Portland teenagers hear young Jewish writer
By Deborah Moon Seldner
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A book is a creative collaboration between the author and all of its readers, according to National Jewish Book Award winning author Jonathan Safran Foer, whose novels of the Holocaust and Sept. 11 give readers ample invitation to participate in their creation.
Foer, who was in Portland April 27, spoke at Wilson High School, Cleveland High School and Powell's City of Books on Burnside. He urged the Wilson students not to consider an author as a distant, elevated being.
"Books are a lot smarter than their authors," Foer told the students. "They are as full and as rich and as tragic as the sum of all their readers."
Foer said that a good book invites the reader to finish it and to participate in its creation.
As a high school student, Foer said he was annoyed when teachers pointed out things they said the author had put into a book. Now, as an author, he said he is grateful to people who find things in his books, whether he intentionally put them there or not.
"Kids' view of books is so static," said Meiner. "Here's the author breathing life and color into the pages."
Foer is the author of "Everything is Illuminated," winner of the National Jewish Book Award, and the recently released in paperback "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," for which Foer received the Literature to Life Award from the American Place Theatre.
Winner of a Bronfman fellowship in Israel, Foer has said some of his best friends and the ideas he is most passionate about can be traced to the five weeks he spent in Israel before his senior year of high school.
Foer's stop in Portland was part of a four-day tour of the West Coast. He said he is making a series of short trips rather than taking an extended national tour because he hasn't wanted to be away from home more than five days at a time since the birth of his son three months ago.