As a salutation to the Holocaust literature tradition, Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel Everything Is Illuminated explores the issues of memory and Jewishness in the post-Holocaust era. Through a quest-for-holy-grail style process, the protagonist searches for the root of the family history, and the novel reveals how the new-generation Jewish American writer endeavors to inherit transgenerational trauma, transmit post-memory and endow the Jewishness with new implications. From the perspective of memory theories, this paper analyzes the relationship between post-memory, cultural identity and Jewishness. It concludes that literary imagination helps “non-survivors” construct the post-memory, which is essential for the post-Holocaust generations to pass on Jewishness with new illuminations.