I can't help but laugh at passages like this. Your reviewer is a sucker for the dubious joys of making fun of non-native English. The Alex bits rely heavily on the humor of Alex's mangled, thesaurus-enriched English. Between the letters that Alex writes back to Jonathan, as he reviews the story Jonathan is writing and sending to Alex, and the story of Trachimbrod, Foer has created one of those Escher-like narratives, where the hand draws itself. In the novel's second time, we get an account of Jonathan's goose chase, and much else, from the exuberantly non-English speaking Alex, Jonathan's 'premium' Ukrainian guide. Jonathan, in the hopes of finding this Augustine, by now surely an old woman, arrives in the Ukraine in our post-Shoah times and hires a guide. Grandfather Safran was rescued from the slaughter by a woman named Augustine. Who are killed, en masse, by the Einsatzgruppe, the German mobile killing squad, in 1941. Her blood flows in the Safran line, down to the 1930s, when Grandfather Safran's precocious penis becomes the marvel of the village, the hope of widows and lonely housewives. At the former date, a baby girl was rescued from a stream, like Moses, and raised by the scholarly, though much vilified, village userer. The first is historic time, told in the historic eternal, and relating the mock heroic epic of the village of Trachimbrod from 1791 to 1941.

The book is divided between two times and two voices. This is comedy touched with a darkness at the end, however - the endless tunnel of the Shoah.

Jonathan Safran Foer's fictionalized account of his particular roots quest, in the boondocks of the Ukraine, for the shtetl from which his grandfather barely escaped the Nazi killing machine in 1941, uses both the folkish idiom of Scholem Aleichem and the surreal layering of Bruno Schulz to convey the comedy of return. Houghton Mifflin, 276 pp., $24 The American search for roots is a form of magical realism all by itself. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Everything is illuminated book review