![]() ![]() ![]() It proposed the possibility of a responsible duality, of "did and didn't" of things being one way and also the opposite way. But, I wondered, is the Holocaust exactly that which cannot be imagined? What are one's responsibilities to "the truth" of an event, and what is "the truth"? Can historical accuracy be replaced with imaginative accuracy? Objectivity with the mind's eye? EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED is my best answer, for now. My mind wanted to wander, to invent, to use what I had seen as a canvas, rather than the paints. What made beginning so difficult, and the remainder so seemingly automatic was imagination - the initial problem, and ultimate liberation, of imagining. In the remaining month, I wrote 280 pages. ![]() I returned to Prague, where I had planned to explain what had happened.īut what had happened? It took me a week to finish the first sentence. Because I didn't tell my grandmother about the trip - she would never have let me go - I didn't know what question to ask, or whom to ask, or the necessary names of people, places and things. ![]() I found nothing but nothing, and in that nothing - a landscape of completely realized absence - nothing was to be found. Armed with a photograph of the woman who I was told had saved my grandfather from the Nazis, I embarked on a journey to Trachimbrod, the shtetl of my family's origin. I intended to chronicle, in strictly non-fictional terms, a trip that I made to the Ukraine as a twenty-year-old. Author I did not intend to write EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED. ![]()
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