traveling, immigrants, Jewish American fiction, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jewish identity, the Holocaust

Although the Jewish Diaspora in America serves as an unlimited reservoir of literary inspiration for Jewish American writers, some of them feel an urge to leave the geographical borders of the United States and to travel abroad. In some of these writers? works, their protagonists travel to Europe to explore the land of their ancestors and recreate their Jewishness. Their journey to the Old World is often motivated by their desire to discover the truth about their family history; however, the motivation for their journey may be the curiosity of a tourist or a desire to flee from their everyday domestic frustrations ? which, nevertheless, may ultimately be transformed into an unexpected (re)discovery of Jewish identity and self-knowledge. My paper examines this theme in the novel Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, Bernard Malamud?s short story ?The Lady of the Lake? and his novella ?Man in the Drawer,? and Philip Roth?s novella ?The Prague Orgy.?