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Jonathan Safran Foer will speak at Sinai Temple on Oct. 15 at 7:30 p.m.

At the time when most writers his age are still trying to find their creative voice, Jonathan Safran Foer has already written his first novel.

A native of Washington, D.C. and Princeton alumnus, Foer wrote his best-selling debut novel, “Everything is Illuminated” at the age of 19 after taking a creative writing class with author Joyce Carol Oates. Foer will be in Los Angeles speaking about his book and his experiences Oct. 15 at Sinai Temple.

The humorous novel is loosely based on Foer’s own experience as told through two narrators, the comical Ukrainian Alex Perchov, and a character called Jonathan Safran Foer, who shares the author’s name if not his personality. The author deftly uses the story-within-a-story plot with many complex characters (who he says were not really based on anyone he knew) to build a story that everyone can believe in.

It all began when Foer took a three-day trip to Ukraine during his second year in college in search of a woman who was believed to have saved his grandfather from the Nazis during World War II. Armed with a photograph of the woman and nothing else, Foer was unsuccessful in his search for her in the town Trachimbrod, where she supposedly had lived.

Some may wonder why Foer felt compelled to make this search, since he had never been to Ukraine in the past and had little to go on, and especially when he said that he wasn’t particularly interested in family history, Judaism or history at all.

“I somehow found myself with plane tickets to Ukraine,” said Foer as he spoke into his cell phone, walking around the streets of Manhattan. “And I don’t quite know what got me from one point to the next. I know that summer was approaching and I had nothing to do. I was also feeling like I wanted to see what would happen if I lifted my energy toward a project.”

With no facts to help him, Foer went to Prague, where the idea for the book took shape. He imagined and wrote a family history, a town history, and the strange and magical relationships within it, stretching back to 1791 and ending with the war.

“It just came to me,” said Foer of the book that took him 10 weeks to write and two years to edit. “Writing was explosive and intuitive. And editing was just hard work.”

The story unfolds with Perchov, who narrates part of the book, humorously using mangled 10-dollar English phrases like “disseminate very much currency” when he means to say “spend a lot of money.”

Perchov’s grumpy and psychosomatically blind grandfather who works as Jonathan’s driver, and a horny dog named Sammy Davis Junior, Junior, also aid in taking the uptight, vegetarian and conspicuously Jewish American Jonathan through a hilarious and heartbreaking search through Ukraine.

Foer explained that Perchov, like the fictional Jonathan, embodies aspects of his real self.

“Like Alex, I think I have the same sort of disconnection between what it is I want to say, or what it is that I feel, and what it is that I’m able to say,” Foer said. “And I sometimes wear my heart on my sleeve like he does. I just show everything very often in a way that comes off rather foolish. And I have the same sort of romantic ideas about the world like he does.”

The fictional Jonathan (only loosely based on the real Foer) describes the mysterious history of his lineage, beginning with a beautiful genius orphan girl named Brod (named after the river she was found floating in), and Yankel, a “disgraced usurer” who adopts her. Underscoring their strange relationship is their love of loving each other, which is greater than their actual love for each other.

“They reciprocated the great and saving lie … willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life,” the narrator says.

But don’t we all do that? And could this need to create a story to believe in somehow relate to Jonathan’s need to find his grandfather’s past?

“The point of the trip was actually the trip itself rather than the destination,” said Foer. “The trip was its own destination in the same way that their relationship was the relationship rather than the ways that they felt about each other.”

“Everything is Illuminated” is not only about finding out the truth of one’s ambiguous past, but it is also about the power of secrets – what they create and what they destroy.

“That’s the neat thing about publishing a book,” said Foer. “The book comes to take on all this meaning that you didn’t intend and so it literally becomes smarter and richer and fuller.”

Foer, now 25 years old, is getting ready to head to the West Coast for his speaking engagement in Los Angeles, and is experiencing a success that he says hasn’t changed his life a bit.

“I think writing is all about authenticity and honesty. There’s no reason to listen to people who are anything less than perfectly authentic,” Foer said.

Jonathan Safran Foer will be speaking at Sinai Temple, 10400 Wilshire Blvd. (at the corner of Beverly Glen) at 7:30 p.m. Admission is $8. For reservations, call (310) 481-3217.