Les enjeux identitaires dans «There are Jews in my House» de Lara Vapnyar et Tout est illuminé de Jonathan Safran Foer : une affaire de patates ?

Abstract

This article seeks to show that potatoes are used as striking indices both in Jonathan Safran Foer' s novel, Everything is Illuminated and Lara Vapnyar' s short story, "There are Jews in my House", both authors being contemporary Jewish American writers of Russian and/or Soviet descent. The presence of potatoes will be studied in key scenes that crystallize the Russian-American Jewish-Non- Jewish interaction and confrontation, albeit in radically different ways. While Foer' s novel is characterized by the extensive use of the grotesque and the camivalesque to describe tragic events, there is no such alleviation in Vapnyar' s short story. Both works deal with the impact of history and anti-Semitism on the lives of the Jews in Central Europe., whether focusing on a pilgrimage of tragic-comic proportions, or portraying the devastating consequences of an everyday denunciation.