Books Like Everything Is Illuminated: Memory, the Holocaust, and Comedy as a Vehicle for Horror

Jonathan Safran Foer published Everything Is Illuminated in 2002, at age twenty-five, and it announced a formal ambition that most novelists never achieve. The novel sends a narrator named Jonathan Safran Foer to Ukraine with a Ukrainian translator named Alex — whose English is assembled from a thesaurus used with more enthusiasm than accuracy — and Alex’s grandfather, whose dog is named Sammy Davis Junior Junior. They are looking for the village of Trachimbrod, where the grandfather helped a Jewish woman save the narrator’s grandfather from the Nazis. What they find there, and what the narrator does with what he finds, is the novel’s real subject.

The formal invention is the vehicle for the emotional content, not decoration. Alex’s letters — “I had manyboys who were my friends, but Augustine was the most premium” — are funny in the specific way that the novel needs: the comedy creates a space of warmth and humanity directly adjacent to the horror of what the novel is uncovering. Foer learned this from Günter Grass, from Art Spiegelman, from the whole tradition of Jewish comic writing that discovered, after the Holocaust, that laughter was not disrespectful but necessary — the only voice in which some things could be said at all. The comedy is not relief from the horror; it is the mode through which the horror becomes bearable enough to look at directly.

The books below were chosen for readers who responded to that formal ambition and to Foer’s particular combination of comedy, family history, and the weight of inherited atrocity. They are grouped by what they most closely share: the experimental Holocaust novel, comedy and family history under the pressure of history, and the literature of memory, inheritance, and what the second generation owes the first.

Experimental Fiction and the Holocaust

#1 — The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

Oskar Matzerath, who decided at age three to stop growing and has spent the years since banging his tin drum and shattering glass with his voice, narrates his childhood in Danzig across the rise of Nazism and the Second World War. Grass’s novel is the formal ancestor of Everything Is Illuminated: it deploys grotesque comedy, an unreliable child-narrator, and formal extravagance to say things about Nazi Germany that realism could not contain. Foer read Grass; the influence is direct and acknowledged. The Tin Drum is longer, darker, and more politically angry than Foer’s novel, but it established the permission to be funny about horror — the grotesque as a moral strategy rather than a moral failure.

#2 — Maus by Art Spiegelman

Spiegelman’s two-volume graphic memoir — in which his father Vladek’s survival of Auschwitz is told in comics where Jews are mice, Nazis are cats, and Poles are pigs — is the other formal ancestor. Maus invented the genre of the Holocaust graphic novel and in doing so demonstrated that form itself was not neutral: the decision to draw Vladek as a mouse is a decision about what the Holocaust did to Jewish identity, about the dehumanization that the Nazis performed and that the comic-book form both enacts and subverts. Foer’s use of three typographically distinct narrative strands and embedded photographs is the prose equivalent of Spiegelman’s visual argument: form as witness.

#3 — The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński

A young Jewish boy wanders through rural Central Europe during the Second World War, surviving encounters with peasants whose superstition and violence are as dangerous as the Nazis. Kosiński’s novel is the extreme version of Foer’s darkness, stripped of the comedy: it is one of the most brutal novels ever written, and its accounts of what the child witnesses and survives produced outrage and disbelief when it was published in 1965. The novel was later controversially accused of being fabricated; the debate about its authenticity became part of its meaning. The Painted Bird is what Everything Is Illuminated would be without Alex — without the human warmth that makes the horror navigable. It is important and extremely difficult.

Comedy, Family, and the Weight of History

#4 — One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

The Buendía family in Macondo, across seven generations of repetition — the same names, the same obsessions, the same failure to learn from the past — is Foer’s Trachimbrod from the other direction: a magical realist family saga in which history recurs as pattern rather than arriving as catastrophe. García Márquez’s novel is the great model for the multigenerational family epic told in a mode that ordinary realism cannot contain. The comedy in One Hundred Years of Solitude is warmer than Foer’s and the darkness less specifically historical, but the structural argument — that families carry their tragedies forward through time, encoded in names and habits and choices — is the same.

#5 — The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

Josef Kavalier escapes from Nazi-occupied Prague to New York, where he and his cousin Sammy Clay create a superhero comic book empire in the 1940s. Chabon’s novel is the most direct American Jewish companion to Everything Is Illuminated: the Holocaust as family history, the use of popular culture (comic books rather than the novel form itself) as a vehicle for grief and survival, the question of what we owe the dead and what we can do for them from a safe distance. Kavalier and Clay is longer, more novelistic, and more conventionally plotted than Foer’s book, but it shares the same ambition: to find a form adequate to inherited catastrophe.

#6 — Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Vietnam as seen from multiple American and Vietnamese perspectives, across the full arc of the war. Johnson’s novel is the American equivalent of Foer’s generational guilt project: a country that committed an atrocity, processed it through fiction, and found that the processing was never quite adequate. Tree of Smoke does not use comedy the way Foer does, and it is a very different formal project — longer, darker, more realist — but it belongs here because it asks the same question about what a nation does with a catastrophe it cannot undo. The Skip Sands plot, in which a CIA officer pursues a classified intelligence project of uncertain purpose, is the American version of Foer’s road trip into the past.

#7 — Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Oskar Schell, nine years old, finds a key in his father’s closet after the father dies in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and sets out to find the lock it opens. Foer’s second novel is the direct sequel to Everything Is Illuminated in the sense that it applies the same formal strategies — multiple voices, embedded photographs, unconventional typography — to a different inherited atrocity. Where Everything Is Illuminated deals with the Holocaust, Extremely Loud deals with 9/11 and, through the grandfather’s parallel narrative, Dresden. The comparison between the two is built into the book: Oskar’s grandfather survived one firebombing, Oskar’s father did not survive another. The comedy here is gentler — Oskar is a child — and the grief more directly stated.

Memory, Inheritance, and the Second Generation

#8 — The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

Leo Gursky, an elderly Polish Jew who survived the war by hiding in the forest, is living alone in New York and writing a book he hopes will keep him from dying entirely. Alma Singer, a teenage girl named after the heroine of a novel called The History of Love, is searching for its author on behalf of a man who wants to give a translation to her mother. Krauss was Foer’s wife when both books were written, and the two novels form a pair that was clearly in dialogue: both involve an elderly Eastern European Jewish survivor, a young American protagonist, a manuscript with a complicated history, and the question of what connects people across generations and continents. The History of Love is more melancholy and more conventionally tender than Foer’s work; together they are one of the stranger literary collaborations in recent memory.

#9 — HHhH by Laurent Binet

A French novelist writes a novel about Operation Anthropoid — the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SS, by Czech and Slovak paratroopers in Prague in 1942 — and keeps interrupting his own narrative to worry about the ethics of what he is doing. Every time Binet invents a detail he cannot document, he breaks the frame to confess the invention. HHhH is the most explicit metafictional examination of the problem Foer confronts implicitly: what right does a fiction writer have to the material of atrocity, and what does it mean to make things up about real people who suffered real deaths? The novel is funnier than its subject suggests and more honest about its own limitations than most fiction claims to be.

#10 — The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

Julian Treslove, a non-Jewish man in contemporary London, has two Jewish friends — Sam Finkler and Libor Sevcik — and becomes obsessed with Jewishness after he is mugged by a woman he believes is Jewish. Jacobson’s Booker Prize-winning novel is the comedy of Jewish identity, guilt, and belonging that Foer reaches toward in Everything Is Illuminated but keeps at a distance through the historical frame. Jacobson is interested in what it means to be Jewish in the present, with the Holocaust as background — the way the inheritance shapes contemporary identity without being directly confronted. The comedy is sharper and more specifically English than Foer’s, but the underlying question — what does it mean to belong to a history you did not live? — is the same.

How to Choose Your Next Read

If you want the formal ancestor: The Tin Drum — grotesque comedy around atrocity, the permission Foer needed.

If you want the most direct companion: The History of Love — written in parallel, answers Everything Is Illuminated directly.

If you want more Foer immediately: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close — the same formal strategies, 9/11 instead of the Holocaust.

If you want the visual equivalent: Maus — form as witness, the graphic memoir that changed what Holocaust narrative could be.

If you want the most novelistic option: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay — Jewish history, comedy, grief, and a more conventional narrative.

For the Best Fiction Books

For the definitive guide to fiction — the greatest novels across literary fiction, classics, and contemporary writing — see our Best Fiction Books of All Time list.

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