“Sono Ebreo, Anche”: Jewish Voices from Arab Countries in Contemporary Italian Prose

Abstract

abstract:The field of Italian literature of migration has seen rapid growth since the early 1990s, and one of the many voices in this literature is that of immigrants coming to Italy from Jewish communities in Arab countries. Unlike the writing of other migrant groups in Italy, the works of Jewish writers from Arab communities draw their themes from the legacy of Sephardic family origins, the compound experience of historical collective and individual migration, and the complex process of forming identities in the host culture. These themes are expressed in a porous Italian, open to influences from Arabic, Ladino, Hebrew, English, and French. This article considers these distinguishing characteristics in the prose of several writers who have come to Italy from Jewish communities in Arab countries over the past seventy years.