Chapter 1: An Overture to the Commencement of a Very Rigid Journey

Alex is a young Ukrainian man and the narrator through much of the novel. He lives in Odessa, a port city on the Black Sea in Ukraine. He is the same age as Jonathan. Alex becomes Jonathan's unofficial guide on his trip to Ukraine. In amusingly incorrect English, Alex introduces us to his own life. He brags about his promiscuity and reckless spending habits. He has never been to the United States, but is enamored of American music and luxuries. Alex is proud to the point of being overconfident, even though he describes his life as ordinary.

Alex introduces us to his family: Mother, Father, his younger brother, Little Igor, and Grandfather. Grandfather lives with the family part of the time. Mother is a humble woman who works at a café. She is a typical Eastern European mother. She scolds Alex constantly and tells him that doing things you hate for other people is what makes a family. Father works for Heritage Touring, a travel agency that specializes in helping American Jews trace their roots in small towns in Poland and Ukraine. Alex calls Little Igor "the Clumsy One," because he is always bruised. Alex cares about Little Igor and tries to be a good brother to him.

Grandfather was born in Odessa in 1918 and has never left Ukraine. Since Grandmother's death from brain cancer two years ago, Grandfather has been depressed. He often yells at Alex and Little Igor. He also claims that he has gone blind, so he keeps a seeing-eye dog (who is not actually trained) named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior. Alex refers to the dog as a "seeing-eye bitch." He also claims that she is deranged.

Translators and guides are in short supply in early July, when Jonathan is slated to arrive in Ukraine. This is because Ukraine is celebrating the first anniversary of its new constitution. Many people are on vacation to celebrate. Since Alex excelled in his English course at university, Father assigns him to work with Jonathan. Father then makes Grandfather the driver for the trip, against his will and despite his supposed blindness. They make plans to pick up Jonathan in Lvov, a major Ukrainian city, and drive him around the nearby area called Lutsk. We find out that Jonathan is seeking his grandfather's hometown, called Trachimbrod. He also wants to find a woman named Augustine, who may have saved his grandfather from the Holocaust. Grandfather does not want to be the driver, but Father convinces him, and it is settled.

Analysis

Although the book is about Jonathan's trip, it opens with Alex's voice. As we meet Alex himself, we wonder why Alex's family is important at all. Alex takes many liberties with the first chapter, partially because he loves to brag, and partially because he is so excited to write for Jonathan. He spends many pages exaggerating about himself, especially with regard to his appearance, his promiscuity, and his sexual prowess. He shows off his knowledge of American pop culture and luxuries, trying to make himself appear as "cool" as possible. Even though Alex and Jonathan have already met, it is clear that Alex is still self-conscious around him. After all, he is writing for an American his own age, and he clearly feels competitive. He wants to prove that he is more than just a tour guide.

The novel's whimsical, ironic humor is present from this first chapter. This humor relies on the humor of cultural misunderstanding as well as tragicomedy, beginning with Grandfather. He is a truly sad character, mourning his wife and being generally belligerent. But we laught at a supposed blind man's being made the driver for Jonathan's trip. The dog's name, playing on the duplication of "Junior," compounds the humor.

Chapter 2: The Beginning of the World Often Comes

Trachimbrod in 1791 is the shtetl to which Jonathan has traced his paternal roots, although the town does not yet have a name. (Later it also becomes known as Sofiowka.) One day, a horse-drawn wagon plunges into the Brod river, which runs through the town. The W twins, Hannah and Chana, are first on the scene. They wade into the river, fascinated by the strange wealth of objects rising from the wreckage. They are soon joined by Yankel D, the disgraced usurer, and the rest of the shtetl's 300 inhabitants.

The shtetl is divided into two sections: the Jewish Quarter and the Human Three-Quarters. Both are inhabited by Jews. Sacred or religious activities are confined to the Jewish Quarter, while secular activities are confined to the Human Three-Quarters. These sections are divided by the Jewish/Human fault line, which is constantly changing along with the ratio of Jewishness to Humanness in the shtetl.

There is much conjecture about who was driving the wagon. Sofiowka N takes the lead. He cannot settle on one description of what happened, although he is adamant that he witnessed the accident. He says that the driver was a man named Trachim, from the city of Rovno. Sofiowka is mad and unreliable, but the townspeople believe him.

Once it is agreed that Trachim must be dead beneath the water, those present argue over what to do. The shtetl's inhabitants argue constantly about issues big and small; even if they know nothing about an issue, they will still argue. In fact, the less they know, the more obstinate they are. Suddenly, a newborn girl rises from the water. The baby was born just before--or during--the accident. She floats amid the junk.

Chapter 3: The Lottery, 1791

No body is recovered. The townspeople continue to assume that the wagon belonged to Trachim, and he becomes a legend. Thus begins the tradition of "Trachimday," a festival complete with reenactments and costumes. As for the baby, the Well-Regarded Rabbi brings her to the Upright Synagogue. He places her in the ark, which is her temporary home until she is adopted.

At the Upright Synagogue, those who pray do so by SHOUTING. This tradition is 200 years old, and it was started by the Rabbi at the time. He decided that people should shout to express their spiritual desperation. In an attempt to be closer to God, the men dangled from ropes attached to the ceiling. Each held on to the rope with one hand, and to his prayer book in the other. One Yom Kippur, a fly got into the synagogue and began to tickle the men as they dangled and prayed. The Rabbi considered this a test of their faith. In order to scratch their itches, they would have to let go with one hand. He urged the men to let their bodies fall to the floor sooner than their prayer books. Half the congregation let go of the rope and became the Uprighters, who continued to pray at the Upright Synagogue. The Uprighters either limped, or refused to walk at all, to remind themselves of their decision. They considered it a sign of their dedication to the Holy Word. The Uprighters continued the tradition of hanging onto the ropes.

The other half of the congregation let go of the prayer book and did not fall. They became the Slouchers. In remembrance of their actions, they sewed fringes to their sleeves. This was to remind them of the ropes to which they clung. They claimed that their actions showed how the spirit of the Holy Word prevailed even when the prayer books fell. The Slouchers changed their traditions and reclined on pillows instead of hanging from ropes. They also changed from a Hebrew prayer book to a Yiddish one. They no longer had a rabbi but used group-led services. They ate, drank, and gossiped both during and after services. The Uprighters look down on the Slouchers, whom they consider impious and overly secular, but the Slouchers do not care. The two groups leave each other alone except when they struggle to push the Upright Synagogue, which is on wheels, further toward either the Jewish Quarter or the Human Three-Quarters.

There had long been a rule that women were not allowed in the synagogue. In 1763, the congregation tried a compromise. The women were allowed to pray in a cellar beneath the men. The room had a glass ceiling so that the women could see up into the men's section. But the men were more distracted than ever, and the women were banned again. To watch the service, they had to stand outside and take turns peering through a hole the size of an egg.

Back to the baby: for six days she lies in the ark, and all the townspeople line up outside the synagogue to see her. The women can view her only through the hole, which frustrates them. They begin to hate her. After the Rabbi publishes an ad in the shtetl newsletter offering the baby, countless applications are left on the synagogue door. Because no man stands out as the perfect father, the Rabbi devises a lottery. He puts all the applications in the baby's crib, and the first one she grabs will be her adopted father. The baby lies for two days without grabbing a single one. Finally, she makes a mess so pungent that the men cannot pray and the Rabbi is forced to open the ark. Since the baby made the mess on Yankel's application, he is chosen as her father.

Analysis

The way the story of Trachimbrod begins is significant: "Trachim B's double-axle wagon either did or did not pin him against the bottom of the Brod River." Like all good Yiddish stories, it begins with a conditional. The wagon may or may not have belonged to Trachim, and he may or may not have been killed in the accident. This ambiguity introduces one of the novel's central themes. Because fantasy and reality are so intermixed in the history of Trachimbrod, nothing is ever sure. Even the legend of Trachim, around which all Trachimbrod lore revolves, is not necessarily true. Given the original teller of the tale, it is more likely false, but a good story is better than no story at all.

We already begin to get a sense of Jonathan's narrative voice. It is full of magicality and whimsy. The imagery describing the wagon accident is vivid and visceral, and it switches back and forth between various points of view. There is the horse pinned to the riverbed by the wagon. There is the flotsam in the water, a confusion of organic and inorganic things. There is the buzz of the townspeople. We experience these things all at once, but the effect is not bewildering, as we might imagine that the people experience it. Instead, we receive glimpses of clarity about the apparent nature of Trachimbrod and about how its residents approach new things.

Right away, vagueness becomes a defining characteristic of Trachimbrod. Not only is it on the Polish-Ukrainian border, but the shtetl itself is divided into the Jewish Quarter and the Human Three-Quarters. In fact, it does not even have a name. All this is very telling about the way the shtetl operates. The people of Trachimbrod are not concerned with the outside world, and therefore they do not need to be defined in its terms. They need no nationality and no name. They know who they are.

The end of Chapter 2 introduces another of the novel's major themes, the marriage of death and destruction to life. The end of the world for Trachim is the beginning for the newborn baby girl. She is born amidst death and refuse, but she is untouched by it. She represents hope.

The closing of Chapter 2 also involves a mystical, multifaceted description of events. The twins hide under their father's prayer shawl like ghosts, the horse dies, and the ant in Yankel's ring hides its face in shame. All of these events are small relative to the whole accident, but somehow they give it great import. We may never know the truth about Trachim and the accident, but we can know about some of the incident's intimate details.

Chapter 3 relates the fate of the baby and the history of the Upright Synagogue. The history of the Upright Synagogue introduces the theme of cultural identity. Even though the townspeople are all Jews, they make divisions among themselves. Although life in Trachimbrod is relatively simple, it is never without conflict. In fact, the people thrive on conflict and argument. One of the major conflicts is between the sacred and secular. This issue divides the population into Uprighter/Sloucher just as it divides the land into Jewish/Human. This is futher evidence that the people of Trachimbrod are content to exist liminally; they often are not one thing or the other, but balancing between the two. Even so, the Uprighters and Slouchers know who they are.

Much of the energy of Chapter 3 is generated by the absurd. The men are so pious that they dangle from ropes and shout while they pray. They think that this will make them seem more devoted to God, but they just look ridiculous. This tradition is part of the townspeople's small-town mentality. Once they have a tradition, they keep it, not gaining outside opinions to help them realize how silly they are. Implicitly the author asks us to consider whether our own cherished traditions are just as silly.

The scatological humor in Chapter 3 is not gratuitous. In fact, it furthers the theme of chance. The baby's choice of Yankel as her father is as unintentional as the manner in which the baby chooses him. She has no more control over her own fate than she does her bodily functions. In turn, Yankel and all the rest of the townspeople suffer greatly from chance in their own lives (although the author directs every event for our benefit).

In the last sentence of Chapter 3, Jonathan puts the story in the context of his own life: "We were to be in good hands." He means both his very-great-grandmother and himself. This multigenerational connection reminds us that Jonathan is telling not just any story, but one that affects him deeply, and without which he would not exist. By creating his family's history, he creates his own. Unlike Yankel and the baby, who have so little control, Jonathan has a measure of control as a writer.

Chapter 4: 20 July 1997

This is the first letter from Alex to Jonathan. Alex discusses the first chapter he wrote for Jonathan, which is Chapter 1 of the novel. We learn that Jonathan has asked Alex to write summaries of the trip from his own point of view. He has given Alex an English thesaurus to help him write. Thus, Alex makes awkward substitutions such as "manufacture" for "make" and "premium" for "good." Enclosed with the letter are postcards of Lutsk, census ledgers of six villages before World War II, and some photographs Jonathan asked Alex to keep for him.

We learn many things about the trip. A guard on a train stole a box from Jonathan that contained important things. The men visited six villages, but did not find the woman named Augustine. Jonathan gave Alex a copy of a picture of Augustine with her family, with which both of the young men have fallen in love.

Alex apologizes for not being a better writer and translator. Jonathan has asked him to make corrections to the first chapter. For example Jonathan has asked him to remove the phrase "very spoiled Jew" and the word "Negro" to make the text more politically correct. But Alex's revisions miss the point, and he changes "very spoiled Jew" to "spoiled Jew." Jonathan also has asked Alex to condense the part about himself.

Jonathan has sent Alex payment for his writing, which Alex accepts, but he says he would write for free because he is honored to do so for an American writer. He praises Jonathan's first chapter, our Chapter 2. He assumes that the parts he does not understand are clear only to Jews. He is somewhat correct; he does not recognize the Yiddish names. Alex claims not to know much about writing but offers to give Jonathan advice anyway.

Alex writes that Grandfather has been much more depressed since they returned from Lutsk. He has moved in with the family permanently and has taken over Little Igor's bed. He is very upset that they did not find Augustine. Alex does not discuss Grandfather's mental health with Father, though they can both hear him crying. He closes with the idea that "in a different world, we could have been real friends." He signs his letter, "Guilelessly, Alex" as he will for most of the novel.

Chapter 5: An Overture to Encountering the Hero, and then Encountering the Hero

Back to before the trip: Alex is looking forward to it, because he is excited to see new places and meet an American. Father has decided that Alex and Grandfather will make the fifteen-hour trip to Lvov. Neither of them knows what Jonathan looks like, but Alex is confident in his ability to pick out an American in Ukraine.

Unlike his family and friends, Alex is not content to stay in Odessa all his life. He wants to move to America to study accounting, and to bring Little Igor with him. But Father tells Alex that he will stay in Odessa like his ancestors and take over at Heritage Touring. When Alex retorts, Father punches him.

The dog Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior is allowed to come along on the trip, provided she wears a special shirt to make her look professional. It says: "Officious Seeing-Eye Bitch of Heritage Touring." The men do not realize that their incorrect English makes her look crude. Alex and Grandfather take their unpleasant drive to Lvov in the decrepit car, while the dog keeps throwing herself against the windows.

In contrast to Odessa, Lvov is stark, grey, and built from concrete. They are four hours early. The train station is decorated with yellow and blue flags to celebrate the first anniversary of the new constitution. Alex thinks that they will help make a good first impression on Jonathan, especially because he thinks yellow and blue are "the Jewish colors." Alex waits for Jonathan in the train station for five hours, nervous and eager to make a good impression. When Jonathan finally arrives, Alex is shocked that he resembles neither the Americans in magazines nor the Jews in Holocaust photos. Jonathan is short with brown hair, and he wears glasses. Their introduction is very awkward, as they have trouble understanding one another. Alex cannot pronounce Jonathan's name, so he calls him "Jon-fen."

Alex is surprised that Jonathan had no trouble with the guards at the Ukrainian border. They are notorious for stealing property and demanding bribes. Here Alex relays some advice Father gave him about Americans crossing the border into Ukraine. The best guard an American can encounter at the border is one who is awed by America and dreams of living there. Alex sympathizes with this point of view. The worst guard is spiteful of Americans and mistreats them to feel superior.

Alex shows Jonathan to the car, where Grandfather is snoring loudly, and the dog has chewed her shirt so that it says only "Officious Bitch." Her mouth is bloody from chewing her own tail. Jonathan shares the tiny back seat with the dog as they start off towards Lutsk and Trachimbrod.

Analysis

Chapter 4 is the first letter from Alex to Jonathan. We see that they are audiences for one another, but the communications are stilted due to cultural differences and misunderstandings. When Alex does not understand something, he assumes it is because Jonathan is writing in a Jewish way, or because Jonathan is mistaken. Alex does not consider that perhaps he is mistaken himself. He plays the "culture card" to avoid questioning his own knowledge. Alex is so sure that he and Jonathan are irreconcilably different that he says they cannot be "real friends."

Despite the focus on cultural differences, we get an inkling that writing is a medium that will connect Alex and Jonathan more closely. Not only have they established a common interest in writing, but they have both fallen in love with the photograph of Augustine. In writing and in love, they can pretend for a moment that they are the same. At least, certain things make them feel the same. But so long as Alex idealistically views Jonathan as not just an American but an American writer, he perceives that they cannot write as equals or friends.

In Chapter 5 we learn about the relationships between Alex, Father, and Grandfather. Father is cruel to both his father and his son. He does not care about their opinion. Whereas Jonathan will search hopefully for his family identity, Alex knows his family all too well. The men in his family are stubborn and belligerent. Having Grandfather come along on the trip allows the contrast between Alex's and Jonathan's families to grow throughout the novel.

When Jonathan arrives, he disconfirms Alex's conceptions of Americans and of Jews. Alex expects Jonathan to look like either a cornfed blond or an emaciated death camp prisoner. This surprise introduces the recurring topic of expectations confronting realities. Once and again in the novel, people do not get what they want or expect.

The setting of Alex's and Jonathan's first encounter is important in terms of their cultural identities. They meet in a place outside of both their realms. Alex is from Odessa, where there are beaches, so he feels displaced in the city of Lvov. Jonathan is displaced, too, not least because he is in another country. Thus the two young men meet on even ground; they feel about equally awkward and lost. This situation gives them an early chance to connect, despite their differences.

Jonathan is a third-generation American, comfortable and unused to political turmoil. Alex is not a very nationalistic Ukrainian, so he does not even mention to Jonathan that the station is deocrated to celebrate the anniversary of the new Ukrainian constitution. He merely hopes Jonathan will like them. But the holiday is significant because it is a reminder of how recently politics have calmed down in Ukraine. It is still only a few years after the end of Communism. Alex is obsessed with America, because he wants to know more about its comforts. When Father punches him for wanting to leave his home country, it seems that Alex is the exception in his family in wanting to leave.

Chapter 6: The Book of Recurrent Dreams, 1791

The Slouchers are holding their weekly Sabbath services at one of their homes. The service is unorthodox. They pray at a different congregation member's house each week. They keep their sacred items in common household places: their makeshift ark is the oven, and the pulpit is a chicken coop. They recline on pillows while praying, and everyone talks during the service.

Instead of having a regular prayer book, they write The Book of Recurrent Dreams, updated the first of every month. The book is a log of the Slouchers' recurring dreams. All are chanted aloud. Each entry in the Book of Recurrent Dreams is marked like a Bible passage (e.g., 4:513). The dreams are deeply personal and tend to be laden with sensory imagery and charged with sexuality and violence. One particularly strong dream is 4:516, the dream of "disembodied birds," which recalls the dreamer's actual memory. She recalls that when she was mourning her son, a bird crashed through the window and died. The impression of the bird on the floor and in the window is more lasting, haunting, and real than the bird was. In dream 4:525, "The dream that we are our fathers," the dreamer looks into the Brod and sees endless images of his ancestors in his own reflection, going back to the face of God.

The Sloucher service is interrupted by two Uprighters, who pound at the door. They shout to announce that Yankel has been chosen as the baby's father. The Slouchers celebrate but do not notice that Yankel is not celebrating. Rather, he is suddenly more afraid of death than before. Jonathan, as narrator, notes that while Yankel received a baby, Jonathan received an adoptive great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

Chapter 7: Falling in Love, 1791-1796

Yankel takes the baby home that night and is fascinated by her. She becomes the only thing that matters to him, and he sits for hours watching her. When her body becomes imprinted with the newsprint from the newspapers he put in her makeshift crib, he reads the stories off of her body.

Yankel lost two children earlier. One died of a fever, and the other died in an accident at the infamous industrial flour mill, which kills one shtetl resident a year. Yankel also lost his wife when she left him for the bureaucrat who helped mediate Yankel's trial. He came home one day to find his wife gone, and a note on the doormat saying simply: "I had to do it for myself." In response, Yankel is tormented and constantly repeats to himself: "I am not sad." Although he forgives his wife, he cannot not bear to destroy the note, so he tries to lose it. But no matter how hard he tries, he cannot. The people of Trachimbrod never mention his wife's desertion.

Yankel's name had been Safran before his crime. At the time, he was very well respected in the shtetl. He founded, ran, and was the sole member of two organizations: the Committee for the Good and Fine Arts, and the School for Loftier Learning.

Yankel-then-Safran's crime is now revealed. He was convicted of unfit practices, for which he lost his usurer's license. The townspeople lost their respect for him, and he left the shtetl, wandering through neighboring villages and taking on different jobs. No matter how hard he tried, he could not be happy. After three years he returned to the shtetl and was accepted back into the community, but he lived as a loner, "like a Sloucher fringe, sewn to the sleeve of Trachimbrod." He was forced to wear the abacus bead around his neck as a mark of his shame. He changed his name to Yankel, which was the name of the bureaucrat who ran off with his wife, and asked that no one call him Safran again.

The baby is Yankel's chance to reinvent himself as a father, "a chance to be again innocent, simply and impossibly happy." He names her Brod, after the river where she was found. He gives her a necklace with a tiny abacus bead to match his, so that she will feel like she belongs with him. Yankel tells Brod that her mother died painlessly in childbirth. He makes up elaborate stories about his romance with her mother so as not to cause her pain. He even writes fake love letters from this fantasy mother to him in order to convince Brod. Inevitably, Yankel falls in love with this fantasy woman. He rereads the fake love letters and fantasizes about her so much that he can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality. But he still has not gotten rid of the note his real wife left him. Brod finds it in her pocket one day when she is a few years old. She does not mention it to Yankel but leaves it on his bedside table.

Chapter 8: Another Lottery, 1791

A magistrate from the major nearby city of Lvov has demanded that the shtetl be named. It must be easy to pronounce and not offensive. The Rabbi proclaims a vote among a select portion of the, and they all cast ballots for names that serve their personal interests. Sofiowka offers to guard the polling box all day. The official announcement the next day proclaims that the town is now known officially as Sofiowka. We now learn the exact location of the shtetl: "twenty-three kilometers southeast of Lvov, four north of Kolki, and straddling the Polish-Ukrainian border." The name cannot be changed, but nobody calls it Sofiowka. The Rabbi calls for a second vote, and this time the W twins guard the polling box. Each person votes for his favored name, and the vote is a tie--each name receives one vote. The Rabbi picks a random slip from the box to break the tie, and Yankel is again a winner. The shtetl is now called Trachimbrod.

Analysis

The Slouchers have created a collective fantasy in place of "dry" religion, because they feel that dreams hold deep meaning. They locate the sacred and holy not in the synagogue or in traditional ceremony, but in the imagination. This is how we learn that Jonathan comes from a line of dreamers. Considering that his ancestors practically worship their dreams and dream-narratives, it is no surpsise that Jonathan himself is so taken with fantasy.

The most important dream chanted from the Book of Recurrent Dreams is "the dream that we are our fathers." The dreamer sees that the faces of his ancestors lead back to the face of God, in whose image they are all created. This is a beautiful metaphor for what Jonathan is trying to accomplish on his journey. If God represents ultimate power and knowledge, then by seeking information about his ancestors, Jonathan is seeking God. The more he learns about his most distant ancestors, the closer he is to finding God. At the same time, being created in God's image, Jonathan is searching for illumination about his own identity.

Like everyone else's, important aspects of Yankel's life are directed by chance. Through Brod, Yankel embraces his misfortune and tries to forget his shame and redeem himself. His method, however, does not let him overcome his past. By giving Brod a tiny abacus bead like his own, he perpetuates his shame instead of erasing it. Brod is thus marked as a product not only of chance, but also of all the chances and decisions faced by her ancestors. We are all like Brod in this respect; we can never fully separate ourselves from our family's identity, no matter how we might transcend it.

Yankel is a dreamer like the other Slouchers. In telling Brod stories about her mother, Yankel can love and feel loved, which helps free him. At the same time, fantasy also haunts and enslaves Yankel. He cannot escape from his wife's words, "I had to do it for myself." These written words are powerful in that he cannot understand them but can always refer back to them. Yankel is trapped in this failure to comprehend the letter because of his generous soul. We see his generosity in his willingness to take in Brod and give her every advantage he can, beyond the chance she represents for him to redeem and reinvent himself. The same generosity makes him unable to fathom his wife's selfishness, even though it is explicit in her note. There is no sign that she is sorry or tormented herself, but Yankel forgives her.

Yankel fails to cure his sadness with words. He tries to convince himself that he is fine by repeating, "I am not sad." This mantra does not work. Words have a great effect on Yankel, but he cannot harness their power as Jonathan can, and the written words trump Yankel's unwritten words as a written testimony trumps an unwritten fantasy. Yankel is also tormented by the simplicity of his wife's letter. She left it on the doormat like a casual note.

The idea of naming is very important in Chapter 8. We know that Trachimbrod does not concern itself with outside business, and the people are happy to have multiple identities, although they do observe boundaries as well. Finally, when the outside intrudes--the magistrate demands a name for the shtetl-- the townspeople acknowledge a need to define the shtetl by naming it.

Naming can be arbitrary or momentous. The naming of the town is intended to be momentous, to be decided by semi-democratic vote. But it is influenced first by self-interested choices and then by chance. The townspeople are foolish for letting Sofiowka be in charge of the ballots, and he decides to name the shtetl after himself. It is also by chance that Yankel wins another lottery. In Jonathan's time, Sofiowka and Trachimbrod are official names that he can find printed in journals and official documents. But when we know their origin, we see that they are just the products of circumstance and dumb luck.

Chapter 9: 23 September 1997

In this letter from Alex to Jonathan, we learn that Jonathan is in his last year of college, while Alex has two more to go. Jonathan told Alex that one is obligated to go after one's dreams, but Alex supposes that this is easier for someone fortunate like Jonathan than for him. He tells Jonathan that he has saved up almost enough money for a ticket to America by forgoing the clubs. He asks for another copy of the picture of Augustine for Grandfather, who now is too depressed even to yell. Alex thinks she is beautiful and agrees with Jonathan that it is easy to fall in love with her.

Alex responds to Jonathan's criticism about the last chapter he wrote (our Chapter 5). Alex thinks Jonathan does not like this chapter as much as the first one he wrote; Jonathan has corrected some of Alex's idioms. Jonathan asked Alex to retain the other incorrect words because they are funny, but Alex is ashamed and wants to correct them.

Alex compliments Jonathan's latest chapter on The Book of Recurrent Dreams. He says that "the dream that we are our fathers" upsets him, because he wants to be the opposite of Father. Still, Father is not all bad. He gave Little Igor a bicycle for his recent fourteenth birthday.

Alex returns to his own work, telling Jonathan that he did not omit Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior from the story as Jonathan requested. Jonathan thought removing the dog would make the story more "refined," but Alex wants to give her a chance as a character.

Chapter 10: Going Forth to Lutsk

As Jonathan and his crew set out for Lutsk, the dog will not leave him alone. He cannot stand this situation, especially because he does not like dogs. They get lost, and Grandfather is increasingly upset. He swears and says impolite things about Jonathan in Russian. Alex pretends to translate, telling Jonathan that Grandfather is pointing out the landscape. Jonathan tells Alex that the dog has converted to Judaism. When Alex translates for Grandfather, he is disgusted and calls the dog "Dean Martin, Junior" instead.

They drive for five hours, and Jonathan tells Alex about his intentions. He shows Alex a photograph of his grandfather with Augustine and the family who saved him from the Nazis. His grandfather's name was Safran, like his ancestor Safran/Yankel. Everyone else in Trachimbrod reportedly was killed, including his wife and child, while Safran escaped. Alex thinks that Augustine is beautiful and looks American instead of Ukrainian. He also thinks she looks sad and intelligent. Jonathan tells Alex he wants to see where his grandfather grew up. He points out that if it were not for World War II, his grandfather never would have moved to America, and Jonathan would have lived in Trachimbrod as a Ukrainian. The back of the photo says, "This is me with Augustine, February 21, 1943." This is why Jonathan thinks the girl's name is Augustine. Jonathan admits that it is possible the note has nothing to do with the girl--it could have been used as scrap paper. Despite this, both he and Alex think that Safran was in love with Augustine. There is a closeness and a tension between the two in the photo.

But Jonathan does not want to believe that the two were in love, which would mean that even true love is replaceable, because his grandfather wed again and started a new life in America. Jonathan's grandmother gave him the photograph only after his grandfather died--she would not say anything about it. She does not like Ukraine, and Jonathan has not told his grandmother that he is traveling to Ukraine because of her painful past. As a young woman she left her family behind in her shtetl, Kolki. Later, they were killed by the Nazis. Alex is taken by the fact that she left her family behind and resolves to remember it.

Jonathan adds that the Ukrainians were cruel to the Jews during World War II, Nazis or not. Jonathan shows Alex the few maps he has of the area where they will search for Augustine. The maps and photograph are the only aids Jonathan has. Alex explains everything about Augustine, the photograph, and the maps to Grandfather. He shows Grandfather the photograph.

At the hotel, the hotel clerk demands to see Jonathan's documents and charges him a "foreigner price" even though Alex is there. At dinner, Grandfather examines the photograph of Augustine in a way that makes Alex uncomfortable. Jonathan does not eat meat, but the waitress does not comprehend this choice and insists that there must also be meat on the plate. The dog is humping the table, which has caused one of Jonathan's two potatoes to fall on the very dirty floor. There is a tense moment. Finally Grandfather picks up the potato, cuts it in four, and gives a piece to each of the men and to the dog. He eats some of his piece first and tells Jonathan, "Welcome to Ukraine." After Alex translates it, all three of them laugh, and Alex perceives that each of them is laughing for his own reason.

Alex asks Jonathan about America and says he wants to be an accountant. Jonathan refuses to call himself a writer, since he has not published a book yet. Still, Alex is encouraging and thinks of Jonathan as a writer. Jonathan explains that his goals are not lofty; he just wants to do something of which he is not ashamed.

They return to the hotel, where Alex warns Jonathan that people often steal from and kidnap Americans. Grandfather and Alex go to the hotel bar to drink vodka. Grandfather is unusually calm and good-spirited, and says that Jonathan "is a good boy" worth helping. They agree to wake up at six o'clock. Grandfather is tossing and turning all night, and Alex cannot sleep either. He knows that it is because both of them are thinking about what Grandfather did during World War II. Alex does not know, but he realizes that the memory makes Grandfather restless.

Analysis

In Chapter 9, Alex begins to be more honest with Jonathan in his letter. He admits that saving up to come to America is far more important to him than his putatively swinging lifestyle in Odessa. He also begins to assert some editorial prerogative, refusing to omit Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior from the story. At this point, he is still looking to Jonathan for guidance and praise. He still thinks Jonathan is the key to his making a name for himself.

In Chapter 9, we also confront the issue of Jonathan the author vs. Jonathan the character. We learn that Jonathan the character wants Alex to make him look more calm and refined in his writing. Meanwhile, Jonathan the author chooses to show how insecure Jonathan the character is, always leaving us unsure to what degree the author is like the character. We read not only about the character's anxiety, but about how he is anxious about his anxiety. In a sense, the author may be humbling himself through the features of the character.

We still do not know anything about Augustine. She has a unique influence on each person; each imagines her in a different way. So long as they do not meet her, she exists in the realm of fantasy and not history. While this acknowledgment can be disappointing for them, it is also safe; no evidence is available to challenge their fantasies. If she never evinces her reality, she will never become a disappointment.

Chapter 10 introduces the topic of loyalty to one's family and country. It also points out how identity can change rapidly from generation to generation. Alex begins with some incorrect notions about Jews, while Grandfather is quite rude about the fact that Jonathan is Jewish. It is for this reason that Alex does not translate Jonathan's comments about the cruelty of Ukrainians during the Holocaust. Jonathan has been culturally insensitive in the course of being honest about his understanding of Jewish history. He forgets that Grandfather lived through the war and could be offended by his allegations.

Humor continues to cut through the cultural tension and misunderstanding. In Chapter 10, the humor is no longer simply ironic, for the benefit of readers; the men appreciate it among themselves. When the potato falls to the floor, the response "Welcome to Ukraine" leads all the men to laugh. They laugh for different reasons, because they are different people with different experiences of Ukraine, but they share a common understanding: a quartered, dirty potato shared with a dog is somehow appropriate to their feelings of cultural awkwardness in communicating with one another, and somehow touchingly appropriate to their shared experience of the friendships they are forming. In essence they all appreciate the difficulty of their situation. The humor places them all on the same level for the moment, and the tension subsides.

Jonathan's articulation of his goal illuminates the topics of shame and responsibility. He does not want to become famous or proud but to avoid shame. While this may be a low bar to set, one might wonder if the author is referring to all the shameful, moneygrubbing jobs that a humanistic writer would avoid. It is also important to remember that Jonathan comes from a family of Holocaust survivors, and whatever he does will seem tiny compared to what his relatives went through in order to survive.

Chapter 10 also introduces us to the mystery of Grandfather's past. He becomes much more friendly to Jonathan once he sees the photograph of Augustine. Suddenly the trip has meaning for him; he wants to find Augustine and is encouraging about the task even when Jonathan is not around. We are left to wonder whether Grandfather knows Augustine or is just touched by her beauty.

Chapter 11: Falling in Love, 1791-1803

Brod is growing up. She insists on doing everything in her own way. The townspeople, especially the men, love her for being stubborn. The women of the shtetl are jealous of Brod because she is the object of every man's affection. They speak badly of her and make sure she has no friends. But none of them tells her the real story of her birth. Yankel also cannot bear to tell her.

Brod is so short and thin that she appears malnourished. She has very white skin, thick black hair, and thin lips. Brod is not concerned with her own beauty. All kinds of people come to her for advice, even the Rabbi.

Brod is obsessed with sadness. She distinguishes between 613 different sadnesses: "She was a genius of sadness, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum." Nothing satisfies her. She cannot be happy or feel love. Instead, she falls in love with the idea of love. In this way, she lives a life "once removed" from everything and everyone. She humors those who woo her only so that she can pretend that life is worth something.

Yankel and Brod take care of each other. He is now very old, and Brod adopts his mannerisms. She walks with a limp even though she is healthy, and she rubs her face as though it has a five-o'clock shadow. He buys many books even though they are poor, and she returns them so that they will have money for necessities. She even makes their library public so that they can make some money. Yankel tries to gloss over the differences in their age and gender: he urinates sitting down and wipes himself like she does, he spills water on his pants to make her feel better about wetting hers, and he scrapes his knees on purpose when she does so by accident.

Their house is a little haven in Trachimbrod. They are never angry at one another, and they do not care what others think. Yankel is eighty-four and Brod is twelve. He worries about what will happen to her after he dies, so he does everything possible to prevent himself from aging. He exercises, forces himself to eat even when he is not hungry, and drinks vodka even when he cannot stomach it. Because he is losing his memory, he uses one of Brod's lipsticks to write reminders on his ceiling, like "you used to be married, but she left you." He cannot bear to have Brod know how frail he is both physically and mentally.

Yankel records a dream in the Book of Recurrent Dreams numbered 4:812, "The dream of living forever with Brod." He has this dream every night. In it, they live together forever and do not age. He imagines that when he dies, the world will end, since he cannot bear to think of Brod living on without him. He admits that he does not believe in God or the afterlife, and that Brod is the only thing that matters to him.

Before Yankel goes to bed, he tries to think positively about his life. As always, he tries to convince himself, "I am not sad." The last thing he sees before going to bed each night is the reminder he has written above his bed: "You are Yankel. You love Brod."

Chapter 12: Recurrent Secrets, 1791-1943

Yankel is now unable to stand reminders of how time is passing and he is aging. He covers the clock in his house with a black cloth, and he does the same with his pocket watch and calendar. He does not observe the Sabbath. He even avoids the sun.

Yankel reads Brod's diary while she is in the bath. In it, she wrote about how the young and old are lonely in their own ways, and that her diary is the closest thing she has to a lover. Both Yankel and Brod keep their own lives secret from themselves. Both of them repeat things until they cannot remember whether the lines are true or not.

In a fantasy sequence, Brod looks into the sky and sees things beyond her world and time. She looks through the windows of a faraway house, where a wrinkled woman goes about her business. There is a bureau covered in family pictures, including one of a woman and her daughter holding hands on a beach. Brod imagines that her own mother looks like that. Another room contains a scrap of paper that says, "This is me with Augustine, February 21, 1943" in handwriting much like hers. Then she looks through the attic wall to see a boy and girl lying on the floor together. He is reading to her from The Book of Antecedents. Brod realizes she is looking at all Trachimbrod--not just the boy, but everyone who has ever lived--reading to the girl. She reads along with them. The passage they read is called "The First Rape of Brod D." It describes Sofiowka approaching Brod after the Trachimday festival in 1804, but it does not describe the rape itself. The boy and girl fall asleep, but Brod is tormented that she cannot learn more about her own future rape.

Chapter 13: A Parade, A Death, A Proposition, 1804-1969

By the age of twelve, Brod has refused marriage proposals from every man in Trachimbrod. She agrees not to marry until Yankel is dead. For Trachimday, Trachimbrod is decorated in white string. This is to commemorate the first item to rise from the waters when Trachim B's wagon crashed. The string connects all the citizens' houses. The parade begins, and floats from neighboring shtetls pass by. Each float is covered in thousands of butterflies, attracted to them by carcasses strapped to the bottom. The Trachimbrod float is covered in blue butterflies, and Brod is atop it in her mermaid costume. A band plays Polish national songs on one end of the float, and another band plays Ukrainian traditional songs on the other end. On the Rabbi's signal, Brod throws several sacks of earth and one of gold coins into the Brod. A young man from Kolki named Shalom recovers the sack with the gold coins. Shalom is Jonathan's great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. The townspeople are drunk and making love. When people make love, astronauts can perceive it from space as a tiny glow. The more people making love somewhere on Earth, the brighter the glow.

Brod walks home and undresses as she walks through the house. There is an odor of death and decay. Brod is described erotically: she is naked, her nipples are hard from the cold, and she has goosebumps. She finally finds Yankel dead in the library, curled up on the floor, holding a balled-up piece of paper in one hand and his abacus bead in the other.

We flash to Yankel's death: he was embarrassed to die alone on the floor. He had meant to tell Brod that he is not her real father, though he wishes more than anything that he were. Rain seeps through the house, and Yankel's reminders in lipstick peel off the ceiling. Brod takes the paper from Yankel's hand and sees that it says, "Everything for Brod."

Just then, lightning flashes. Brod sees Shalom from Kolki watching her at the window. She yells at him to go away, and she tries to cover both Yankel's body and her own. He says he will not leave without her. Yankel jerks in rigor mortis and knocks over the oil lamp. The room is suddenly dark. Yankel smiles, though he is dead. Brod turns to face Shalom and says, "Then you must do something for me." Her belly lights up with an extremely bright light.

We flash forward to Jonathan's grandmother's house: his mother is twenty-one. Jonathan's grandfather died twenty-one years ago, five weeks after coming to America and just after his daughter was born. Jonathan's mother and grandmother watch the first moon landing on television. The astronaut on the moon looks back at Earth and sees Trachimbrod light up.

Analysis

Brod cannot love despite all her intimacy, good intentions, and genuine affection. This inability makes us question the very definition of love. If it is not any of those things, what is it? It is not related to the rejected marriage proposals. Foer only gives hints of definitions of romantic love and family love at this point.

Despite all their intimacy, Yankel and Brod do not really know one another. Brod even lies to Yankel and tells him that she does love him. But Brod does not love him; she is incapable of loving. They do give each other all the affection they can muster.

Yankel cannot imagine his life without Brod, and moreover, he cannot imagine Brod's life without him. This is why he is so afraid of dying, even in the first moments when he learns he is going to be a father. It is so excruciating for him to think about her living on without him that he fantasizes about the world ending along with him.

Chapter 11 also focuses our attention on memory. Yankel writes on the ceiling so that he will know who he is, even as his memory fades. It is sad and strange that he must remind himself, "You are Yankel. You love Brod" every night before bed. Everything, even love, can be forgotten in less than a day's time (especially if one is old). For a healthy person, can love outlast memory? Memory, at least, can be the key to love. Jonathan may find something of family love on his journey by unlocking memories and drawing closer to his ancestors.

Chapter 12 explains the secrets that Yankel and Brod keep from one another. We also learn what defines a secret. It is not simply something untold; it is something you consider telling but do not. For example, Brod does not tell Yankel that she has begun menstruating, while Yankel does not tell Brod that he is not her real father--although he intends eventually to do so.

Chapter 12 also examines the importance of time. For Yankel, time's power is fully acknowledged, but he hides from it. Yankel can never escape from the passsage of time and the fact that he is aging. The best he can do is to avoid the markers of time in the hope that he will forget it exists. Even as Yankel is an unwilling slave to time, Brod traverses it. She is able to fantasize far into the future, past her own rape, all the way to its being made a part of history. She even sees the writing on the back of the picture of Augustine.

Fantasy and reality are particularly convoluted in Chapter 12. Though Brod's fantasies are some of the most potent in the book, she does not control them. She can see hundreds of years into the future, but once she is there, she cannot affect what happens. Her experience reminds us that we can only control fantasies to a certain extent; even fantasies have their boundaries. In seeing a possibly real future, Brod is constrained by reality. Even so, chance is still the most powerful driving force in many people's lives, and if fantasy must yield to reality, reality often must yield to chance. Brod's limited foresight is matched by Jonathan's limitations as he seeks to unearth past facts. When Jonathan's reality is limited, he turns to fantasy (and this pattern might be observed in the author's trajectory, having written a fictional version of his actual experience).

Chapter 13 focuses on liminal space, that is, the border state between two opposites. Trachimday is shot through with the interweaving of love and violence, death and life. Trachimday is based not so much on Trachim's death and Brod's birth as on their conjunction. This founding moment sets the precedent for a further mixing of life and death. The floats in the parade are one symbol of this mixture. They are literally alive, covered with thousands of vibrant butterflies. (In some literature, butterflies represent the soul--in ancient Greek the same word is used for both--so figuratively, each float is buzzing with souls.) But dead things, the carcasses, are what draw the butterflies to the floats. The founding moment is recapitulated when Yankel dies and Brod has the nakedness of a newborn--but the newness is different now; Brod's sexual life begins.

Similarly, violence and love are interwoven in Chapter 13. Brod's rape will weave lovemaking together with violence. In addition, real love will be going on all around Brod as she is raped. It remains an open question to what extent love and violence inspire rather than repel one another.

Love, according to Jonathan, emits light bright enough to carry on for many generations. This idea is comforting after the assertions about memory and love in the previous chapter. Although we can forget love, it retains a permanence that can traverse space and time. If enough people love strongly enough, perhaps everything will be illuminated. Often, things "come to light" only after a great deal of time has passed and new eyes evaluate them. By writing about his family's history, Jonathan acknowledges the endurance of the centuries-old glow.

Chapter 14: 28 October 1997

Alex has written to Jonathan again: Grandfather refused to accept payment for driving Jonathan around, and Alex is too afraid to ask Grandfather why, even though Alex has been saving up for a ticket to America. He dreams of having a luxurious apartment in Times Square big enough for both him and Little Igor. Meanwhile, Grandfather is becoming more depressed. He no longer hides his crying. Alex recently caught him crying over some old photographs. The next night, he cried over the photograph of Augustine, repeating her name. The night after that, he cried over a picture of Jonathan, while still repeating "Augustine."

Jonathan has not given Alex much critique of Alex's most recent chapter. He hopes Jonathan likes his humor and is laughing with him, not at him. He has made some of the changes Jonathan requested. Jonathan also suggested that the dog should die in a "tragicomic accident while crossing the road," but Alex again refuses to remove the dog from the story.

Just as Yankel wrote "Everything for Brod," Alex feels dedicated to Little Igor, a good boy. Father never comes home for dinner anymore, but he goes out with his friends every night and comes home drunk and belligerent. Recently Father beat little Igor. In the mornings, Alex and Little Igor clean up Father's messes.

Alex thinks it is sad that Brod cannot feel things. Jonathan's writing has made him wonder why we think about things that cause us pain. Regarding the glow of making love, Alex claims to have seen a girl's bottom light up while having sex with her. He suggests that Jonathan change the story so that the astronaut looking down is Russian instead of American. He also asks Jonathan to send him American magazines. He is eager to keep exchanging chapters.

Alex continues to tell his family about Jonathan. But he explains to them that Jonathan is not a "Jew" with a capital J, but a jew, like the famous ones Alex knows about.

Chapter 15: The Very Rigid Search

Back in Ukraine: Jonathan is ready to go out in the morning. Overnight, Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior has chewed up almost all of Jonathan's documents, including his maps. Jonathan is hungry and they go to the restaurant, though Alex has already eaten. Alex tries to ask the waitress out, and she asks if he will bring Jonathan along. Alex tells the waitress that Jonathan is a Jew. She asks to see his horns. Jonathan ends up with just a cup of coffee. Alex becomes increasingly annoyed with Jonathan throughout the day.

In the car, Grandfather is asleep as usual, and again he says "Anna?" when Alex wakes him. They start off to find Trachimbrod without the maps but soon decide to ask for directions. The attendant at the gas station has never heard of Trachimbrod, but he has heard of some of the other towns Jonathan mentions. He points them in a general direction. Jonathan tries to give the attendant a pack of Marlboro cigarettes as a tip, because his guide book suggested it.

Jonathan and Alex talk about never having been truly in love. They agree with Grandfather that Odessa is a better place to fall in love than Trachimbrod. Alex asks to see the photograph of Augustine again.

They keep asking others for directions, but not one admits having heard of Trachimbrod. Alex feels "as if we were in the wrong country, or the wrong century, or as if Trachimbrod had disappeared, and so had the memory of it." At midday, Alex approaches a woman sitting on the steps of a tiny house. The house is decrepit, and men's, women's, and children's clothing are strewn about the yard in an eerie fashion. The woman is peeling corn. She is friendly, but she says she has never heard of Trachimbrod or Sofiowka. Her smile, however, strikes Alex as a mark of something more. He recalls the photograph of Augustine and shows it to her. She says she does not recognize anyone, but Alex insensibly keeps asking her, and she keeps answering no. Finally she begins to cry, and Alex asks if anyone in the picture has ever seen her. She replies, "I have been waiting for you for so long." Alex repeats that they are searching for Trachimbrod. She begins to cry harder and says, "You are here. I am it."

Analysis

Unlike Jonathan, Alex knows little about his immediate family's past. Because Grandfather is tormented by his past and will not discuss it, Alex instead attempts to control the future. He sees Little Igor in the same way Yankel sees Brod, as a chance to reinvent himself through the young. Throughout Alex's letters, he implies but never states that Father beats Little Igor. By now it is fair to assume that Father does beat him, and perhaps this is why Little Igor is always brusied. We can infer that this pattern contributes to Alex being so protective of Little Igor and why Alex wants to take Little Igor with him to America. As he says, "Everything for Little Igor."

Alex is also interested in getting to America for himself. He is trying to go somewhere new and exciting, while Jonathan is trying to recover the past. Alex is even willing to give up his family and Ukrainian identity for a chance to start anew. After all, he does not know much about his roots, although he knows how to make his way as a Ukrainian.

Chapter 14 exposes a bit of hypocrisy on Jonathan's part. He keeps asking Alex to omit the embarrassing parts of his own story, but he leaves in all the most intimate and shameful details of his family's lives when he writes. Furthermore, he invents disgusting and humiliating details about their lives. Most of the time, Jonathan sees himself as inextricably connected to his family's history. Yet, when he tries to edit his own story, he characterizes himself as separate from history.

As in many travel narratives, the state of the vehicle parallels the state of the characters. In Chapter 15, the car keeps getting stuck in the uneven country roads, just as Jonathan and Alex are lost without directions to Trachimbrod.

When he is talking to the old woman, Alex acts on instinct. He is compelled to keep pressuring her without knowing why, as though he is part of something greater. Something about the woman's house and manner triggers his interest.

Chapter 15 also reminds us of the power of words and images over the human mind. A simple reframing of his question begins to unlock the magic of the story. This interaction between Alex and the old woman is a keystone of the book. She sits there with the answer they are searching for, but she does not yet have permission to remember. Her memory is buried deep beneath fortresses of scars and purposeful forgetting. Alex batters at this fortress of denial, first with the photograph and then over and over again with his questions.

The passage of time often generates a sense of humility about even the bravest moments of one's past. Small tales can become tall tales, but monumental actions can be worn down by time and diminished by memory. So it is for the old woman until Alex breaks through to her. The facts that are so important for Jonathan's search are a part of her everyday life: 'I survived the Holocaust, I am a Jew, I know where to find Trachimbrod.' These facts seem normal to her after so many years, and they are integrated into her psyche despite having been hidden for so long.

It does not occur to her that she is the key to Jonathan's "illumination." Because of this humility and propensity for forgetting, the individual must rely on society for the encouragement to remember. If the elders can no longer keep memory alive due to the decimation and scattering of the population, the responsibility falls on the younger generation, the scattered remnants, to seek out and employ the keys of memory and history.

Chapter 16: The Dial, 1941-1804-1941

A woman whom the narrator does not identify takes off her panties in a very deliberate manner. She is aroused. We learn that she will die, before having children, in the water along with the rest of the shtetl. She folds the panties neatly and places them in a man's breast pocket like a handkerchief. The man is getting married that day. They flirt, and she tells him to meet her at the Dial. It is summer, and everything is in bloom.

The man is Jonathan's grandfather, Safran. He runs to the Dial to join the other shtetl men. A band begins the Dial Waltz, which traditionally is sung for each man of Trachimbrod before he is married. The song refers to the groom's wife and their upcoming sexual consummation. As Safran walks to the Dial, he wishes the Gypsy girl were there. She is his true love. Safran is equally honored and sad to become an adult and take his place in his family's history.

The Dial was created after Safran's great-great-great-grandfather, Shalom the Kolker, suffered a tragic accident. The story: Brod is seven months pregnant at the time. She urges her new husband not to work at the flour mill, but he goes anyway. Brod remarks that love is hating someone's absence even more than loving their presence. Brod waits for her husband to come home every day after work. She loves to be dependent on him. She is very happy that she can finally love, and she wishes Yankel could know this. She does not want her husband to be smart, because she wants them to have a simple relationship. They have had only six real conversations in three years.

Two months into the Kolker's job at the flour mill, Brod learns that a disk-saw blade came loose and lodged itself in the middle of his skull, perfectly vertically. He is not dead, but the blade will remain in his head for the rest of his life; removing it would kill him. The only symptoms of his injury are his violent outbursts. He insults Brod frequently and unpredictably; soon he is hitting her as well.

The Kolker hates himself for hurting his wife, but he cannot stop himself. He takes a doctor's advice and sleeps in a separate room. The abuse subsides for a while but worsens again, and he beats her every morning and evening. For the last year of their marriage, the Kolker confines himself to his bedroom. Brod cuts a hole in the wall so that they can talk. One day, they undress and gaze at one another through the hole. This feels more intimate to them than any of the times they made love. They touch themselves in front of one another, and then make love through the hole. For the first time, their lives seem to have deep meaning.

Brod persuades her husband to change his name again to confuse the Angel of Death and prolong his life. He is no longer Shalom or the Kolker but Safran. She remembers this name from one of the notes on Yankel's ceiling, no doubt the one reminding him that Safran was once his name.

Meanwhile, we learn about the fate of a clan called the Wisps of Ardisht. They were exiled to the rooftops. They ration their cigarettes after they realize that the supply is dwindling. When they have only twenty matches left, lighting a cigarette becomes a ceremonial event. The people become hysterical about the matches, thinking they cannot survive without them. Then a child realizes that each cigarette can be lit by another cigarette. As long as there is always someone smoking, there is no need for matches. The clan members set up a smoking schedule so that they will never run out of fire. For them, each cigarette is "a candle of hope."

Brod feels the same way about the Kolker as the clan members do about cigarettes. She knows he will die, so she grieves and wears torn, black clothing. She is now eight months pregnant with the child conceived through the hole, Jonathan's great-great-great-great grandfather. The Kolker complains that Brod is breaking her promise--instead of loving him until he dies, she is acting as though he is already dead.

In the days before he dies, neither he nor Brod sleeps. They pass notes, kisses, and insults through the hole. Even when the Kolker tries to sing to Brod, he cannot help but curse her. By the time he dies, they have had one hundred real conversations. The Kolker tells Brod that Yankel was not her real father. She tells him she loves him, and she means it.

The Kolker dies just as their child is born. She does not know whether the Kolker was alive at the precise moment of birth, and since Jewish custom forbids naming a child after a living relative, she cannot name the baby after his father. She names the baby Yankel, the same as her other two children. Brod cuts out the ring of wood around the hole in the wall and wears it with the abacus bead on her neck. It reminds her of the Kolker, but also that life is empty.

The men at the flour mill have the Kolker's body bronzed, and they place it as a statue in the middle of the town square. The saw blade in his head serves as a perfect sundial: thus is the Dial created. The statue is meant to be a symbol of strength and vigilance, but it soon turns into one of good luck. People from all over come to touch the statue for good luck, so many that he has to be re-bronzed every month. His bronzed body becomes stronger with each bronzing. It is rebuilt so many times that it no longer looks like the Kolker. Rather, it looks like his descendants, after whom it is molded.

The text returns to Jonathan's grandfather, Safran, who is kneeling in front of the Dial on his wedding day. He wipes the sweat from his face with the panties the Gypsy girl gave him. He prays to his great-great-great-grandfather not to let him hate the man he will become. Then the men carry him through the streets on their shoulders, and he and his bride marry in a short ceremony.

Chapter 17: 17 November 1997

Alex has been asked by Jonathan to make the character of Jonathan seem less anxious, though Jonathan was moved by Alex's latest chapter. Alex writes to Jonathan that at first he found Jonathan's latest chapter so confusing that he wanted to throw it away, but now he loves it. He urges Jonathan to rewrite the chapter so that Brod is happy instead of having such a sad marriage.

It upsets Alex to think about Jonathan's relationship with his own grandmother. Like Grandfather, Jonathan's grandmother lost her spouse and had to be strong to survive. He urges Jonathan to tell his grandmother that he went to Ukraine, even though it is painful and awkward to watch one's grandparent cry. But it is a grandchild's duty to acknowledge his grandparent's feelings, like he does for Grandfather. Alex suggests that Jonathan went to Ukraine so that his grandmother could forgive him, which means that eventually she must learn that he went.

Alex now reveals the secret that he is a virgin. He only pretends to be promiscuous to impress Father and Little Igor. This is also why Alex likes writing so much; it lets him pretend to be someone he is not. Alex says he was born to be a writer, because "with writing, we have second chances."

Grandfather asks Alex about Jonathan every day. Grandfather wants to know if Jonathan has forgiven him about Herschel. Grandfather cries every night over what he did during the war. Alex himself forgives people for everything; he finds comfort in thinking that everything is meant to be, including his own fate. Yet, Alex wants a better future for Little Igor.

Alex ends the letter by reiterating that Grandfather is not a bad person; he should be forgiven. Alex also begs Jonathan to make him and his family appear better than they really are in his book.

Chapter 18: Falling in Love

Back to the trip: Alex returns to the car and wakens Jonathan and Grandfather. He tells them he has found Augustine--that is, the old woman. They all go to her house, and she cooks them a meal of potatoes and cabbage. She has a lame leg and walks slowly. Her house has just two rooms filled with thousands of items: clothing, books, papers, photographs, and much more. There are countless boxes with strange labels like "Darkness" and "Dust." Jonathan records each label in his diary.

Alex notices that Grandfather is smiling more than ever since Grandmother's death. He even combs his hair when the old woman is not looking. Jonathan asks her to tell him everything she knows about his family, and whether she was in love with his grandfather. Alex does not translate this question for fear of overwhelming her. He Alex cannot keep his eyes off the woman, positive that she really is Augustine. When she brings the food to the table, one of the potatoes drops to the floor. The three men laugh, remembering their dinner at the hotel.

Grandfather tells the woman several times that she is beautiful. She protests, but Alex agrees. She is shy. When Alex tells the woman that Jonathan is from America, she asks whether America is a place in Poland. She also does not know what an airplane is. Alex is shocked and humbled by her ignorance. The woman begins to cry and asks why Jonathan has wanted to find her. Jonathan says he wanted to find Augustine because if she had not saved his grandfather, he would never have been born. He gives her an envelope of money from his parents. Grandfather asks the woman to come to Odessa to live a better life with him.

The old woman says she is neither Augustine nor the girl in the photograph. Grandfather refuses to believe her, and his temper suddenly rises. But the woman says she knew Jonathan's grandfather, Safran, even though she does not recognize the other people in the photograph. She says they are not from Trachimbrod. She goes into the other room and returns with a box labeled "Remains." From it she produces many photographs and tells a story about each one.

When she holds up a picture of a man named Herschel, Grandfather decides to leave and tells her to shut up. She keeps talking. She says that Herschel lived in Kolki and had to shoot his best friend, Eli, in order to save himself from being shot. Grandfather yells that she is lying, and she begins to cry as she pulls out more photographs. He says she is not from Trachimbrod, even though she says she is the last survivor. Everyone was killed except for the few who escaped, and even they were not lucky. Grandfather tells the woman that someone else should have survived--she should have died. He feels tormented in her presence.

She says that she was good friends with Jonathan's grandfather, who was the first boy she ever kissed. Her mother wanted her to marry him, but she did not. She digs out a photograph of herself and Safran standing in front of the house. Safran lost a wife and two babies in the war. Alex sees that Jonathan is crying.

Alex asks the woman her mother's name, but she refuses to say it. This reminds Alex that he does not know the woman's name either, since she is not Augustine despite his wishes. She digs out a photograph of Safran and his wife Zosha in front of their house after their wedding. Jonathan asks to see the house in the photograph, but the woman tells him Trachimbrod is gone. There is only a field now. Grandfather orders the woman to take them there anyway.

The woman remembers the town every day. She remembers how Trachimbrod was like one big family. She is ashamed to have survived the war. Grandfather keeps interrupting, calling her a fool and a shameful liar. The woman asks to be alone with Grandfather, so Alex and Jonathan go outside, peel the woman's corn, and talk about America. Suddenly, Alex is ashamed to know so much about America.

Alex changes the topic to Jonathan's grandmother. When he was a child, she would always pick him up. She was actually weighing him, because when she was young she was starving and fleeing from the war, so now she wants her grandchildren to be fat. Jonathan and his grandmother used to scream long words off of her back porch for fun. They were in love with words.

Alex grabs Jonathan's diary and begins to read some fiction about Alex's family. In the tale, Alex is standing up to his father. Alex cannot decide what he feels. Finally Grandfather and the woman come out, ready to go to Trachimbrod.

Analysis

Chapter 16 blends marriages from two generations. The marriage of Brod and the Kolker prefigures every wedding in the town once the Dial is erected, and in particular it prefigures that of Safran and his new wife. Safran's part of the story is full of sex, anticipation, and fertility. For their part, Brod's and the Kolker's story is also full of passion. Even so, their experience links love and violence very closely.

Again, a birth and a death occur together, although this time the situation is more complicated. One recalls the series of births of twins in Genesis that stretch the notion of the first-born: what happens if a twin comes out partially, then goes back in, and the other twin comes out first? In the present case, if someone is born just as someone dies, can the child take the person's name? It is only an issue for parents who respect the particular tradition of naming and remembrance, but the complexity of the story here implies a challenge to strict adherence to tradition.

The hole in the wall between the places where Brod and the Kolker live is a refiguration of the hole in the synagogue wall, the one through which the women had to look to see Brod when she was a child. Now Brod is the one looking through a hole at her husband, and he can look through the same hole at her. This hole is a breach in the wall; it brings two people together, while the earlier hole brought frustration and jealousy in its reminder that the women were outsiders.

The hole also represents an absence, and it serves as a reminder of absence. It therefore is conducive to love, on the ground that love is hating someone's absence more than it is loving someone's presence. The hole does much more than keep the Kolker from harming Brod. It forces the Kolker and Brod to hate one another's absence, and this is gives them a mechanism through which they are able to find love once again.

Once the Kolker dies, he is treated in the same manner as Trachim B. He becomes a symbol, and everyone makes his figure into what they wish. Even though the Kolker's marriage to Brod was full of tragedy and abuse, the men in his family now pray to him for good luck in their own marriages. His fate as a continually rebuilt statue, looking a bit different in each generation, being rebuilt in the image of each generation, shows that history and memory are malleable. To some degree we can make them what we want. In this way, truth feels less important to us than the hope for relevant meaning.

Chapter 17 marks the halfway point of the novel, if one simply counts chapters. This is the first letter in which Alex begins to tell Jonathan what he really thinks. For instance, Alex gives his point of view about intergenerational relationships. People are taught to honor their grandparents. Many people think that honoring them means keeping secrets from them as though they would not want to know the secrets. But according to Alex, to honor them is to be honest at any cost, even if it means acknowledging one's own grandparent's weakness or making them cry.

Alex becomes very bold with Jonathan in declaring that he is the one who is born to be a writer, not Jonathan. Alex feels a need to reinvent himself and his life, while he thinks that Jonathan does not. In this view, coming to terms with one's roots is not a reinvention but a discovery. But mere discovery is not what Jonathan is trying to do. Jonathan is seeking to create a history for himself and his family through creative writing.

Alex clearly still hates the fact that Jonathan's stories are so sad. This sadness violates Alex's idea of what a writer should do. He wants Jonathan to realize that a writer's responsibility is to create a better world through fantasy. This is the strongest articulation of Alex's narrative voice so far. It seems that learning how to write has developed Alex into a more mature human being.

The title of Chapter 18 encourages us to ask, Who is falling in love with whom? The theme of love in this chapter goes beyond eros or romantic love. Jonathan falls in love with his grandmother as a child, especially though the safety he feels when he is hiding beneath her skirt. Grandfather seems to fall in love with the old woman, even though he becomes very angry and rude towards her. At first, it even seems that all three of the men are falling in love with the woman, because they think she is Augustine. Even when they know she is not Augustine, the feeling endures. In truth, they are falling more deeply in love with their ideas of an older time, and with ideals rather than reality. Like Brod's, their love is "once-removed."

Even though Alex's persistence led the old woman to talk initially, it is now Grandfather who convinces her to take them to Trachimbrod. She and Grandfather have a long private conversation, and we might presume that they talk about what it is like to remember the very difficult old times. But Grandfather has had conflicting expressions of emotion, and nobody ever finds out what they have said to one another. From our perspective, they have an unspeakable bond through the past. Jonathan has come searching for Trachimbrod, and it is Grandfather, with his links to the past, who can get them there. Stubborn and cruel as he can be, Grandfather has one thing Jonathan does not: firsthand experience. Having lived through the war, he can have an intimacy and mutual understanding with the woman that Jonathan and Alex cannot.

Chapter 19: The Wedding Reception Was So Extraordinary, or It All Goes Downhill After the Wedding, 1941

It is the time of Safran's and Zosha's wedding. Zosha's parents, Tova and Menachem, take every measure to make sure the wedding is perfect. They are very affluent and live in the largest house in Trachimbrod, which is really two houses connected by an attic. Thus it is known as the Double House. They have many luxuries in their house from porcelain toilets to wine racks. Menachem loves the idea of improving the house, and he never wants it to be finished. He hires men to pretend to renovate the house, so that it will always look as if it is unfinished but has great potential.

The wedding is the town's big event of 1941. Almost everyone in Trachimbrod is invited. So many people come that the last census of Trachimbrod is taken there. Suddenly, an extremely strong wind sweeps through the house, causing total chaos. Zosha and her mother try frantically to put everything back in order. Meanwhile, Safran is in the cellar with Zosha's younger sister, Maya. She was waiting for him when he went down to the cellar to change his clothes. When she takes her panties out of his lapel, we realize that she is the Gypsy girl from Chapter 16. They have sex as the wedding reception continues upstairs.

Chapter 20: The Dupe of Chance, 1941-1924

As Safran makes love to Maya in the cellar, he gets the sense that every event in his life is a product of chance. He has no control over his life, so he cannot feel guilty for anything, not even having sex with his new wife's younger sister.

Jonathan marvels over his grandfather's physical abnormalities. Even as a baby, his grandfather had a full set of teeth. He was malnourished as a baby, because his mother could not stand having him bite her breasts. He also was an only child, because she did not want to go through the agony again. His right arm is shorter than his left, presumably because he did not get enough calcium from breast milk.

This lame arm, however, brings him good luck throughout his life. It prevents him from being drafted during the war and from working in the infamous flour mill. It keeps him from swimming into the Brod to save Maya as she drowns with the rest of Trachimbrod. It also prevents him from boarding a ship of immigrants that is turned away from America and whose passengers end up dying in a death camp. Most of all, Safran's lame arm causes many women, including Augustine, to fall in love with him. In fact, he loses his virginity at age ten and sleeps with 132 women in his lifetime, although he loves only Maya. Safran's unusual longevity in bed is another result of his early malnutrition. This characteristic makes women consider him a great lover. But Safran is unable to have an orgasm.

At age ten, he lost his virginity to the very old widow Rose W. He visited her house to help her in the name of charity. She pitied him for being crippled and, after confiding in him the details of her husband's love letters, she seduced Safran and they made love. He did not know what to do, so he followed her lead. She just wanted to be close to Safran's arm as though it were her husband. They had sex every Sunday for four years, until she confronted his youth and could no longer stand it. When she was killed by the Nazis seven years later, on June 18, 1941, her last thought was of Safran's arm.

Chapter 21: The Thickness of Blood and Drama, 1934

The Sloucher congregation pays Safran to visit widows' homes including Rose W's. Nobody knows that he is having affairs with them. Instead, they laud him for being so generous with his time. He does not even reveal these relationships in his journal. He is not ashamed, but he does not want to make any of his lovers, or his mother, jealous of his affections for someone else. He maintains that one can never love more than one person, because to love someone is to feel more for that person than everyone else.

In the present, Jonathan mentions that his grandparents met in a displaced-persons camp after the war. His grandfather's journal is the only written information he has about his grandfather's life before meeting his grandmother. He also explains to Alex why he cannot tell his grandmother about Augustine. His grandmother will realize too that it is impossible to love more than one person, and she will become jealous of Jonathan's and grandfather's love for Augustine.

The second widow Safran made love to was Lista P, the widow of the first victim of the Double House. Unlike Rose W, she did not spend her days missing her husband. She was happy, because her husband loved her so much that she could still feel it. Safran and Lista had tickets for the same seat in the shtetl theater. Instead of staying, they went back to Lista's house. There, he took her virginity--her husband was killed on the morning of their wedding, so it was never consummated.

The third woman Safran slept with was the Gypsy girl. He met her in the theater and recognized her from a bazaar, where she was a snake charmer. He was struck by her bravery as a Gypsy among Jews. He made sure that she saw his arm, and she immediately responded with a sexually-charged smile. The play was an exaggerated retelling of Trachim B's accident. We read along with the play; that is, we read interspersed among the lines of the play additional line of Safran's conversation with the Gypsy girl. He asks her whether she likes music, and they begin to fondle one another as they converse in the dark theater. The music begins to swell as they become more aroused. She leads Safran out of the theater and all through the shtetl to a petrified forest he has never seen before. They make love there as the music in the theater comes to a glorious climax.

Analysis

Safran's life is rife with infidelity. Jonathan is not following the pattern Alex would wish: why would Jonathan create such a morally disappointing view of his grandfather, when fantasy and the power of the written word give him the freedom to make the man into anything he wants? Perhaps this characterization is another example of the acknowledgment that nothing can be perfect. No matter how many renovations Zosha's father makes to his grand, luxurious house, it is never done. He does not want it to be done, because then were would be no excitement, no hope for a better future. In the same way, Safran is never physically satisfied, no matter how many lovers he has. He is addicted to the constant flux, the excitement of the new. Meanwhile, he keeps his love reserved for just one person.

Safran's affair with Rose W is ultimately a testament to the power that fantasy can have over reality. When she makes love to Safran, she pretends he is her husband. She gives in to this fantasy so completely that as she dies, she thinks of the arm and not her husband. The tales of Safran's sexual exploits lead us to wonder if he has a fantasy of his own. We know that he was malnourished as a child because his mother could no longer stand to breastfeed him. A psychoanalytically inclined reader might infer that the lack of intimacy with his mother has led Safran to spend the rest of his life wanting to be held to women's breasts. But there is never a fulfillment for Safran, symbolized by the fact that he is incapable of having an orgasm.

Safran's lame arm is another manifestation of the blending of life and death. His "dead arm" brings excitement into his life. Although Safran cannot orgasm and therefore cannot procreate naturally, his dead arm brings a wealth of sexual experiences. Moreover, his arm saves him from dying in several ways. It is because of the association of his dead arm with life that Safran is never truly viewed as a crippled person. Instead, his bold presentation of the arm as a sexual object makes him exotic. Ultimately, there is something erotic in recognizing that a part of his body is unattainable. Rose W tries to make it attainable by imagining that the arm belongs to her dead husband.

The way Safran makes love to the Gypsy girl is entirely new to him, despite all his sexual prowess. This time, the acts of making love are not all; the relationship is not purely physical. We cannot be sure that Safran falls in love with the Gypsy girl, but such a connection is implied. At any rate, their relationship is far more emotionally poignant than any Safran has experienced before.

The locations where Safran and the Gypsy make love are telling about their relationship. They meet in the theater amid music and artifice, and in turn their relationship is emotional and playful. Like the play, however, their relationship can never quite be real. The cultural differences between them constitute a draw, but an unfulfilling one; the differences ultimately keep them apart. The petrified forest is significant in that it is somewhere Safran has not been before. It is also a liminal space, set off from society, where they are suspended in time and beyond the reach of the town and its traditional history. The petrified forest, dead and empty, cannot judge them even as it bears witness to their lovemaking. The forest also connects them to ancient romanticized themes of natural sexual connection, even while it is a space that can legitimate their intercultural love.

Chapter 22: 12 December 1997

In a letter, Alex tells Jonathan that he is translating the novel for Little Igor as Jonathan sends chapters. This brings the brothers together and makes them laugh. Grandfather cannot look Alex in the eye anymore. He still wishes Father were gone.

Alex explains that his latest chapter was the most difficult so far to compose. He has been avoiding the issue of Grandfather "pointing at" Herschel. But he claims that Jonathan has taught him to be honest in his writing, even at the expense of dignity. For instance, he can barely believe the things Jonathan writes about his grandfather's sexual exploits, especially considering their immorality. Could Jonathan write like this if his grandfather were alive? If not, why not? And why do women love Safran's crippled arm so much? Do they want to feel superior to him, overpower him, or be close to death by being close to his arm?

Jonathan has advised Alex to remove the section where Jonathan talks about memories of his grandmother, but Alex resolutely refuses. Alex now returns to the issue of mixing truth with fantasy in writing. How can Jonathan write the way he does, or demand that Alex alter or omit facts? If this is allowed, then why not choose to make a fantastical account a happy one? Alex complains that the trip already seems too ordinary instead of triumphant. He wants to embellish it as Jonathan does with his family history. He even suggests that Grandfather could have saved Jonathan's grandfather from the Nazis: "I do not think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem."

Chapter 23: What We Saw When We Saw Trachimbrod, or Falling in Love

Alex, Jonathan, and Grandfather continue to think of the old woman as Augustine. She has never been in a car before, and she is too scared. Instead, she walks to the site where Trachimbrod once stood, resting frequently. The men drive behind her very slowly. They stop to let her rest in the front seat when she is tired.

As she rests in the front seat, the woman asks Grandfather if he has any children. Alex is proud when he introduces Alex as the oldest son of his oldest son. Then the woman asks if Alex and Jonathan have any children. When Alex asks her if she has any children, Grandfather shoots him a nasty look. She says she has a baby girl.

The woman leads them through many fields and forests, and darkness falls. In the dark she looks like a ghost leading the way. They stop in the middle of an empty field flanked with trees, where they can hear the sound of water. The woman announces that they have reached Trachimbrod.

Jonathan cannot believe her, so she explains how Trachimbrod was destroyed in one day. The Nazis came and burned the synagogue. Then they made all the men of the town line up. They unrolled a Torah scroll, and the Nazi General commanded that each man spit on it, or his family would be killed. Grandfather protests that this is a lie, but the woman insists that it is true. She says that the first few men obeyed, but when her father refused to desecrate the Torah, the General killed his wife and daughter. Jonathan says he does not want to hear any more. He walks away to fill bags with soil for his grandmother, should he ever tell her about his trip.

Meanwhile, Alex and Grandfather hear the rest of the story. When the General set his gun upon the woman's older sister, who was pregnant, her father again refused to spit. The General shot her in the womb, leaving her bleeding and in agony, but not dead. Again he demanded that her father spit on the Torah, but he refused again. Instead of killing the older sister (as reported above), they left her to suffer. Finally, they killed her father. The woman's older sister crawled away, but none of the Gentiles in the town would help her.

Grandfather asks the woman if she can forgive the Gentiles. She says she cannot. Grandfather says he could, because their families' lives were also at stake should they help a Jew. The woman tells him he does not know what he is saying.

Her older sister eventually crawled into the forest and went unconscious. She awoke to find that her baby was dead, but she was clearly alive. She followed the trail of her own blood back to Trachimbrod. The Nazis were gone. She gathered all the Jews' belongings, pried the gold fillings from the corpses' teeth, and cut their hair--to save it all from scavenging neighbors. The woman's sister bought the house in which the woman now lives, and she lived there with all the Jews' belongings until she died. She has considered this tragic load of memorials her punishment for surviving.

Before they leave Trachimbrod, the woman leads them to the monument that proves the existence of the massacre. The commemorative monument was dedicated by the Prime Minister of Israel, and it is engraved in Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Polish, Yiddish, English, and German. Grandfather and the woman walk off, leaving Alex and Jonathan to lie under the stars.

They return to the woman's house. She tells them that she last saw Jonathan's grandfather a few years after the war, when he had returned to Trachimbrod. They got into a terrible argument over Hamlet.

She says that Jonathan resembles his grandfather before the war. She tells them that there are very few Jews remaining in the area. They are too old or too scarred to share any information. Grandfather again invites the woman to live in Odessa, but she refuses.

She gives Jonathan a box labeled "In Case," as well as her friend Rivka's wedding ring, which Rivka hid before she died. Jonathan posits that Rivka hid the ring so that there would be proof she existed. The woman argues more broadly that Rivka saved the ring in case someone came looking for Trachimbrod someday. She says: "The ring does not exist for you. You exist for the ring. The ring is not in case of you. You are in case of the ring." The ring will not fit on Jonathan's finger, and the woman cuts him trying to make it fit.

Before they leave, Alex asks the woman her name. She says it is Lista. Then she asks him if the war is over. Grandfather kisses her on the lips. She walks back to her house, saying that her baby needs her.

Analysis

Alex's opinions about Jonathan's writing and writing in general are crystallizing and becoming more sophisticated. He is becoming a writer. He has revealed something of his true self to Jonathan, including his feelings toward Grandfather, his love of sitting on the beach, and his love for Little Igor above all things. He is a much more passionate writer, now that he has dropped his pretenses and focused on telling the truth. At the same time, he now cannot stand to see Jonathan suggesting the slightest pretense. Jonathan suggests that Alex should remove elements that embarrass or scare him, but these choices seem to violate the principle of telling the truth. First, Jonathan wanted Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, cut, and now he asks that the stories about his grandmother be cut. He does not say it outright, but Alex thinks these suggestions by Jonathan are cowardly. But an author cannot include all details of every situation, so the question of authenticity turns on decisions about which details deserve to be remembered and told.

But in accepting this narrow end of the wedge, Alex concludes that "I do not think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem." Thus he articulates the difference between his and Jonathan's writing goals. Alex is still eager to embellish his stories about the present, while Jonathan embellishes the past in order to deepen his account of its underlying truth. Alex is still naive as a writer, but at least he is now a writer. He considers Jonathan inconsistent, even hypocritical, with regard to the use of fantasy. He does not yet see how myths can express deeper truths. Still, as the two writers develop and exchange their own voices, they are working together to create one narrative. They may have to resolve this conflict about the role of fantasy in order to reach synthesis in their common project.

Lista's story reintroduces two of the novel's greatest themes: guilt and responsibility, and fantasy. Lista suffers a terrible tragedy during the Holocaust, but she survives. But rather than regarding her survival as a miracle, she is filled with guilt. She punishes herself for her own survival, just as Grandfather punishes himself for his (though his survival is more complicated). Because there are no other people to be responsible for, she directs her responsibility towards objects and an imaginary child. She catalogues and guards them in the obsessive manner in which the people of Trachimbrod once protected their dreams and their lives.

As important as objects are to Lista, it is the lack of objects at the site of Trachimbrod that hits Jonathan with such weight. The commemorative object has come from elsewhere. Jonathan collects dirt, as though to chronicle the nothingness that the shtetl has become, though dirt is also a symbol of possibility in that soil provides for life, and it is a powerful remembrance of the land that Jonathan can bring back for his grandmother.

Fantasy and reality are now intertwined so delicately within the narrative that they are very difficult to untangle. Lista tells the story of her own near-death and survival as though it is her older sister's, as the reader gradually realizes that the story is about herself. She also refuses to believe that her baby is dead. Lista is living a life once-removed from her own pain. She does not have to face her agony of the Nazi atrocities so long as she pretends they affected her sister rather than herself.

The novel leads us to infer that Lista is the woman whose virginity Safran took. We know that Jonathan invents the story of Lista and Safran after having met Lista. Therefore, he chose to give them this particular relationship on the basis of the story told by Lista. If nothing else, this development satisfies our interest in connecting events and illuminating mysteries. After all, it is tantalizing to think that Lista's baby, whom the Nazis shot, was conceived with Safran. The author provides us with the ability to make this inference without giving us irrefutable evidence. If fantasy is always an acceptable choice for the author, can we ever be sure that any part of the narrative is true, including the deeper mythic reality of the narrative? The author empowers us as readers to use our own imagination, to decide for ourselves whether or not we will believe in the author's version of the truth.

Chapter 24: Falling in Love, 1934-1941

The community remains proud of Safran's selflessness for visiting so many widows. Safran also makes love to 52 virgins, one for each position he learns from a deck of dirty cards. Thus the crippled boy has "two working hands," an actual hand and a hand of cards.

Safran does well in school, but it bores him. Half the school day is devoted to religious studies taught by an Uprighter, and the other half involves secular studies taught by a Sloucher. The schoolboys, like all the townspeople, learn the history of Trachimbrod from The Book of Antecedents. This is the same book Brod envisioned generations ago in her telescope fantasy. The book started as a log of important events, but it quickly came to include practically every detail of life in Trachimbrod. It is updated constantly. When there is nothing to add, the people write, "We are writing... We are writing... We are writing..." to make sure that the writing is continuous.

Jonathan imagines what entries his grandfather might have read in The Book of Antecedents. Some of the more notable entries include:

The Flour Mill: An explanation of its curse, according to which a man dies there every year due to God's wrath over the creation of matzoh.

Jews Have Six Senses: Jews have memory as an extra sense, which is a vivid perception of the past far in excess of what Gentiles merely remember.

The Time of Dyed Hands: Early in the shtetl's history, the rabbi dyed each person's hand a different color in order to catch a thief. A mouse turned out to be the culprit, but in the meantime everyone showed where their hands had been. The dye exposes many secrets but also results in false accusations, after people interpret something's original color as a sign that a certain person touched it.

The Novel, When Everyone Was Convinced He Had One in Him: In the mid-1800s, everyone became convinced that they could write a novel. Over seven hundred novels were written in three years. A century later, a boy looked for his great-grandfather's book in the library, knowing only that it was about love. The librarian laughed; all the books were about love.

Art/Ifice/Ifact/Artifice/Artifact/Ifactifice: All of these terms are defined in relation to one another. Art does not come from necessity or the desire to make something good. It exists only for itself. Thus, no real Art has ever been or ever will be made; the artist is always an outsider. The author of this entry wonders why we attempt to make Art anyway. Ifice is the opposite of Art, created for utility. Artifice starts out with the intention of being Art, but becomes Ifice. An Artifact is something purposeless that has been interpreted as beautiful in hindsight. It can never be Art or fact. Ifactifice is a nonsense word. Like other nonsense words, it was created in an attempt to find a new and better way of speaking.

The First Rape of Brod D: Sofiowka accosts Brod after the Trachimday parade on the day Yankel dies. He cuts off her costume with a knife. We flash forward to the scene of Yankel's death, when the Kolker appears at Brod's window. As before, she tells him, "Then you must do something for me." The next morning, Sofiowka is found hanged and mutilated on the wooden bridge. His hands have been cut off and strung from his feet. "Animal" is written across his chest in Brod's lipstick.

Plagiarism: This section claims that Cain killed Abel due to plagiarism, but Cain is the one who suffered because "God loves the plagiarist." This is because God created man in his own image, which was self-plagiarism. In essence, all people are made of the same material, and therefore plagiarism is inherent, natural, and unavoidable.

The 120 Marriages of Joseph and Sarah L: Joseph and Sarah L married each other 120 times after almost as many divorces over trivial matters. Their final marriage contract still hangs on the door of their house. It is basically a record of all the arguments that broke up their previous marriages.

The Book of Revelations: This entry acknowledges that death and darkness are a significant parts of life. Every person experiences the end of the world at least once--in dying. Was God's creation of the world only a beginning or also an end?

The Five Generations between Brod and Safran: Brod and the Kolker's first two sons die in the flour mill. Their third child lives a long life and becomes the great-great-great grandfather of Safran, Jonathan's grandfather. The names of the men between those generations are all hybrids of other names: Trachimkolker, Safranbrod, Trachimyankel, and Kolkerbrod.

Brod's 613 Sadnesses: These are divided into Sadnesses of the body, covenant, intellect, sex and art, and interpersonal sadness. According to Brod's record, almost anything can cause sadness.

The last page and a half of this chapter, and presumably of The Book of Antecedents, is the phrase "We are writing..." repeated over and over.

Chapter 25: 24 December 1997

In this letter, Alex writes to Jonathan that they are now working as a team but should not send critiques of each other's work. They are becoming the characters about whom they write--they are even becoming one another. They can give each other the safety and peace for which they both long.

The previous night, Alex as usual went to the beach instead of a nightclub, because he is saving up for a ticket to America. Nightclubs make him feel sad and abandoned, but on the beach, he imagined a painted white line connecting him to Jonathan. Grandfather walked up to Alex on the beach, and it is the first time Alex can remember that the two of them were alone together, without distraction. Grandfather asked to borrow money from Alex to find Augustine, but Alex said it would be a fruitless search. He asked if Grandfather wanted to do so because of Herschel, and Grandfather's silence implied that the answer was yes. He insisted on going alone and told Alex to keep his plans a secret.

This episode is very meaningful for Alex; finally they are bonded by something. But Alex is not sure what to do, because helping Grandfather fulfill his quest would leave Alex without money to move himself and Little Igor to America. He asks for Jonathan's advice, even though he knows the advice will not reach him in time. Letter writers converse in "misplaced time." For Alex, he now has something of real value, a genuine choice between his own goals and Grandfather's. Alex ends his letter with the claim that Jonathan is the only person who has ever understood him at all, and he is the same for Jonathan.

Analysis

The Book of Antecedents is a wonderful expression of the author's creative humor, illuminating deeper truths. One entry claims that Jews have an unusually keen sense of memory. This claim would be supported by the fact that the book exists in the first place. Trachimbrod is obsessed with recording every detail of its history. The instinct among the townspeople to preserve is as great as their instinct to create. For them, "We are writing..." is synonymous with "We are alive..."

The story of the dye is yet another example of how fantasy and reality can become indistinguishable. The world is so colorful, so embellished, that the people lose their keenness of sight when each color is restricted to represent an individual. Every object becomes a symbol of human influence, and the people can no longer tell the truth from the fantasy, the original from the presumed embellishment.

The entries on Art/Ifice/Ifact/Artifice/Artifact/Ifactifice debate patterns of writing and interpretation. Writing is often self-aware; that is, a lot of writing is about other writing or the act of writing itself. Like Rivka, who buries her ring, people want to be remembered. They leave writing behind as proof of existence, and they endlessly debate its meaning.

When we finally read the story of Brod's rape, much of the earlier narrative is explained. But we are left with mystery in that we do not know for sure that the Kolker killed Sofiowka alone. He and Brod might have done it together. We also do not know for sure whether the light in Brod's belly, a pregnancy, is from Sofiowka or the Kolker.

The entry on plagiarism exposes the manic individualism of the American academy, where everything must either be entirely one's own or properly cited. Older American traditions, and the traditions of other cultures' narrative communities, often emphasize the universal character of human expressions. The past lives in the present, and we do ourselves a service rather than commit a crime when we recover a past achievement for ourselves. In this, apparently even God is on our side.

The book's name, The Book of Antecedents, deserves consideration in its own right. Everything in the book is an antecedent, even the deaths and violence; after tragedies, life kept moving on and people kept writing. Again, ends can serve as beginnings, just as each divorce between Joseph and Sarah L gives them the ground for a new marriage contract. The world does not end with us, as Yankel wished. It goes on, and it is our responsibility to create lights bright enough to reach far into the future.

Chapter 25 is Alex's penultimate letter, and it is clear that he has come into his own. In claiming that he and Jonathan have become one voice, he has humanized Jonathan as a writer and decided that the two of them are now peers. Alex's new maturity also enables him to share a signficant connection with Grandfather for the first time.

When Grandfather asks Alex for money, Alex is very quick to decide he can forgo his own dream of leaving for America. He is awed by the responsibility that lies in his choice. He asserted earlier that it is the grandchild's responsibility to come to terms with the grandparent, and he now has his chance to fulfill his duty. In addition, perhaps in his new maturity and his greater willingness to stand up to his father, Alex no longer needs America now that he feels more at home in Ukraine.

Chapter 26: An Overture to Illumination

Grandfather, Alex, and Jonathan return to their hotel. Grandfather insists that Jonathan open the box marked "In Case." The men take turns reaching into the box without looking, pulling out objects. Grandfather pulls out an old, stained pearl necklace that looks like it was once buried. It reminds him of a pearl necklace he bought Grandmother, in which she was buried. Alex pulls out a world map from 1791, which seems like a simpler age to him. Jonathan pulls out a volume labeled The Book of Past Occurrences. He turns to a page at random and reads--it is the story of The Time of Dyed Hands, and the book is actually The Book of Antecedents.

At this point, Alex asks Jonathan something strange: he asks him to save Grandfather from what will happen to him two paragraphs later. He begs Jonathan to write the rest of the chapter for him, because he cannot bear to. However, he keeps writing.

Grandfather pulls a photograph out of the box and puts it down without looking at it. Jonathan examines it and is shocked. One of the men in the photograph looks exactly like Alex. With him are another man, a woman, and a baby. They hand the photograph to Grandfather. He seems amused by the photograph, and agrees that the man looks like Alex. In fact, it is himself. The photograph was taken in Kolki before the war. It turns out that Grandfather is from Kolki, not Odessa. This is the same shtetl from which Jonathan's grandmother fled. He says he does not want to know Jonathan's grandmother's name. Grandfather says, "I am not a bad person. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time." The woman in the photograph is indeed Grandmother. She is holding a baby, who is Father. The man standing next to Grandfather is his best friend, the Jew named Herschel, whom Grandfather murdered.

Chapter 27: Falling in Love, 1934-1941

Seven months after they made love for the last time, the Gypsy girl commits suicide and Safran marries Zosha. During the seven years they were lovers, they adored their time together. They often made love in the petrified forest. Their lovemaking was flirtatious, unlike Safran's sad lovemaking with widows. They could never be affectionate in public because she was a Gypsy and he was a Jew. They were more than lovers, too; they knew each other very well. One night as they lay in the forest and the Nazis were advancing, they thought about their futures. He would make notes for her out of letters clipped from newspaper articles about the war, while she would carve notes for him into trees. They were one another's only friends, and they shared with each other their deepest secrets. Safran took the Gypsy girl to the Dial and told her the story of Trachim B and Brod's life. He made her promise to help him write it down someday. On the day they made love for the last time, Safran told the Gypsy girl that his parents had arranged for him to marry Zosha, whom he has never met. From then on, they pretended not to know one another. One day, he found her leaving his house. She says, "Your books are arranged by the color of their spines. How stupid." He went to Lista's house for comfort.

Safran wanted to make love to Lista, but she found the prospect unattractive; the whole appeal for her was not being able to have him in his incompleteness, with his bad arm. Before he left, she gave him a copy of Hamlet.

We flash farther back to the first time Safran and the Gypsy girl made love. They guide one another's hands over their own bodies. Then we flash forward to the day when the Nazis bombed Trachimbrod. Safran has his first orgasm. Somewhere else, the Gypsy girl slits her wrist with the same knife she used to use to carve notes into the trees.

Chapter 28: 26 January 1997

In this letter, Alex breaks his promise not to critique Jonathan's writing. He is angry that Safran and the Gypsy girl cannot be happy together. He says that in his version of the story, Safran would take her to America, or at least kill himself so that Jonathan would never be born to write such sad things. He calls Jonathan and all his relatives cowards, because they all live in a world that is "once-removed," like Brod. All of them turn down love and the chance to be happy. As for himself, Alex understands what Jonathan is trying to convey about life's frustration; he often chooses to go against what he wants. He has given up his dream of taking Little Igor to America, and he wishes he could simply choose to be happy.

Alex did not give Grandfather the money after all, since Grandfather did not really want to find Augustine but Herschel, Grandmother, and others--people he never would have been able to find. Grandfather died four days earlier, having slit his wrists in the bathtub.

Alex finally told Father how he really feels, and he is now doing the same with Jonathan, for real this time. He asks for Jonathan's forgiveness. For the first time, Alex signs his letter "Love" instead of "Guilelessly."

Analysis

After so many clues about Grandfather, the dark mystery is illuminated at last. In Chapter 26, Grandfather's past and the whole dynamic in Alex's family comes to light suddenly, but the tension leading to this release has been building throughout the novel. Like the pearl necklace, the story is unearthed, brought from its box from obscurity into bright daylight. Like Lista, Grandfather has had to be prodded time and again until he cannot bear to hold his secret any longer.

Without realizing it, Jonathan and Alex have accomplished their task as the younger generation. They have led the older generation to reveal the past so that it can be passed down into the future. They may not have found Augustine, but they have found Grandfather.

Chapter 27 is again a chapter called Falling in Love, and again we are not sure where the love is. Do Safran and the Gypsy girl love one another romantically or only as close friends who sleep together? Is there a difference? Part of their flirtation involves joking that they do not love one another after all.

The lovers communicate through writing, which gives expressions of their love an endurance that can last far longer than the relationship itself. Safran cuts his love notes out of the war headlines, which symbolizes the danger of their love and forebodes that it will end. The Gypsy girl, identified with nature, cuts her notes into trees. Just as the war tears them apart, their cultural differences prevent them from being together.

The lovers return to the petrified forest often. Petrified wood is neither good for paper nor good for cutting love notes with a knife, yet this kind of wood will endure long after memories of the town have disappeared. The forest bears silent witness to their time together. The forest is a haven, precisely because it is dead. There are no interruptions or surprises; all the activity is their own. But like the forest, their love is stagnant; it cannot grow and cannot enter the city or public life. Like Brod and Yankel, Safran never really gets what he wants.

Chapter 28 is Alex's last letter. Here his honesty comes to its climax. Alex has learned about love from Jonathan, even though he says Jonathan and his whole family are incapable of really loving or getting what they want. As Alex has told Jonathan, to love and honor someone means telling them the truth. This is what he did for Grandfather, even at the risk of having it kill him--which it did.

For the first and only time, he signs his letter, "Love, Alex." In expressing the love of friendship or philia for Jonathan, Alex is expressing his anger and his joy, his gratefulness and his frustration. Their book chapters have shown that love is richly charged with opposing emotions and dangers. It is fitting that Alex signs his letter with love after he has