Reimagining History: A “Real” Affair
Fictional narratives mixed with historical elements explore Jewish characters’ experiences both in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and Philip Roth’s Plot Against America, creating the fundamental question: What are the benefits of historical truth, especially in these stories? The main characters, in both works, are Holocaust survivors and children of survivors, concerned about their precise place in history. They are in search for identity, undergoing direct and generational trauma, creating nostalgia for a world in which they were born into a place that was theirs for a lifetime. The hope of being reunited with a loved one, or even finding the slightest information, despite fact that the person is no longer alive, or of completing a particular project, play an important role in one’s survival. Both Jonathan Safran Foer and Philip Roth constantly ask questions, wrestle with the truth and historical facts, remain unsatisfied with answers, particularly with answers that seem not to satisfy and relieve them: Each period in history has its evils, but the World War II period stains one’s thoughts and visions. The two novels by Foer and Roth, though seemingly different, yet they impart a similar message: When words are not enough to describe the failure of man to man and when language seems to trivialize the dehumanizing events and the crisis of identity, historical facts become the vehicle by which meaning is conveyed.
Though it is true that Foer’s narrative incorporates fantastic elements, coexistence of multiple worlds, and reconciliation of different languages, nonetheless, it uses historical truth to illuminate one of the narrator’s, Jonathan’s beginnings. Jonathan is a Jewish-American who travels to the Ukraine, in order to explore his past. The village of Trachimbrod is the Ukrainian village Trochenbrod, and its story is mythical in the novel, presenting a disruption in the linear presentation of events—a strategy that assists in the portraying of traumas of the past. The characters in the novel, as it progresses, slowly become part of a larger picture encompassing individual and collective traumas. The reader’s experience of assembling together the story piece by piece into a linear narrative is in accord with the structure of trauma as a disruption in history. Every historical element is like a code for something missing. In here, the village of Trachimbrod is the code for the missing Jewish population, massively killed by the Nazis. It acts as a door for Jonathan to solve his crisis for identity. Critic Elitza Kotzeva, have pointed that “readers who seek similarities between the historical Holocaust in the Ukraine and the events described in the text might stumble upon obvious problems regarding the story’s authenticity.” This is not the point of such usage of historical facts. What one chooses to unveil in fiction is directed by a motive essentially aesthetic; the reader criticizes the author of a novel by how he tells the tale.
Further, what might one ask is how close is the narration to the truth? Examining Foer’s novel, the following interpretation is inevitable: Memories are a significant part of one’s life. Jonathan has come to the Ukraine to unearth some of the memories his grandmother and grandfather attempted to bury. Reimagination of history is not a manipulation on Foer’s part, but a reflection of his attitudes toward memory. Jonathan Safran Foer attempts to express how significant memories are. He tells the story of Brod, a woman living in Trochimbrod, who’ll give birth to a child whose direct descendant will be Jonathan, to show how it directly relates to that of his grandfather. Out of the desire to remember everything the people of Trachimbrod create The Book of Antecedents and The Book of Recurrent Dreams. These books are passed down generation after generation and studied in attempt to keep the memories of their fathers alive. Lisa Propst, in her article “Making One Story? Forms of Reconciliation in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases” quotes Foer, “the fictional Jonathan finds nothing but nothing, traveling through a landscape of completely realized absence” (30). Although Jonathan, the “hero,” as Alex, the other narrator in the novel calls him, finds no woman called Augustine who supposedly saved his grandfather during the Holocaust, but he finds hope and history that connect him to his past and partly complete the incomplete. Why would someone try to theorize such traumatic experiences? There might be no unanswered questions, but doesn’t every novel embody some dark areas? And isn’t sometimes the essence of the question to be without answer. The ultimate importance here is that Jonathan, reimagining historical truth, creates a possibility for the unity with the past. However one defines hope, most Jews during the dark times had none. For many, memories were the only element to soothe the anguish that had penetrated their souls. In his narrative, in reference to Trachimbrod, Jonathan says, “There’s definitely something out there” (Foer 99), still hoping and waiting for the memory to unveil itself. It is true that Foer’s acquaintance with the facts is much less “developed” than his understanding and weighing of fiction; nonetheless, there is definitely purpose and balance “out there.”
Similarly, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America reimagines some elements of historical truth, bringing historical incident to life. Nathan Zuckerman speaks of Roth, “And as he spoke I was thinking, the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into” (qtd. in Roth 3). The natural thought is that fiction only cannot function within the sphere of make-believe. After all, most readers prefer facts or what they take to be facts. For instance, if there were no Charles A. Lindbergh in the novel, along with the kidnapping story of his son, he would not for a moment win the reader’s sympathy, thus creating a cold transition in the novel. The non-fictional characters are also there for the reader to make connections to the present times and see how politics works its destructive effects at the personal level. Though it is true that Roth oscillates between fable and familiar realism or documentation, yet the reader experiences the outrage and frustration lived by the characters. As Judith Paterson Jones and Guinevera state in Philip Roth, “[Roth] points to the universalities of the human condition that lie beneath the secular façade” (162). It is apparent that the seven-year-old protagonist, Philip, represents many seven-year-old children in extraordinarily dreadful conditions, for instance the Holocaust, who simply wish “why-can’t-it-be-the-way-it-was” and often think, “I’d never before had to grow up at a pace like this” (Roth 172). There is certainly a confusion of identity for Philip, as he is unable to grasp big and dark concepts such as race, hatred, and anger. Also, the anti-Semitism and Lindbergh’s fascist administration in the United States, in the parameters of the novel, although fictional, but do not fail to depict man’s inhumanity to man and pains, both physical and emotional, that are so overwhelming.
Moreover, there is a two-folded experience in Roth’s novel: the historical truth and the basis of the representation of the truth. The truth is already blurred with fiction in the novel, and by the time it is passed to the reader, it is again re-interpreted and re-modeled. So is there really historical truth? As Herman Roth, young Philips’s father puts it, “Because what’s history? History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark. Even here on Summit Avenue. Even what happens in his house to an ordinary man—that’ll be history too someday” (Roth 180). Thus, history and historical truth are created by internalizing the external—the external, here, being the factual elements. Gregory Currie, in his essay “Both Sides of the Story: Explaining Events in a Narrative” describes the process through which we decide to interpret fiction: The author creates a world: a world of characters and events, and the characters do what the author decides they should do . . . we don’t seek to explain why this or that is fictional, we seek to explain why this character did that, or why this fate befell that character (54). Applying the notion to The Plot Against America, whatever the vehicle, Roth’s attack is consistently the disparity in American life, his targets being America’s hyper-nationalists, racists, sexists, and vulgarians. The reader’s “job” is to filter the fictional and factual in the novel and come up with his own interpretation. Roth’s novel is multilayered, and one than more notions can be born after reading the novel. One thing, however, is clear—Roth makes reality credible in fiction. Holocaust seems to be the central point of the novel, yet in the plot against America is where the focus should be. If there were no historical figures, such as Lindbergh or Franklin Roosevelt mentioned in the novel, how then would this be a satire on American political life or an attack on its most abhorrent matters? The historical truth needs to be there in order to create close relationship between the reader and the text. If the reader relates to the non-fictional characters and some of the “real” events within the story, he can certainly reimagine the position of the familiar target—American nuclear family within such a corrupt state.
The historical truth is represented as something essential, yet multi-layered in both Foer’s and Roth’s novels. In Everything is Illuminated, historical elements represent a return to the past, giving much significance to memory. These truthful segments, in this particular piece, eliminate the superficiality of the characters. They give Jonathan, not only hope that his past exists and unity with the past members of the family who have been killed during the Holocaust is still possible, though not physically, but at the same time depict the ferocities of fascists who wanted to entirely get rid of Jews, from the planet, as a “final solution.” Jonathan’s journey is reminiscent of the emotional crossing of the survivors or the children of survivors who want to be suspended on earth with ties to someone, to some thing. Similar to Foer’s novel in stylisitic approach and topics, The Plot Against America is “reality” found in American experience. The historical truth in this novel is based mostly on true-life characters and events. The fantasized Holocaust occurrences in the novel are mostly satirical, in order to show the surrealism of the “real” world. It is an attack on corrupt politics, which has its devastating effects at the personal level. As a result, the individual is engaged in a life and death struggle with all the internal and external forces of control.
Works Cited
Currie, Gregory. “Both Sides of the Story: Explaining Events in a Narrative.”
Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic
Tradition 135.1 (2007): 49-63. Print.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything is Illuminated. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Print.
Jones, Judith P., and Guinevera A. Nance. Philip Roth. New York: Frederick Ungar
Publishing Co., Inc., 1981. Print.
Kotzeva, Elitza. “Everything is Illuminated.” Masterplots (2010): 1-3.
MagillOnLiterature Plus. EBSCO. Web. 1 May 2011.
Propst, Lisa. “Making One Story?’ Forms of Reconciliation in Jonathan Safran Foer’s
Everything is Illuminated and Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Glass.”
MELUS 36.1 (2011): 36-60. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 1 May 2011.
Roth, Philip. The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography. New York: Farrar, Straus, &
Giroux, 1988. Print.
Roth, Philip. The Plot Against America. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Print.
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