Everything is Illuminated

By Jonathan Safran Foer (2002) Published by Perennial, 276.

This is the best book I’ve read so far this year. It starts out with some truly funny passages written by Alex, a young Ukranian man who’s paid to give a tour to an equally young Jewish American (named Johnathan Safran Foer) who’s come to Ukraine in search of a woman he believes rescued his father from the Holocaust. Alex’s narrative is filled with hilarious thesaurial blunders: he uses the word “rigid” for “difficult”, “flaccid” for “easy”, “manufacture Z’s” for “get some sleep.”
In between sections told by Alex we have stories of the shtetl of Trachimbrod where once a baby girl appeared in the river among an enigmatic cloud of floating detritus: string, clothes, maps, books. The official story is that a wagon crashed into the river, jettisoning the baby and the odd items, but the wagon is never found, and as we watch the baby mature into the beautiful and ingenious Brod we are left to wonder if perhaps her origins are more magical than we were first led to believe: was her coming somehow an omen of the future destruction of the shtetl at the hand of the Nazis exactly 151 years later.
A huge cast of characters is brought into play, the narrative breaks off and starts again at various stages of history, and the story is told at turns through rabbinical diaries of a communities dreams, through songs and wedding invitations, through encyclopedia entries and stage directions, but all of it is a beautiful accretion of mythic speculations built around the sand kernel of a man searching for the lost origins of his family.
It’s interesting: at the start of the book the sections told from the point of view of Alex are by far the strongest, whereas the sections that take place in Trachimbrod read like shoddy ripoffs of Sholem Aleichem. But the novel starts plunging into new depths as soon as the author begins to focus on the recurrent dreams that plague the residents of Trachimbrod, and it just never stops. By the end of the novel Trachimbrod has become as rich, grotesque and weirdly sad as Garbriel Márquez’s Macondo or the post-war Zone of occupied Germany in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
I get a sense that Foer set out to write a rather silly novel and found himself writing something magnificently more profound. While overall the results are incredible. The only big flub, I think, is that as Foer grows as a writer he begins to take the character of Alex a little too seriously, allowing him to morph from a good natured clown into a troubled existential antihero in a way that doesn’t quite ring true. I really liked the choice to add depth to the character: over the course of the book Alex, like the other characters, is confronted with the horrors of the history of the Nazi invasion, the Holocaust, and the possibilities of a godless and meaningless world—it’s natural that the character should change and grow in response to this, but the fact that his joyous, manic temperament disappears altogether is just about the only graceless touch to this otherwise supremely elegant story.

Fallen

A theatrical production created by the cast and Aerial Angels and directed by Allison Williams and Zay Weaver

This is a show going on for one more weekend at University of Alaska Anchorage, and it really knocked me off my feet. The show draws from several Bible stories, all of them troublesome because of their depiction of women: The Garden of Eden, the stories of Samson and Delilah, Esther, Jezebel and Lot’s Wife. The dialogues and monologues leave something to be desired; clearly this is a play that was written by committee. But the devices used to showcase the stories are often display the sort of brilliance that can come only from a well-tooled ensemble that enjoys working together. The story of Samson and Delilah begins with a gossipy choral telling set in a hair salon, and progresses to an absolutely stunning trapeze routine carried out by Anthony Oliva and Rachael Donaldson at some frightening altitudes. The death-defying (or at least concussion-defying) nature of their work made me feel I was witnessing a primal and carnal liaison of mythic proportions. Later on Kelli Brown and Elizabeth Daniel face each other on either side of a hoop suspended from the catwalks above the stage that serves as a mirror through which Jezebel contemplates the reflection in the moments just prior to her death. The ensuing trapeze routine where the queen and the reflection she worships balance together on their mirror is a subdued and elegant moment, one of the most beautiful in the whole show.
Great kudos have to go out to the whole cast as well as to the Aerial Angels, a touring ensemble of circus-skill performers who have come through Anchorage several times now and who have done a great service to our community by passing on their skills to some of the talented up-and-comers studying at University of Alaska Anchorage.