The premise of a young Jewish man traveling to the Ukraine in search of the woman rumored to have saved his grandfather from the Nazis is one that could easily slip into the maudlin or the melodramatic.

In “Everything Is Illuminated,” Jonathan Safran Foer’s ambitious first novel, it is instead the doorway to a story that reveals itself in ways that are comic, dramatic, absurd and sometimes maddening.

Memory is at the center of the novel, as how people remember and what they choose to remember becomes a question. Though two of the sections are narrated in the present tense, they describe events from the past, which is made clear by the letters written to the young man also named Jonathan Safran Foer by his Ukrainian translator Alex reflecting upon their trip.

Alex narrates two of the three threads that run through the book. One section consists of his letters while another is the tale of how he, his grandfather and Jonathan set out in search of the Ukrainian village of Trachimbrod armed with only an old photograph, trying to find the woman, Augustine, believed to have saved Jonathan’s grandfather.

The third story line is Jonathan’s novel-in-progress, which revolves around an imagined history of Trachimbrod.

“I want to express myself,” Jonathan says at one point. “I am looking for my voice.”

“It is in your mouth” is Alex’s immediate reply.

In Alex, Foer has created a singular narrator, one whose mangled English is a cross between the stylings from “A Clockwork Orange” and witticisms attributed to Yogi Berra.

“My legal name is Alexander Perchov,” he says to open the novel. “But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. Mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her. If you want to know why I am always spleening her, it is because I am always elsewhere with friends, and disseminating so much currency, and performing so many things that can spleen a mother.”

The mangled language combined with a sense of humor make Alex quite the comical character. However, it does become a bit annoying. Luckily, Foer has created a story that is rich enough to not have to rely solely on its Ukrainian narrator.

Indeed, while “Everything Is Illuminated” begins as a comic novel and Jonathan’s passages about the history of Trachimbrod are a bit surrealistic, there are also moments of great emotion and drama.

“Here it is almost too forbidding to continue,” Alex tells Jonathan before recalling a decisive moment when Alex’s grandfather recalls a long-repressed memory from the war.

Where the book works best is in its exploration of how events that happened decades, or even centuries, before can still have a profound impact on people living in the present.