55 pages • 1 hour read
Jonathan Safran FoerEverything Is Illuminated
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 22-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 22 Summary: “Illumination”
Grandfather finally tells his story to Alex and Jonathan. Grandfather lived in Kolki with his wife and child. Herschel, a Jewish man, was Grandfather’s best friend, and would often look after the baby when they couldn’t—he even called the baby “son.” They were his only friends, and he was a daily part of their lives. Grandfather says that they had no idea what was coming or how quickly things would change.
One day, the Nazis arrived in Kolki and forced everyone in the village to line up. They held a gun to people’s heads and forced them to identify a Jew or be shot. When they got to Grandfather, he identified Herschel to prevent them from killing him, his wife, or his child. The Nazis then put all of the Jewish people in the synagogue and burned it down. Grandfather decided after the incident that he must completely change his life, and he left Kolki behind so that his son never finds out what he did.
Chapter 23 Summary: “The Wedding Reception Was So Extraordinary! Or The End of the Moment that Never Ends, 1941”
After having sex with Maya in the cellar while the wedding is being set up in the house above, Safran goes upstairs. They all sit down to eat, and he realizes that the Romani girl is one of the servers at the wedding. Another wind blows through the house and overturns the party once again. The Romani girl slips Safran a note that says “Change,” but he loses the note before he ever reads it.
Chapter 24 Summary: “The First Blasts, and Then Love, 1941”
Safran is having sex with his wife, Zosha, on their wedding night. He is thinking about running away with the Romani girl. German bombs sound in the distance, and the attacks on the local area have begun.
Chapters 22-24 Analysis
These chapters are very short but climactic for both Alex’s and Jonathan’s stories. In Alex’s story, Alex and Jonathan finally hear Grandfather's of betraying his best friend in order to save his family. It is horrible and highlights both the impossibility of such a choice and the incredible guilt suffered as a result. The tone and writing style of Grandfather’s story is markedly different from the main narratives; he begins slowly, then rushes with increasing speed to the end, dwelling on the moments before the violence occurs while trying to get the bad parts over as quickly as possible. Safran Foer represents Grandfather’s need to get the story out, and his difficulty in doing so, by running sentences together and then, as his agitation increases, running words together. This effect connects the reader deeply to Grandfather’s narrative, viscerally conveying how difficult it is for him to tell his story and how heavily his actions weigh on him to this day.
Concurrently, in Jonathan’s narrative, the bombs are just starting to fall across the area around Trachimbrod, and we realize that with Grandfather’s story taking place during the war. The book has spent so much time in the “before,” recounting the minutiae of life in Trachimbrod and incorporating magical realism to create a setting that is almost outside of time. The Holocaust has hovered at the edges of this near-fable, and the outcome for Trachimbrod is alluded to throughout the book. Once this genocidal violence is acknowledged, there’s no turning back. Alex’s narrative converges with Jonathan’s; the two stories finally meet in the defining moments of both Safran’s and Grandfather’s lives.
Related Titles
By Jonathan Safran Foer
