Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan is the same age as Alex and is an American college student from New York. Alex describes him as very short, with spectacles and short hair that rests on his head like a fur hat. He also is a vegetarian and is represented as the “hero” of the story by Alex. Jonathan is Jewish and travels from America to Ukraine to look into his grandfather’s history. He has a photograph and the name of the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis, and he wants to find her and thank her. In some ways, Jonathan is represented as a typical American: he does not know when to stop talking and generally makes life difficult for Alex when they are faced with situations like renting hotel rooms or asking for directions. When he asks Alex to rewrite a scene so he triumphs over a hotel clerk instead of being humiliated, Jonathan shows a willingness to bend the truth to make himself look better.

Although we are not privy to Jonathan’s side of his correspondence with Alex, we can glean some detail from Alex’s responses to his letters. Jonathan is deeply moved by the results of their quest to find Augustine, and yet shows a reluctance to hear the entire story. There are points in the story where Alex stops translating for Jonathan because he does not want to hear anymore—a luxury that Alex, as translator, does not have. But Jonathan’s quest is the impetus for the road trip that will, in the end, bring Alex and Grandfather to a new understanding of their relationship and their family history. By coming from America in search of his family history, he has forced Alex’s family to reckon with their own personal history.

Grandfather, also named Alexander, was, as far as Alex knows, born in Odessa in 1918 and has never left Ukraine, only traveling as far as Kiev. Alex’s grandmother, Anna, died two years prior to the events of the novel, and Grandfather has been grieving ever since. He moved in with Alex’s family soon after her death and tells everyone he is blind, even though he clearly is not. Despite this fact, Alex’s father gives him a seeing-eye dog called Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., named after his favorite member of the Rat Pack. Grandfather acts as the driver for Jonathan’s trip. He is reluctant to go and blames it on not wanting to “attend to a very spoiled Jew” (13). However, he is captivated by Augustine’s photo and eventually becomes the most motivated member of the group to find her.

At the outset of the story, Grandfather shows prejudice against Jews. He begrudgingly accepts Jonathan and shows a curmudgeonly humor. Later, we understand his antipathy toward Jews to be less about prejudice and more about his guilt for betraying his Jewish friend, Herschel, to the Nazis in order to save his own life. At the end of the journey, Grandfather is forced to confront his shameful action. This act so affected his life that he left his home in Kolki and moved to Odessa with his family, determined that his son would never know what he had done. But when he revisits the story and shares it with Alex and Jonathan, the force of this confession is enough to shatter the life he has managed to build since then. He finds it impossible to forgive himself, or leave the past behind. At the end of the novel, he ends his own life in an attempt to free Alex and Igor from his past, allowing them to build a new life free from their family history. 

Brod, Jonathan’s great-great-great-great-great grandmother, is a character in Jonathan’s fictional history of Trachimbrod. She is born from the river, appearing when Trachim’s cart overturns into the water. Brod is adopted by Yankel D and is described as healthy, but small and frail-looking. She is also intelligent and curious, but lonely and sad. Brod is beautiful and burdened by that beauty, as all the men in the shtetl desire her, even at a very young age, and the women hate her.

From her birth, Brod is an outsider in Trachimbrod. She and Yankel D, who is also on the fringes of accepted society, create a home and a life together, supporting themselves by renting out their books. Brod believes that Yankel is her father and also believes the stories that he invents about her mother. Brod is raped one night after the Trachimday festival by Sofiowka. Upon coming home, she finds Yankel dead and asks the Kolker to avenge her. He kills Sofiowka and they marry, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s family line begins. Brod is Jonathan’s creation; in the space where the history of Trachimbrod should be, he has created his own history, and along with that has created an ancestor who appears almost literally out of thin air. Her birth is a magical event and she is clairvoyant, contributing to the sense of magical realism that Safran Foer creates in the Trachimbrod sections of the novel.