Jewish History, Illuminated

Not quite 25, author Jonathan Safran Foer gives new meaning to the phrase, "talent to burn." In his extraordinary first novel, "Everything Is Illuminated" (Houghton Mifflin), fire and light appear everywhere, and especially in the Polish Ukrainian shtetl of Trachimbrod, whose fantastical history Foer dramatizes. There, festive boats sparked by fireworks sail along the deceptively quiet River Brod. Bucolic fields are showered by lightning storms. Ultimately, a satanic firestorm, ignited by Nazi invaders, obliterates the town so thoroughly that its name disappears from memory.

Or almost. More than half a century after Trachimbrod's destruction by Hitler's army, a young American writer named Jonathan Safran Foer reverses the journey taken by his grandparents, and embarks on a search for the obscure village from which they nearly failed to escape. His only clues are a long outdated map and a 50-year-old photograph of a young woman who may or may not be named Augustine; who may or may not have saved his grandfather's life; who may or may not still live in the area, or for that matter, still be living.

A greenhorn in the country of his forebears, the author innocently enlists the aid of an Odessa-based outfit called Heritage Tours, which caters to American Jews who wish to visit their ancestral villages in Poland and Ukraine. Alas for the naïve author, the tour company's expertise appears to lie more in the realm of comic burlesque than travelogue. In hilarious, fractured English, the supposedly crack translator explains, "All of my friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name." Alex's half-blind, narcoleptic grandfather - who won't go anywhere without his frisky seeing-eye dog - is the driver. Not only can't the tour guides and the author speak intelligibly to each other, Alex and his grandfather speak a different dialect from that common to the region where Trachimbrod once existed. Can this trip be salvaged?

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