Read Online Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jonathan Safran Foer
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shirts, glasses, watches, silverware. He had lost a shoe, his favorite opal cufflinks (the Sloucher fringes of his sleeves bloomed unruly), three years away from Trachimbrod, millions of ideas he intended to write down (some of them wholly original, some of them deeply meaningful), his hair, his pos-ture, two parents, two babies, a wife, a fortune in pocket change, more chances than could be counted. He had even lost a name: he was Safran before he fled the shtetl, Safran from birth to his first death. There seemed to be nothing he couldn’t lose. But that slip of paper wouldn’t disappear, ever, and neither would the image of his prostrate wife, and neither would the thought that if he could, it might greatly improve his life to end it.
Before the trial, Yankel-then-Safran was unconditionally admired.
He was the president (and treasurer and secretary and only member) of the Committee for the Good and Fine Arts, and the founder, multiterm chairman, and only teacher of the School for Loftier Learning, which met in his house and whose classes were attended by Yankel himself. It was not unusual for a family to host a multicourse dinner in his name (if not in his presence), or for one of the more wealthy community members to commission a traveling artist to paint a portrait of him. And the portraits were always flattering. He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.
On the advice of his lawyer, Isaac M, who gestured quotation marks in the air with every syllable of every word he spoke, Yankel pleaded guilty to all charges of unfit practice, with the hope that it might lighten his punishment. In the end, he lost his usurer’s license. And more than his license. He lost his good name, which is, as they say, the only thing worse than losing your good health. Passersby sneered at him or muttered under their breath names like scoundrel, cheat, cur, fucker. He wouldn’t have been so hated if he hadn’t been so loved before. But along with the Garden-Variety Rabbi and Sofiowka, he was one of the vertices of the community — the invisible one — and with his shame came a sense of imbalance, a void.
Safran moved through the neighboring villages, finding work as a teacher of harpsichord theory and performance, a perfume consultant (feigning deafness and blindness to grant himself some legitimacy in the absence of references), and even an ill-starred stint as the world’s worst fortuneteller — I’m not going to lie and tell you that the future is full of promise . . . He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others — the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had un-limited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room.
He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.
After three years he returned to the shtetl — I am the
Before the trial, Yankel-then-Safran was unconditionally admired.
He was the president (and treasurer and secretary and only member) of the Committee for the Good and Fine Arts, and the founder, multiterm chairman, and only teacher of the School for Loftier Learning, which met in his house and whose classes were attended by Yankel himself. It was not unusual for a family to host a multicourse dinner in his name (if not in his presence), or for one of the more wealthy community members to commission a traveling artist to paint a portrait of him. And the portraits were always flattering. He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.
On the advice of his lawyer, Isaac M, who gestured quotation marks in the air with every syllable of every word he spoke, Yankel pleaded guilty to all charges of unfit practice, with the hope that it might lighten his punishment. In the end, he lost his usurer’s license. And more than his license. He lost his good name, which is, as they say, the only thing worse than losing your good health. Passersby sneered at him or muttered under their breath names like scoundrel, cheat, cur, fucker. He wouldn’t have been so hated if he hadn’t been so loved before. But along with the Garden-Variety Rabbi and Sofiowka, he was one of the vertices of the community — the invisible one — and with his shame came a sense of imbalance, a void.
Safran moved through the neighboring villages, finding work as a teacher of harpsichord theory and performance, a perfume consultant (feigning deafness and blindness to grant himself some legitimacy in the absence of references), and even an ill-starred stint as the world’s worst fortuneteller — I’m not going to lie and tell you that the future is full of promise . . . He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others — the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had un-limited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room.
He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.
After three years he returned to the shtetl — I am the
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