Recommendations
Books Like Everything Is Illuminated
Ukraine, family history, and the things that were lost in the Holocaust
If Everything Is Illuminated moved you — Alex Perchov's comic magnificence, the shtetl of Trachimbrod, the grandfather who could not speak of what he had seen — these eight novels share its preoccupation with recovering what the Holocaust destroyed, or its formal invention in the face of what cannot be said.
- 1Buy
Maus
by Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman interviewing his father Vladek about his survival of the Holocaust, rendered as a graphic novel where Jews are mice and Nazis are cats — the most formally innovative documentary work about Holocaust memory in any medium; shares Everything Is Illuminated's structure of a child of survivors investigating a parent's experience and its preoccupation with what memory can and cannot recover
- 2Buy
The Emigrants
by W.G. Sebald
Four narratives of emigration and exile, each centered on someone who left Europe and could not fully inhabit the life that followed — Sebald's most personal engagement with the Holocaust's aftermath; where Foer's approach is maximalist and comic, Sebald's is quiet and elegiac, but both are organized around the same fundamental question: what does the generation that comes after the Holocaust inherit from those who survived it
- 3Buy
Austerlitz
by W.G. Sebald
Jacques Austerlitz's gradual recovery of his identity as a Jewish child rescued from Czechoslovakia on a Kindertransport — Sebald's most conventionally narrative work; shares Everything Is Illuminated's structure of a man recovering suppressed family history and its engagement with what it means to have been hidden from your own past; where Foer's protagonist travels to Ukraine, Sebald's travels to Prague and Theresienstadt
- 4Buy
The History of Love
by Nicole Krauss
Leo Gursky, a Polish Jewish survivor living in New York, and Alma Singer, a teenage girl whose mother is translating a book called The History of Love — Krauss's second novel shares Everything Is Illuminated's braided structure, its preoccupation with Jewish survivor experience, and its engagement with the relationship between books and love; where Foer gives us Alex as the comic voice, Krauss gives us Leo as the elegiac one
- 5Buy
The Painted Bird
by Jerzy Kosiński
A young child wandering through Polish villages during the Second World War — Kosiński's controversial debut novel is the most extreme literary engagement with what Eastern Europe looked like from inside the Holocaust for a Jewish child; where Foer approaches his shtetl through magical realism and comedy, Kosiński approaches his through unflinching violence; for readers who want the same Eastern European setting without the formal mediation
- 6Buy
Sophie's Choice
by William Styron
Stingo, a young Southern writer, befriending Sophie, a Polish survivor of Auschwitz, in 1940s Brooklyn — Styron's novel is the American-survivor companion to Everything Is Illuminated's American-descendant story: where Foer travels to Ukraine to understand what his grandfather survived, Stingo stays in Brooklyn to understand what Sophie survived; both novels use a naïve American narrator to make the Holocaust accessible
- 7Buy
The Tin Drum
by Günter Grass
Oskar Matzerath, who refused to grow after the age of three and witnessed the entire history of the Third Reich from a child's perspective — Grass's novel is the German magical-realist companion to Everything Is Illuminated's American-Jewish one; both use formal extravagance (Oskar's refusal to grow, the shtetl of Trachimbrod) to make the same historical catastrophe available for literary representation
- 8Buy
HHhH
by Laurent Binet
Binet's account of Operation Anthropoid — the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by Czech and Slovak paratroopers in 1942 — and his own process of writing about it; the most self-conscious meditation on the problem of writing historical fiction about the Holocaust; shares Everything Is Illuminated's formal preoccupation with what it means to narrate historical violence and what liberties fiction may and may not take with the documented past
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