Jonathan Safran Foer — writer with roots in the Russian Empire
Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist and essayist whose debut novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002) — about searching for a Ukrainian village that sheltered his grandfather during the Holocaust — was a bestseller translated into 30 languages. His subsequent novels Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Here I Am cemented his reputation.
Tracing the roots — Poland / Russia
His grandparents fled Poland and Russia (Russian Empire) to escape the Holocaust — the same flight that Everything Is Illuminated dramatises. Foer literally travelled to Ukraine to research his family's story, tracing his grandfather's survival through the Jewish communities of the Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement. His entire literary project is an act of recovering that lost world.
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Poland / Russia. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."