 after taking a creative writing
class with author Joyce Carol Oates. Foer will be in Los Angeles
speaking about his book and his experiences Oct. 15 at Sinai
Temple.
The humorous novel is loosely based on Foer’s own
experience as told through two narrators, the comical Ukrainian
Alex Perchov, and a character called Jonathan Safran Foer, who
shares the author’s name if not his personality. The author
deftly uses the story-within-a-story plot with many complex
characters (who he says were not really based on anyone he knew) to
build a story that everyone can believe in.
It all began when Foer took a three-day trip to Ukraine during
his second year in college in search of a woman who was believed to
have saved his grandfather from the Nazis during World War II.
Armed with a photograph of the woman and nothing else, Foer was
unsuccessful in his search for her in the town Trachimbrod, where
she supposedly had lived.
Some may wonder why Foer felt compelled to make this search,
since he had never been to Ukraine in the past and had little to go
on, and especially when he said that he wasn’t particularly
interested in family history, Judaism or history at all.
“I somehow found myself with plane tickets to
Ukraine,” said Foer as he spoke into his cell phone, walking
around the streets of Manhattan. “And I don’t quite
know what got me from one point to the next. I know that summer was
approaching and I had nothing to do. I was also feeling like I
wanted to see what would happen if I lifted my energy toward a
project.”
With no facts to help him, Foer went to Prague, where the idea
for the book took shape. He imagined and wrote a family history, a
town history, and the strange and magical relationships within it,
stretching back to 1791 and ending with the war.
“It just came to me,” said Foer of the book that
took him 10 weeks to write and two years to edit. “Writing
was explosive and intuitive. And editing was just hard
work.”
The story unfolds with Perchov, who narrates part of the book,
humorously using mangled 10-dollar English phrases like
“disseminate very much currency” when he means to say
“spend a lot of money.”
Perchov’s grumpy and psychosomatically blind grandfather
who works as Jonathan’s driver, and a horny dog named Sammy
Davis Junior, Junior, also aid in taking the uptight, vegetarian
and conspicuously Jewish American Jonathan through a hilarious and
heartbreaking search through Ukraine.
Foer explained that Perchov, like the fictional Jonathan,
embodies aspects of his real self.
“Like Alex, I think I have the same sort of disconnection
between what it is I want to say, or what it is that I feel, and
what it is that I’m able to say,” Foer said. “And
I sometimes wear my heart on my sleeve like he does. I just show
everything very often in a way that comes off rather foolish. And I
have the same sort of romantic ideas about the world like he
does.”
The fictional Jonathan (only loosely based on the real Foer)
describes the mysterious history of his lineage, beginning with a
beautiful genius orphan girl named Brod (named after the river she
was found floating in), and Yankel, a “disgraced
usurer” who adopts her. Underscoring their strange
relationship is their love of loving each other, which is greater
than their actual love for each other.
“They reciprocated the great and saving lie “¦
willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully
creating and believing fictions necessary for life,” the
narrator says.
But don’t we all do that? And could this need to create a
story to believe in somehow relate to Jonathan’s need to find
his grandfather’s past?
“The point of the trip was actually the trip itself rather
than the destination,” said Foer. “The trip was its own
destination in the same way that their relationship was the
relationship rather than the ways that they felt about each
other.”
“Everything is Illuminated” is not only about
finding out the truth of one’s ambiguous past, but it is also
about the power of secrets ““ what they create and what they
destroy.
“That’s the neat thing about publishing a
book,” said Foer. “The book comes to take on all this
meaning that you didn’t intend and so it literally becomes
smarter and richer and fuller.”
Foer, now 25 years old, is getting ready to head to the West
Coast for his speaking engagement in Los Angeles, and is
experiencing a success that he says hasn’t changed his life a
bit.
“I think writing is all about authenticity and honesty.
There’s no reason to listen to people who are anything less
than perfectly authentic,” Foer said.
Jonathan Safran Foer will be speaking at Sinai Temple, 10400
Wilshire Blvd. (at the corner of Beverly Glen) at 7:30 p.m.
Admission is $8. For reservations, call (310) 481-3217.