Francophone Sephardic Fiction

This book argues that modern francophone Sephardic novels, mainly from North Africa, draw on oral storytelling as well as modern and postmodern techniques to express the experience of migration, producing innovative imagined portable homelands with which the migrants successfully confront new societies, languages, and cultures.

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Francophone Sephardic Fiction:Writing Migration, Diaspora, and Modernity approaches modern Sephardic literature in a comparative way to draw outsimilarities and differences among selected francophone novelists from various countries,with a focus on North Africa. The definition of Sepharad here is broader than just Spain: itembraces Jews whose ancestors had lived in North Africa for centuries, even before thearrival of Islam, and who still today trace their allegiance to ways of being Jewish that goback to Babylon, as do those whose ancestors spent a few hundred years in Iberia. Theauthor traces the strong influence of oral storytelling on modern novelists of the twentiethand early twenty-first centuries and explores the idea of the portable homeland, as exile andmigration engulfed the long-rooted Sephardic communities. The author also examinesdiaspora concepts, how modernity and post-modernity threatened traditional ways of life,and how humor and an active return into history for the novel have done more than merenostalgia could to enliven the portable homeland of modern francophone Sephardicfiction.