Finished the book...

Now that I've finished reading Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, I'm going to go back and check to see if my questions were answered, and continue to compare the movie and the book as far as the rest of the novel.

Does Augustine come before or after the much adored Brod, and what relation does she have to Brod and Yankel?
Augustine comes after Brod, and even though I'm still not really sure of Augustine's exact identity, assuming we mean Augustine as Alex thinks of her, Augustine wouldn't be directly related to Brod, but she rescued her grandson, or great grandson, from the Nazis.

Speaking of Yankel, what is this story about him swindling some man while his name was Safran?
We learn more about this in later chapters, although it never goes into detail about what he did, just tells you that he was sentenced and had to wear a bead to show his guilt.

And does the main character Jonathan Safran Foer and the author having the same name have any significance as far as the story? (Its fiction).
Not that was revealed, not that I can tell.

Why do people in Trachimbrod, or Sofiowka, behave so strangely?
This could either be simply an invention of the real Jonathan Safran Foer, or an invention of the Jonathan Safran Foer in the book who is writing this section, or it could just be how people acted back then.

Do they really record their recurrent dreams as it describes, even though they would seem, at least I imagine, such private and intimate dreams one wouldn't want to share with their whole village?
Apparently they do...

What makes Brod so special?
Mostly what makes Brod special is the strange circumstances that are her birth and adoption into Trachimbrod. She's also very beautiful, and this plus the mystery factor is I think what makes her so desirable and despiseable (to men and women respectively).

Who were her parents, why was she found the way she was, and what is up with the scene where she uses her telescope to look through a wall of a neighbor's house and read a recording of her apparent first rape, when there was no mention of her being raped before? What does this mean about her, about the book?
We still don't know who her parents were, nor why she was found the way she was, nor really what was happening in this scene, except if it was after the fact of her actual first rape, then it was just her reading the Trachimbrod book where they record everything that happens to everyone. In this case it doesn't really mean anything about her or the book.

Some new questions that were raised in the middle and end sections of the books are:

What is the reader to make of the relationship between Jonathan and Alex? Did they both discover their sexuality on this search, and have something of a fling, or did they just get so emotionally close it could be mistaken for such?
Who is Augustine? Is Lista the same Lista that Jonathan's grandfather slept with? What of the deceased mother and child who died in the Brod river? Why are so many women attracted to Jonathan's grandfather's dead arm? Does he only ever fall in love with his unborn child?

Basically I'm still confused about a lot of things after reading this. And even though I thoroughly enjoyed it, I'm just wondering if I'm simply not intelligent enough to understand or if I'm not making the right connections or wasn't paying enough attention or what's going on to make me remain confused.

And lastly, the book and movie ended up varying an awful lot, because the movie cut out a huge section of the book, everything in the past about Yankel and Brod and Trachimbrod and Jonathan's grandfather. They do hint at Alex's grandfather's past, but I'm pretty sure in the movie his grandfather was a Jew himself, not just his best friend. Also, in the movie the grandfather kills himself while they're still on their journey and Alex never kicks his father out of the house. So although they are mainly the same story and have much of the same dialogue, I'd still say they are very different works of art.