Word: trachimbrod
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Everything Is Illuminated,” for instance, takes the form of a correspondence between two writers—one is a Ukrainian translator, and the other is Foer’s namesake, who communicates only through historical tracts of magical realism about the Jewish village of Trachimbrod. Never do we get an “I” in Foer’s books, and when we do, it’s always in reference to someone else...
...Everything Is Illuminated is written as a duet for two voices. One belongs to Jonathan Safran Foer (or his fictional alter ego of the same name), who relates the history of Trachimbrod, the East European village where his ancestors lived. Trachimbrod is a lyrical, fairy-tale creation, a Yiddish idyll of the Fiddler on the Roof variety, inhabited by randy, gossipy villagers like Bitzl Bitzl the gefilte-fish monger, and the melancholy maiden Brod, the narrator's great-to-the-fifth grandmother, who precociously enumerates 613 varieties of sadness by the time she's 12 years...
...famous nightclubs in Odessa." (His English gets better?and less hilarious?as the book goes on.) Accompanied by Perchov's narcoleptic grandfather and a flatulent dog named Sammy Davis Jr., Foer and Perchov set off into the Ukrainian countryside to search for what's left of present-day Trachimbrod...
...Alternating chapters, the two voices come at the plot from both ends at once, Foer moving forward in time through Trachimbrod's history and Perchov searching backward for traces of it. They also share themes: the maddening bonds of family, the power of memory and the importance of lies and jokes. "I present not-truths in order to protect you," Perchov tells his charge. "That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person." The two stories collide when the searchers stumble on Trachimbrod's last surviving inhabitant, who tells the horrifying secret of how the dreamy...
Alternating chapters, the two voices come at the plot from both ends at once, Foer moving forward in time through Trachimbrod's history and Perchov searching backward for traces of it. They also share themes: the maddening bonds of family, the power of memory and the importance of lies and jokes. "I present not-truths in order to protect you," Perchov tells his charge. "That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person." The two stories collide when the searchers stumble on Trachimbrod's last surviving inhabitant, who tells the horrifying secret of how the dreamy...