Study questions for Everything is Illuminated

Possible quiz question for this week.  All three Holocaust works we have read: Enemies: A Love Story, Maus and Everything is Illuminated engage on some level with what Hirsch calls “post-memory.”  Pick two of these works and compare and contrast how post-memory functions in them.  It would be useful for your essay to be able to explain very briefly how you explain/define post-memory using or in relation to Hirsch’s definition. 

1. Everything Is Illuminated is written in two voices: Alex gives his account of the character Jonathan Safran Foer as he journeys to Ukraine to try to find Augustine and Jonathan’s story of the history of Trachimbrod.  What is the effect of using these two voices?  How do they come together or diverge?
2. What is the significance of names in the novel?  Trachimbrod is also known as Sofiowka and we find that although Alex asserts that he comes from a family line of Alexes from Odessa, this turns out not to actually be the case.  The name of the “hero” of the story is the same as the author.  How do these questions of naming relate to issues of witness, truth and memory so important to the novel?
3. Alex’s letters are fashioned to seem as if they are written with the (unskillful) use of a thesaurus.  Pick one instance of this use and discuss how its (mis)use relates to larger themes in the novel. 
4. Alex asserts that humor “is the only truthful way to tell a sad story.”  What do make of the use of humor in the novel?  Is this one way of trying to express the “ineffable” or is it inappropriate given the novel’s subject matter? 
5. How is this novel structured chronologically?  How does this structure help to convey the novel’s themes?
6. On page 145 Alex asserts of his grandfather “He is not a bad person.  He is a good person, alive in a bad time.  Do you remember when he said this?  It makes him so melancholy to remember his life.  I discover him crying almost every night, but might counterfeit that I am reposing.”  Later on page 227, Alex's grandfather says, "I am not a bad person. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time."  Does the novel judge Alex’s grandfather? Or is he arguably also the hero of this novel?
7. Discuss the use of magical realism in the sections on the shtetl of Trachimbrod?
8. What is the significance of the novel’s title?  What exactly is illuminated?  Is illumination a positive thing? 
9. On page 183 Alex, his grandfather and Jonathan come to where Trachimbrod once stood.  The hero expected to take “many photographs” but “’Nothing grows here anymore,” she [Augustine] said. ‘It does not even belong to anyone.  It is only land.  Who would want it?”  On page 184 Alex writes, “I implore myself to paint Trachimbrod, so you will know why were so overawed.  There was nothing.  When I utter ‘nothing’ I do not mean there was nothing except for two houses, and some wood on the ground, and pieces of glass, and children’s toys, and photographs.  When I utter that there was nothing, what I intend is that there was not any of these things, or any other things.”  What is the relationship between place, memory and history in this novel?  What is the significance of the total obliteration of Trachimbrod within this context? 
10. On 246 “ghosts” are discussed.  What kind of ghosts are these and how do they relate to questions of memory in the novel?  Is this a “haunted” novel?  If so, how so? 
11. The novel sometimes focuses on objects, including the box of “Remains.”  What is the significance of this box and of the one that the group takes away with them?