Negotiating Jewish identity: transnationalism in Italian-language writers of Jewish origin

Although several Jewish authors have written in Italian in the course of the peninsula’s history, Jews have made their real entrance in Italian literature only after the Unification of Italy. Many of the assimilated Jewish-Italian writers of the pre-Holocaust decades of the twentieth century experienced their Jewishness in a more intimate manner than those who started writing after World War II. In the 1980s and 1990s growing antisemitism and a changing memory culture evoked the need among Jewish writers to explore their ancestors’ memory, and their own ‘Jewishness’. Among these Jewish authors, the subgroup of translingual writers born outside Italy, but writing in Italian, have to a large extent remained under-researched. Their works play a special role in the intermediate, transnational space where representations of complex identities migrate from one national context to another, creating connections and intersections beyond national and cultural borders and shaping both supranational and national Holocaust cultures. This transnational dimension is the interpretative lens through which the project addresses the ways in which translingual writers of Jewish origin, based in Italy, negotiate their Jewish identity and other senses of belonging.

Keywords:Jewish identity

Disciplines:Literatures in Italian