‘Humorous Is the Only Truthful Way to Tell a Sad Story’: Jonathan Safran Foer and Third Generation Holocaust Representation

Sarah Coakley

doi:10.3390/genealogy3040055

Abstract

Jonathan Safran Foer’s representation of the Holocaust in his first novel, Everything is Illuminated, has been the subject of much controversy and critical debate. Several critics and Holocaust survivors have objected to the work for the lack of historical accuracy in its mythological narrative and the irreverence of its humour. However, such responses fail to take into account its specific form of generational representation: The Holocaust of Everything is Illuminated is always perceived through a third-generation lens, and its provocative elements instead highlight aspects of the experiences of the grandchildren of survivors. With this in mind, this paper examines Foer’s approach to the Holocaust in Everything is Illuminated and Liev Schreiber’s film adaptation (2005), making specific reference to the challenges faced by the third generation. Drawing upon theories of the transgenerational transmission of trauma and postmemory, it will explore the roles of creativity and humour in resilience, in addition to the reconstruction of a historical narrative under threat of erasure. Ultimately, by offsetting the tendencies to reduce the complexity of the Holocaust into unequivocal moralities (as exhibited in the film adaptation) with the idiosyncrasies of the third-generation experience, an alternative contextual perspective on the Holocaust is propounded, containing its own discrete set of ethical questions and concerns.

Highlights

As the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz draws near, and the Holocaust transitions from living into historical memory, one thing is increasingly clear: we are still not quite sure how to address the topic historically, socially, and artistically
There is no group for whom the opposite is more true than those who Derek Parker Royal calls ‘the psychological and spiritual inheritors of the Holocaust’: the descendants of survivors, known as the second and third generations (Royal 2011, p. 4)
This research spans multiple disciplines, including both those in the sciences, and social sciences. The dialogue between these different modes of research forms an image of a complicated interrelation of different modes of transmission, from epigenetic modifications transferred via gametes, to the social processes at work when a traumatised parent’s behaviour impacts the child’s life and world of meaning

Summary

Introduction

As this article will argue, these representational decisions (especially its humour) are a result of, and express, the third generation experience and responses to such an overwhelmingly traumatic event In other words, these decisions are broached using contemporary aesthetics towards distinct ethical imperatives, arising from the third generation’s particular proximity to the Holocaust. It seems reasonable to suggest, that to dogmatically exclude humour from representations of the Holocaust potentiates generating a spectacle of suffering; the reduction of those persecuted (and the Jewish people more generally) into passive victimhood and the murdered into martyrs In other words, such a move runs the risk of presenting the peoples concerned primarily as symbols rather than as individuals, and the privileging of suffering over resilience. This is certainly true of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, as I hope to illustrate over the following pages

Everything Is Illuminated

Fidelity to Historical Fact

Insistence on the Uniqueness of the Holocaust

Preservation of a Strict Morality

Concluding Remarks