25 Jun Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated, movie starring Elijah Wood

(2005) I started watching this movie by accident, flipping channels. When I realized what it was about I set my U-Verse to record the movie so I could watch it in its entirety.

A young man learns that his grandfather grew up in a small Jewish settlement in the Ukraine, a shtetl named Trachimbrod that was destroyed by the Nazis during World War II. He travels there in search of the woman who saved his grandfather’s life.

The movie is based on the novel of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer, and he is also the main character in the movie. There really was a Trachimbrod, and the history of what happened there is told here. It was written and directed by Liev Schreiber, now a busy actor and one of my favorites.

My grandfather’s family lived in a shtetl named Rimshan, about 145 miles from Vilna, the capital of Lithuania. In 1942 Nazis sympathizers, actually Lithuanians who lived right there, murdered all the Jewish families. My grandfather had left 35 years earlier. When he was conscripted into the Russian army and had 48 hours to report for duty, his mother made secret arrangements for him to him escape to Canada. She never saw her son again.

My two cousins, Ace and Deborah Allen, made a similar journey to Rimshan a few years ago, just to be there, to see if anyone remembered.

Everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us on the inside looking out …

I realized that the reason I loved this movie so much, the reason I had a lump in my throat the entire time I watched it, is because I too am on the inside looking out, on this journey to uncover my past.

Everything Is Illuminated at amazon.com

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