Jonathan Safran Foer

I picked up the book on the spur of the moment at my local public library, added it to the ever-growing to-be-read stack, and then speed-read through it a couple days before the due date when I saw a hold was placed by another patron. The extraneous time constraint added some urgency to the reading, and perhaps made me enjoy it all the more. Jonathan Safran Foer has proven to be a very wise writer, and Here I Am offers some touching insights into the human soul, as the different characters show more struggle with self-knowledge and finding their place in their family and their culture. He strikes a fine balance between tenderness, humor (often pointed at the Jewish culture), and political commentary (in the form of fictional, somewhat grotesque, although not entirely improbable scenario). As in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer's greatest skill is depicting the workings of the mind of a precocious child (in a way, all characters are precocious children, even the adults whose recollections and sensibilities are often those of a keen intelligence discovering the world for the first time). A childlike perspective is what lends the story a certain semi-magical quality: the ability to imbue the most ordinary situation with an unexpected, original insight, as if shelling an unsuspected secret concealed at the heart of the real like a golden nugget. (See some of the quotes I pulled from the book in the Common Knowledge section below.) One such wonderful moment comes, not without the participation of children, in the funeral eulogy given by a young rabbi, who, retelling the story of the finding of baby Moses in the reeds by an Egyptian princess, zeroes in on her exclamation, "Look, a crying Hebrew baby." The rabbi wonders why she uses the word "look", rather than "hear." One child, Benjy, suggests that perhaps "he was crying in Jewish."


" 'How would one cry in Jewish?,' the rabbi asked. ...
'I guess babies don't really speak.'
'Do tears?'
...
'Look. She saw that he was crying, but didn't hear.'
...
'She knew he was a Hebrew because only Jews cry silently.'
...
'Let's say we have two choices, as Jews: to cry silently, as your mother has said, or to cry in Jewish, as you said. What would it sound like to cry in Jewish?'
...
'Maybe like laughing?' Max suggested.
...
Sometimes, [when his son was hurt], if there was visible blood, Jacob would even say, 'It's funny.' And his son would believe him, because sons have no choice. But sons do feel pain. And the absence of expression of pain is not the absence of pain. It is a different pain. When Sam's hand was crushed, he said, 'It's funny. It's funny, right?' That was his inheritance.
...
'What was Moses crying about? [the rabbi continued] Was he crying for himself? Out of hunger or fear? Was he crying for his people? Their bondage, their suffering? Or were they tears of gratitude? Perhaps Pharaoh's daughter didn't hear him because he wasn't crying until she opened the wicker basket.' "


This subtle exegesis of Moses's tears and his rescue continues later on, with the realization that perhaps the princess was deaf and so needed to see the baby cry. In a short passage, Foer manages to say a lot about the human condition, the Jewish human condition (and its Holocaust inheritance, with the allusion to the experience of hiding beneath floorboards and learning to be invisible and mute in order to survive), family bonds, parent and child bonds, and pain that accompanies our everyday lives.


The multifaceted close-reading is another facet of Foer's penchant for enumeration and quasi-archival lists. All characters compulsively index their experiences, likes and dislikes, names, events, what-ifs, what-nots, possibilities and impossibilities. As with the Moses story, turning their catalogs of emotions and memories over and over, they discover something about themselves, and by extension also about us. show less

A strange book. Intermittently hilarious and tragic. I cried, and I laughed. This has only happened when reading very few other books, some inferior, others on the same level of innovation and ravishing emotion.

If you necessitate a motive to examine this volume: It was comic. Scratch that: It was comic, and completely, utterly draining. Poignant. Honest in the most dishonestly clever way.

Perhaps that is why it is called Illuminated. By the end we will see Alex in all of his glorious show more multifaceted complexity, and we will understand why the heroes’ ancestors did what they did and yearned for their children to know this, too. Everything does get more illuminated as the story moves on. Perhaps this is a story of illumination—of remembrance, really, which is the sixth sense of the Jew. Perhaps this is simply a story of Jewish mysticism and storytelling (but it is not, no it is not,) a story of pervasive knowledge in the face of death and violence and ignorance.

But it is not only that.

I wanted to finish this book knowing what Everything was. Perhaps that is why Jonathan left us on a cliff. He set a trap for us. He knew we’d want to know, and that we’d buy his book wanting to know and read it wanting to know and love it wanting to know, until he would make sure that we’d be coming back for more. Wanting to know.

This is a conversation between two heroes that we want to know, from head to toe. Read it for two scratch that, three reasons: It’s hilarious, it’s heartrending, and it will leave you wanting illumination.

Wanting in a good way, that is. show less

The writing style of this book gave me great pause in the beginning, and it took until about page 90 for my to truly get into the spirit of the story, but when I did I couldn't put it down.

The story concerns a fictionalized version of the author, also named Jonathan, who travels to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather when the Nazis arrived in Trachimbrod (a fictionalized version of Trochenbrod, a real Jewish schtetl that was eradicated by the Nazis during World War II). He show more is accompanied by a 'seeing eye' dog who just wants to hump his leg (Jonathan hates dogs), a translator who is supremely bad at his job (his English isn't perfect) and the translator's grandfather who is driving them around Ukraine to find this schtetl (and who is also hiding a secret from them).

The story is told through three differing points of view, although two of them come from the same narrative voice. Alex, the translator, provides the story of the trip through Ukraine with his broken English and outdated American slang; he is also writing letters to Jonathan as Jonathan writes the book and sends it to him chapter by chapter, asking Alex to edit and read through it. The third voice is Jonathan, writing his family history, and the story of how his family came to be.

While there are some moments that made me flinch (see: the way that male characters talk about women they encounter, but then again, this happens in almost every male-written story I've read), the story has so much heart to it. The characters have so much motivation and drive, and it's also interesting to see the way a Jewish person writes about a tragedy during a Holocaust that wasn't a concentration camp, but the eradication of a small settlement that was wiped out so thoroughly it doesn't even exist anymore.

Foer writes and weaves his story beautifully, and I finished this book with tears in my eyes as I sat there and thought about the horrors that the Jewish people have faced, and the profound trauma that it has left on them for generations. One of the best parts of the book, in my opinion, is when Jonathan writes about memory, and how Jewish people experience memory as a sixth sense. I feel like that is one of the truest sentiments I've ever heard.

4/5 simply because the writing style is not something that I particularly gravitate towards usually, but the story is too compelling not to continue reading. show less

Un meraviglioso pugno nello stomaco. E’ così che ho pensato di definire questo bellissimo libro. L’avevo comprato anni fa ma prendeva polvere nella libreria e grazie ai consigli di lettura ho potuto finalmente leggerlo.
L’ho amato davvero e mi è spiaciuto finirlo, avrei voluto rimanere nella New York di Oskar ancora un po.
La storia, di per sé, è già struggente: un bambino, Oskar, ha perso il suo papà nell’attacco delle torri gemelle e cerca di superare la tristezza con degli show more espedienti che lo rendono un po’ strano agli occhi degli altri. La sua mente lavora molto e lui ha un sacco di idee e sa tantissime cose perché è sempre stato abituato dal suo papà a ragionare e a conoscere. Un giorno Oskar, per caso, trova nell’armadio del padre una chiave con scritto “black” e decide di scoprire cosa apre quella chiave pensando sia un messaggio lasciatogli in eredità. Intorno a lui diversi personaggi si inseriscono nei capitoli raccontandoci la loro vita e il loro punto di vista, rendendo tutto più complesso e malinconico.
Questo è un libro che non può non lasciare qualcosa, è un libro che può far male perché parla di perdite, di assenze, di cose non dette, di dolore, ma può far bene perché parla anche di amore, di speranze, di ricordi…
Ho pianto mentre lo leggevo, ho pensato tanto, ho anche riso perché in alcuni passaggi Oskar è divertente! Lo rileggerò perché ci sono dei passaggi bellissimi come questo:
“C'erano cose che volevo dirgli. Ma sapevo che gli avrebbero fatto male. Così le seppellii e lasciai che facessero male a me.” show less