Compares the outrageous Jewish conformism in Woody Allen's "Zelig" (1983) and Patrick Modiano's "La Place de l'Étoile" (1968). Argues that the two works have many narrative, thematic, and referential points in common. Views both works as subversive and as dealing in their own way with the trauma of the Shoah. However, the implications of "chameleonism" in France in 1968 and in the U.S. of the 1980s were very different. Modiano's novel marked the beginning of French confrontation with its collaborationist past, whereas "Zelig" came out at a time of relative American openness and tolerance to otherness.
