In Ukraine, Jonathan’s journey starts in Lviv. The story revolves around painful memories.

Rather unexpectedly, Alex’s grandfather opens up “narrative wounds”: the recollections of WWII and the Nazi persecutions of the Jewish people discompose memory archives that seemed to be orderly structured and organized. Upon his arrival to Ukraine, Jonathan meets his guide and translator Alexander (Alex) Perchov (nicknamed Shapka), accompanied by his eccentric grandfather, who in spite of being half blind drives a car, and his dog Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior. The availability of multiple memory fragments signals the re-construction of Jonathan’s family story that appears to involve a complex web of interconnected components, which evoke, individually and collectively, memories and emotions, blending and mixing diverse spatial and temporal dimensions.

In Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan “forges identities” while reorganizing memory fragments and leaving the premises of chronologically defined and structured memory territory-memory is being and being is memory. Transcending the boundaries of memory fragments, the individual is exposed to the constant flux of meanings, affects, and emotions. The story of a little shtetl Trachimbrod produces an intricate web of connections, which evolves through the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Everything is Illuminated touches upon the delicate nature of memorial connections that develop and dissolve, revealing individual and generational traumas and illuminating possible roads to healing and recovery.Įverything is Illuminated covers about three centuries that involve a diversity of stories that mesh, combine, and intertwine. When an invisible bond with the stories of others is established, the individual’s life turns into a multivocal echo of generations: forgetting and remembering is a way to re-connect with self and others. Jonathan travels through Ukraine, mapping out new geographical experiences, as well as a new mental and imaginative space that appears to be marked with existential traumas. Directed by Liev Schreiber, this film-which bridges at least five cultural dimensions (American, Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, and German)-narrates the story of the Jewish American traveler Jonathan Foer, who undertakes a trip from the USA to Ukraine to find a woman who saved his grandfather from being executed by the Nazis during World War II. This semester the Ukrainian Homelands series includes Everything is Illuminated (2005), based on the novel of the same name written by the American writer Jonathan Safran Foer.

Everything is illuminated novel