Postmodern Holocausts: The “Rape of History” in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated

Abstract: This critical reappraisal of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002) shows how postmodernizing the Holocaust in fiction seeks to free the third generation from paralysis of memory but in doing so works against the concept of history as a record of past events, privileging instead history as a series of violations in an unending apocalypse and reconfiguring the past as a collection of myths. Such “postmodern holocausts” undermine any attempt to understand history as an objective record of real events or to recover a usable past. They do, however, return us to the question of how the Holocaust can be made real for those who were not there, and they also raise issues of the ethics of representation and of the future of Holocaust memory.