Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaledition.com/i/739920
October 20 • 2016 41 T he poet Galway Kinnell believed that "The secret title of every good poem might be 'Tenderness.'" It's a sentiment that could be applied to the novels of one Kinnell's admirers, Jonathan Safran Foer, as well. Though they focus on fierce subjects (the Holocaust, 9-11, the destruction of Israel), Foer's nov- els always exude a kind of long- ing for things that are gone, that will never again be. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a boy named Oskar whose father died on 9-11, imagines a book with everything backward so his father would leave the Twin Towers instead of entering them. He and his dad would then sit together in his room at bedtime, looking at the stars on the ceiling, and their conversation would go backward, from his father's "I love you" when he left the room to "Once upon a time" as he tells Oskar a goodnight story, and then: "We would have been safe." It has been 14 years since Foer's first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, was published, a novel that prompted the Times of London to say that the author had "staked his claim for literary greatness." Three years later came Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, then the non-fiction Eating Animals, then Tree of Codes, a work of art plus short novel plus poem. He edited, with author Nathan Englander, The New American Haggadah, and he's won many literary prizes, includ- ing the National Jewish Book Award. Foer's latest novel is Here I Am, which the New York Times called his "best and most caustic novel, filled with so much pain and regret that your heart sometimes struggles to hold it all . . . Once put down it begs . . . to be picked back up . . . Here I Am has more teeming life in it than several hundred well-meaning and well- reviewed books of midlist fiction put together." Foer says Here I Am is his "best answer" to how he feels about his Judaism. "It's the place I took that question most seriously" and is "a full expression of how compli- cated that is." The central ideas in the book are "home, people look- ing for home, home and home- lands in terms of family, religion and all alone," he says. Foer will be among the more than 30 authors speaking at the Jewish Community Center of Metropolitan Detroit's Annual Jewish Book Fair, November 2-13. Foer will speak at 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 3, at the Berman Center for the Performing Arts, followed by a book sale and sign- ing. "Jonathan Safran Foer at once writes to the depths of our Judaism and humanity," said Book Fair co-chair Susan Lutz. "His new book, Here I Am, aptly tells the tale of a fam- ily living Jewishly in the dias- pora. What makes them Jewish, and what is their duty to Israel? Foer struggles with the belief in God, and yet his story reassures an indication of the concept. Forgiveness, righteousness and responsibility are thoughtfully considered in this must-read novel for any Jew living the span of 20th-21st centuries in America." Foer was born in 1977 in Washington, D.C., the middle of three sons. He was never one of those kids certain of what he wanted to do when he grew up. But he had a feeling "that I wanted to know, that the answer would be a release and let me go." He was, he says, "longing to know." He found his answer at Princeton, where he earned a degree in philosophy. Foer took an introductory writing class with Joyce Carol Oates, who later served as adviser for his senior thesis — which evolved into Everything Is Illuminated. Published in 2002, the book tells of a young American Jewish man who goes in search of the woman who saved his grandfather's life in WWII. Both Everything Is Illuminated and Foer's next novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, were quickly made into films. So now he knew what he would do with his life. And it is a very good life. "Who could be luckier?" he says. "I have no constraints. I can really just work from a position of my own joy or at least my own exploration." How Foer writes has changed over time. He used to be an early riser, and he could use his day as he chose. Then he married and had two boys (he has since divorced) and so, he says, "the logistics of life" now come in to play. Everything starts with a bit of what he calls an itch. Like thinking about those people who, at first glance, seem ordinary — but are sometimes tremendously dedicated soldiers of the past. Civil War reenactors are a bit of an itch these days for Foer. There is, in particular, a group known as "Progressives," who remain in character at all times, wearing only military outfits and clothing that might have been found in the 1860s, eating only food like cornmeal and hardtack. The next step: "Let's just give this a little time and space and see." Because maybe the Progressives will turn out to be just that small itch you scratch continued on page 42 arts & life b o o k f a i r From Jonathan Safran Foer to a night of Star Trek, the JCC's Annual Book Fair offers more than 30 authors and events that boldly go where no Book Fair has ever gone before. It's A By Elizabeth Applebaum | Special to the Jewish News Jonathan Safran Foer Classic!