![]() The seriocomic, partly surreal picture of life in Trachimbrod begins in fine magical-realist form with the story of a newborn baby who inexplicably survives when her father’s wagon tumbles into the Brod River (for which she’ll be named) and he drowns. ![]() Malaprop) and blithely rearranges all his employer’s plans. Three stories are told therein: that of 20-year-old college student Jonathan Safran Foer’s journey (in 1997) to the Ukraine in search of “Augustine,” the woman rumored to have saved his grandfather from the Nazis Jonathan’s novel-in-progress, a fictional history of Trachimbrod, the Polish shtetl where his ancestors settled in the late 18th century and letters written to Foer by his Ukrainian guide and translator Alex Perchov, an imperturbable Americanophile who boasts that he’s “fluid” in English (in fact, he mangles it as memorably as Mrs. ![]() Comedy and pathos are braided together with extraordinary skill in a haunting debut, a tale that depicts, with riveting intensity and originality, a young Jewish American writer’s search for his family’s European roots. ![]()
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