She was standing down and right to his grandfather in the picture. The straightforward description feels like a pause in the novel, a moment where the story is opening up all that is required of the reader is that they look: It is Alex, Jonathan’s Ukrainian translator, who describes the photograph during his retelling of their journey through Ukraine. The moment we actually “see” Augustine is one of unusual simplicity and clarity. By revolving the story around Augustine’s silent photograph, Foer draws on the elegiac nature inherent in photography-Augustine’s photograph is a reminder of a moment that can never be recaptured-while examining the limitations of representation. The photograph-silent, unchanging, and unknowable-serves as the emotional center of the story. The novel moves forward and backward in time, alternating between Jonathan’s travels through Ukraine and the text of the novel he is writing based on his family’s experience-and Augustine’s photograph is situated where the two stories meet. Jonathan’s grandmother told him that Augustine and her family saved his grandfather from the Nazis Jonathan then travels to Odessa to locate Augustine in order to learn about his family’s experience during the Holocaust, a history his grandmother refuses to speak about.
Early in Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2002 novel, Everything Is Illuminated, the reader is introduced to a figure in a photograph that the protagonist, also named Jonathan Safran Foer, calls “Augustine,” though he does not know her real name.
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