This is simultaneous one of the best and most unpleasant books I've read in some time.

I'd seen and loved the movie a long time ago, which adapts only one of three main narrative threads. Reading it now, I can appreciate much of how those chose to film it (especially the genius casting of Eugene Hütz as Sasha), much of what I was missing, and all the troubling echos of the ongoing contemporary war in Ukraine and the genocide in Palestine.

Another, maybe bigger thread shows us a fictionalized version of Jonathan Safran Foer's imagined version of his ancestor's lives on the Ukrainian/Polish shtetl that first thread revolves around. On the whole, it's heightened and whimsical, sometimes bordering on twee, but also profound, and I do enjoy it. It's also really fucking disturbing in a way it's not clear he intended.

I haven't finished the book yet, so maybe there's a payoff to this that I'm missing, but he explicitly sexualizes more than one of these imagined ancestors at ages as young as ten. I genuinely don't know what else to say about that.