Hybrid identity of Jewish-Libyans writers in Italian language

di Daniele Comberiati

In a context of literary representation of a city and of a precise time – the postcolonial Tripoli of the fifties and sixties – it is worth dwelling on the complex identity of the writers who will be analysed in the course of the essay: the first three, — Arthur Journo, David Gale and Victor Magiar are difficult to position. Write in Italian language, but were born in Libya and the Dodecanese where their families have come not in 1912 (year of the Italian colonization), but after 1492, following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Their native language is therefore the Hebrew Sephardic, meaning the ladino; the spoken language in everyday retained is the arabic of Tripoli (a different version of the classical Arabic), while the Italian was the language of education, later the first official language of the country of immigration, finally language of Scripture used for their works. Non-random choice, then: the use of Italian assumes a specific desire of the authors to address an audience well outlined and probably to rescue from oblivion certainly unfamiliar events. The further inclusion within my analysis of a non-Jewish author as Luciana Capretti has a purely methodological reason: it seems to me must use his novel as a counterpoint, or how a look outside in respect of the Jewish community in Tripoli. Luciana Capretti, who has known some of the authors cited, see what was, by those in Libya had come only after colonization, the perception of the Jewish community, supporting the thesis in a sense of peaceful coexistence after all more cultures and almost complete libicizzazione (to use the libyan language and handwriting) local Jewish writers group. She also has an identity complex: born in Tripoli by an Italian family, arrived in Rome in 1967, but started to conceive and write the novel Ghibli during his long stay in New York. Obviously in your case the distance (time and space) took the filter function and allowed her to use childhood memories and recollections without falling into the trap of nostalgia, casting even a polished look on their past. It is perhaps appropriate to adopt a broad outline of the history of the relationship between Muslim and Jews, especially Jewish-Libyans-Italian authors fundamental relationship. The communis opinio sees Arabs and Jews antithetical and enemies by vocation. It is sometimes suggested that this opposition can follow up at the most remote roots, i.e. within the time of the Patriarchs. The conflict between Jews and Arabs has actually origin well back, although missing episodes in the life of Muhammad, conflicts with the local Jewish communities, especially Yatrib (the future Medina). In the great Arab conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711, Tariq Ibn-Ziyad many soldiers were Jews and in Spain was consolidated an important Jewish community. Coexistence between the two religions (which was added, for some time, even Christianity) was good, if not exemplary. Would have waned in Spain in 1492, the year in which the Jews were expelled or forced to convert to the Catholic faith. Since many of them traveled in North Africa or the Middle East, the coexistence with Muslims was followed in those lands and would last until the 20th century. Throughout this time, the Jews enjoyed, like Christians, monotheistic minority status of dhimmi, protected by the State in Exchange for the payment of a fee. Although they preferred to live in their own neighborhoods usually called mellah, where they concentrated their synagogues (not unlike today's community of Florence, Venice, New York or Amsterdam), Jews were forced to live in ghettos, as in the Christian world, nor existed in Arab countries a substantial anti-Semitism, to use a term still inappropriate in the context of common origin, being Arab peoples Semitic. Mostly, local Jews shared the lifestyle of Arabs. To demonstrate the perfect harmony can serve as monumental writer Claudia Roden tells us, cookbooks, for Egyptian Judaism of her family.

Until the late nineteenth century local Jews and other Arab countries they spoke Arabic. They dressed well at araba (were Arabs, but different). The women wore the habara, the men of galabie and Caftans with turbans, hats and fez. Westernization and emancipation of the Jews began with the digging of the Suez Canal and the modernisation of the economy. He was born Jewish bourgeoisie, who after attending Hebrew school continued their studies by missionaries. Played a leading role in the trade of cotton and in the country's capitalist explosion [...] Were khawaggat, Westernized men dressed in clothing with fez. Some traveled from village to village by train. Their offices and warehouses were located in shopping malls of Giselle. One hundred years ago, a European traveller was shocked seeing Jews who ate non-kosher food in the Bazaar. In practice, our community in Egypt do not observed strictly religious laws, but the synagogue had an important place in the life. It was a meeting place for [...] We used a small synagogue located above a throw-in in a private garden in the neighborhood of Zamalek. It was full of men that moved like wobbling from left to right (no back and forth as the faithful in Eastern Europe, but from left to right). Spanish and Moroccan songs sang dirges monotonic melodies, Syrian and Iraqi, but also recite the Qur'an and Egyptian national songs ... The centuries-old co-existence with the Arab world is also caused by the discrimination of Sephardic Jews in the current state of Israel. The fellow Jews of European origin, Ashkenazi, they watched (I prefer to use the past tense, although they are still visible traces of the phenomenon) Sephardim as primitive peoples, "Arabic" and not European. In the early 1990s, the position of a "Moroccan" (or Iraq or Yemen) in Israel was not very different from that in France or the Netherlands, except that in the case of Israel the "Moroccans" were Jews, and forever.

The Jewish community in Tripoli, which dates back to the second Temple period (6th century BC), no longer exists, but the late 1930s consisted of about 36,000 people. In the analysis of literary production in Italian Jewish writers of Tripoli several items deserve special attention: first multilingualism evident of these works, characterized by the presence of Arabic words, tripoline (a particular King variant of classical Arabic) and jewish. The description of post-colonial reality, often accompanied by a veiled nostalgia, it is also helpful to understand Italy's economic relations with its former colonies. This is even more evident in Libya, where a bitter civil war and long accompanied the Italian conquest began in 1912 with the Italo-Turkish war. During World War II, when the fascist regime built the Giado concentration camp, Italian-Jewish community chose to remain in Libya, although the relations with the natives were difficult for what happened in previous years. In addition, through the special Italian-Jewish literary history, you can find those characters of diaspora, cosmopolitanism and multilingualism that characterize the literature of postcolonial migration and Italian. The authors analyzed here are shown with multiple identities – Italian - Jewish - Libyan – to which a language associate hybrid, and a particular sensitivity to multicultural issues. There are also important because they show a new kind of "italianità", quite different from the monocultural and mono-religious that even today some members of the political class tend to present. The migration was for them to write, because all the work has been published in Italy several years after the exodus. Analyzing their history is understood as the Italian identity should be built by Association and commonality and not for exclusion. 

The Tripoli of the 1960s, at a quick glance, it doesn't look very different from contemporary multi-ethnic city: live together, not without difficulty, Americans, British, Italians and Greeks, Arabs, Christians, Jews and Muslims. The Jewish community lives perhaps the most flourishing period: after the pogroms of 1945 and 1948, with takeover decreed by King Idris, the situation looks absolutely calm. Libyan Jews are generally affluent, their children speak Italian and attend Italian schools, but in the community the Exchange takes place through a specific language, a mixture of Arabic, Hebrew, and Italiano f Tripoli. The moderato in domestic politics of King Idris helps the community, although the weather slowly begins to worse-rare: the rise of Nasser in Egypt and especially the six day war of 1967 put an end to an apparent tranquility. The pogrom of June 1967 convinced much of the community that it is time to leave the native land; with the military coup of Colonel Gaddafi in 1969 for the Jews in Libya becomes impossible: migration to Israel is prohibited, the goods are confiscated, many of them reach Italy and Israel only through it. The jalaa, the expulsion, with which Gaddafi will terminate the Italian presence in Libyan land, also marks a historical moment for Italy important: the news is forcing the public to back over the years and the colonial atrocities, including the concentration camps recently discovered in Libya are just the most egregious. The white ships that carried the Italians on the Sicilian coast, in what is commonly known as "the exodus of 20,000," have forced the Italy to relate to a void: the critical reflection on its colonial actions.

This period of history is an important literary representation in Journo, Gale and Magiar. They are also very interesting texts for the literary genre used, a hybrid between memoir and fiction where real data are transferred from the plant. Arthur Journo, with his the rebel, drawing a picture of colonial and postcolonial realist and sometimes embittered Tripoli.

Lively, conversational style, the book lacks narrative drive, especially towards the end, that looks pretty in a showdown of the author with the people who humiliated. The text has a great value as a document of the daily life in Libya, also because Journo, not without irony, describes very well the Tripoli cosmopolitan and multi-religious of the forties and fifties and makes no secret of the atrocities carried out by the British and by Arab nationalists during the period of decolonization and independence, with expropriation and violence worthy of the worst colonialism. But the book is also apparent in the Tripoli bathing establishments, entertainment such as cinema and the stage: some elements of the Libyan capital, tied with those in other writers, form a perfect map of a city gone. Also important is its message of nonreligious Jew, fierce fighter of all fundamentalists, who can't read nor Hebrew or Arabic (languages who also speaks with ease) but he feels tied to both cultures. The author manages to never fall in between-in of nostalgia: the multiculturalism of Tripoli, who in his childhood was the most fascinating part of the city, becomes a simple consequence of the imposition of colonialism and war. Does not spare criticism, Journo, even Israel, promised land very virtual, mainly because of internal strife among Sephardic Jews, to whom belongs the author, and the Ashkenazi.

That year is the autobiographical book peacemakers by David Gale, which traces the ups and downs of his family forced to flee from Tripoli and fortuitously the Italy. The book of Gale is pretty interesting politically, as it proposes a parallelism between the Jewish refugees in Arab countries and the Palestinian refugees in Israel: in both cases nostalgia and frustration dominating the mind and becomes so difficult to establish guilty. Narrative level is certainly important the fact that, while examining a period quite wide (from the second world war until 2002, when Gale manages to return to Tripoli), the whole work is characterized by the feelings of the author baby, when he played with Arab friends and co-existence seemed a natural fact. The writer more mature than this group though is definitely Victor Magiar, descended from a family of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in the 15th century, Spanish, wandered through the length and breadth of Europe before settling in early nineteenth century in North Africa. Currently residing in Rome, the author was born in Tripoli in 1957, in the post-colonial period, but was forced to leave Libya in just ten years. His most compelling and complex is no doubt and the night came, sort of fictionalized autobiography, along with the author's family history and adventures of his uncle, Leon, fascinating and contradictory character. The story begins in the 1930s, and descriptions of life under Italian colonialism is very meticulous, even because Magiar uses to his narration of newspapers of the era and other historical sources, diligently cited in the text. The story uses a classic structural artifice to space the novel from mere autobiography: while narrated in the first person, in fact, the young protagonist (the writer himself) becomes Hayim Cordoba, which, if it keeps the Sephardic origins the author, immediately leads the reader on a fiction and literary character. The part that is more related to the post-Italian colonialism, and the most interesting literary level, lies in early paintings describing the girlhood of Magiar/Hayim: you notice the background once Tripoli multicultural and multi-religious, where classes of children of different races and religions will be challenged on a daily basis with the diversity learning to understand, even by tackling the difficulties to comment on the story.

It is not easy to teach history in a former colony. The dispute isot between Europeans and Africans in antiquity but among Italian colonialism and the struggle for the independence of this century. Are perhaps those 100,000 deaths out of a population of one million inhabitants, which make it so contemptuous and long is always polite Warda. From us doesn't and take advantage of the occasion to review the names of the fruits of the school garden: apricot, mish-màsh; oranges, burtugàl; dates: tamàr. «Watermelon?», and looks at me. «Watermelon? I do not know what is the watermelon. " Remain all appalled. The teachers not believing that seek an illustration in a book, finally they are showing me a drawing. «Ah! Yes, watermelon!» «Watermelon? That's how you say home?» "No home we say karpùs". «Karpùs but that dialect is?» «Not dialect, is Spanish ". «Spanish?» Sanchez, my classmate, is scandalized. "But no, it's a Greek word! It says karpùzi» now even Ivy betrays me. It is the beginning of chaos, everyone starts to say in their own way the name of the fruit of discord: the American girl, Jenny, is called to the Blackboard to write the name of the fruit in English, in Italian. Follow Sanchez and then Nàdan that writes it in store: Ivy knows how it is said in Greek but he can't write it. «And in Arabic? " He insists the teacher. «Dellàh» Mazhàla cut short, but not exact: dellàh's dialect. Then is Sayìda to give the right answer: «batih»

On pages relating to the description of the author's childhood tripolina, cannot be hushed up references to the work of the Tunisian Jewish writer Albert Memmi, who in his autobiographical text La statue de sel describes the life of a young Jew in an Arab country. It is no coincidence that the subtitle of the work, the Jews in an Arab country, which picks up again, once the title of the essay by purposely does not explicitly mention De Felice, Tripoli, Libya and in order to give a sense of General information at i.e perienze Jewish communities living in countries bordering the Mediterranean.

If in the course of the narrative, following the historical events, the coexistence between Arabs and Jews is becoming increasingly difficult, the author never fails to warn the reader of the dangers of religious fanaticism, also thanks to the teachings of his family and of the father, able to have a child educated, of not respecting the shabath, the Sabbath, the traditional day of rest for the Jews, registering it in a public school, where rest days were the Christian Sunday and the Friday Islamic. The book of Magiar has an additional purpose, to bear witness of the language of the Sephardic Jews, the ladino, which according to the author is the "true Spanish». The manner in which the author uses the Ladin language is extremely sensible and precise: every word, although perfectly understandable in Italian, is translated to avoid incorrect rendition of the text. At the beginning of the book, also, Magiar plays in a table of the Ladin language transliteration rules according to the norms of the National Authority for Ladino and its Culture of Jerusalem, not forgetting to put alongside the words transliterated examples of pronunciation. Such scruple is the narrative: in fact from the book suggests that for many Sephardic Jews is the ladino language better known and more widely used, not Arabic nor the local Italian – sort of lingua franca among different populations of Tripoli – and even the young Jewish State of Israel, which constituted an obstacle for Sephardic Jews to emigrate to the Holy Land, where the Ladin language is not spoken. The text of Magiar connects, in many ways, the novel Ghibli of Luciana Capretti, so far the only woman and the only non-Jewish author present between postcolonial writers of Italian expression coming from Libya, which is the same age (and friend of Magiar of family, because the parents had befriended in Tripoli before the exodus).

With Magiar, Luciana Capretti also shares the fact that they had to abandon the hometown Tripoli during childhood, in just five years, due to the progressive worsening of the economic conditions of their families who decided to return to Italy. Ghibli, a title that refers to the hot desert wind that seems to engulf the town, is actually an effective metaphor to analyze the situation of the Italian community during the jalaa. Choral novel, the real star is the Libyan capital, that is treated by the author as a character, as if it had its own personality. Returns with even more nostalgic echo of intense-many works previously covered: the multicultural world of yesteryear seems vanished forever under the blows of political or religious fanaticism that should certainly appear meaningless to those who for years has lived without. The houses of the Incis built from fascism to civil servants, the colonial district of the City Garden, the Medina, the Sicilian ice cream shop, Hara, the Jewish quarter, the shops of dealers: Tripoli becomes a set of concrete places, described specifically, yet held together by an imaginary aura, like she wasn't really a city to tie them. Become places of memo-ria and together places of imagination, giving shape to a sweet city, "as the dates that ripen there, like bananas that the smell". Luciana Capretti in the novel uses the history of the Jewish community as privileged Prism to interpret what will happen soon: the Jews, who had arrived before the Italian colonialists and that they felt in all Libyans and Castello, drop out City after the pogrom of 1967; the Italians however fail to realize what is really going on. Their colonial mentality still prevents them from throwing a polished look on the surrounding reality and the consequent feeling of invincibility or impunity will be revealed as a bad ally at the time of the expulsion. With Luciana Capretti virtually closes off the descriptions of jalaa, which incorporates more generally the dynamics of the expulsion of the Jewish community. The violence of colonialism have not been absorbed: the contradictions of current Libyan society should consider the consequences of such historical removal in Italian. From the literary point of view, it becomes necessary at the current time, operate a widening of the corpus of postcolonial works of Italian authors ' texts mentioned expression born in Libya, areIn a context of literary representation of a city and of a precise time – the postcolonial Tripoli of the fifties and sixties – it is worth dwelling on the complex identity of the writers who will be analysed in the course of the essay: the first three, — Arthur Journo, David Gale and Victor Magiar are difficult to position. Write in Italian language, but were born in Libya and the Dodecanese where their families have come not in 1912 (year of the Italian colonization), but after 1492, following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Their native language is therefore the Hebrew Sephardic, meaning the ladino; the spoken language in everyday retained is the arabic of Tripoli (a different version of the classical Arabic), while the Italian was the language of education, later the first official language of the country of immigration, finally language of Scripture used for their works. Non-random choice, then: the use of Italian assumes a specific desire of the authors to address an audience well outlined and probably to rescue from oblivion certainly unfamiliar events.

Luciana Capretti

The further inclusion within my analysis of a non-Jewish author as Luciana Capretti has a purely methodological reason: it seems to me must use his novel as a counterpoint, or how a look outside in respect of the Jewish community in Tripoli. Luciana Capretti, who has known some of the authors cited, see what was, by those in Libya had come only after colonization, the perception of the Jewish community, supporting the thesis in a sense of peaceful coexistence after all more cultures and almost complete libicizzazione (to use the libyan language and handwriting) local Jewish writers group. She also has an identity complex: born in Tripoli by an Italian family, arrived in Rome in 1967, but started to conceive and write the novel Ghibli during his long stay in New York. Obviously in your case the distance (time and space) took the filter function and allowed her to use childhood memories and recollections without falling into the trap of nostalgia, casting even a polished look on their past. It is perhaps appropriate to adopt a broad outline of the history of the relationship between Muslim and Jews, especially Jewish-Libyans-Italian authors fundamental relationship. The communis opinio sees Arabs and Jews antithetical and enemies by vocation. It is sometimes suggested that this opposition can follow up at the most remote roots, i.e. within the time of the Patriarchs. The conflict between Jews and Arabs has actually origin well back, although missing episodes in the life of Muhammad, conflicts with the local Jewish communities, especially Yatrib (the future Medina). In the great Arab conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711, Tariq Ibn-Ziyad many soldiers were Jews and in Spain was consolidated an important Jewish community. Coexistence between the two religions (which was added, for some time, even Christianity) was good, if not exemplary. Would have waned in Spain in 1492, the year in which the Jews were expelled or forced to convert to the Catholic faith. Since many of them traveled in North Africa or the Middle East, the coexistence with Muslims was followed in those lands and would last until the 20th century. Throughout this time, the Jews enjoyed, like Christians, monotheistic minority status of dhimmi, protected by the State in Exchange for the payment of a fee. Although they preferred to live in their own neighborhoods usually called mellah, where they concentrated their synagogues (not unlike today's community of Florence, Venice, New York or Amsterdam), Jews were forced to live in ghettos, as in the Christian world, nor existed in Arab countries a substantial anti-Semitism, to use a term still inappropriate in the context of common origin, being Arab peoples Semitic. Mostly, local Jews shared the lifestyle of Arabs. To demonstrate the perfect harmony can serve as monumental writer Claudia Roden tells us, cookbooks, for Egyptian Judaism of her family. Until the late nineteenth century local Jews and other Arab countries they spoke Arabic. They dressed well at araba (were Arabs, but different). The women wore the habara, the men of galabie and Caftans with turbans, hats and fez. Westernization and emancipation of the Jews began with the digging of the Suez Canal and the modernisation of the economy. He was born Jewish bourgeoisie, who after attending Hebrew school continued their studies by missionaries. Played a leading role in the trade of cotton and in the country's capitalist explosion [...] Were khawaggat, Westernized men dressed in clothing with fez. Some traveled from village to village by train. Their offices and warehouses were located in shopping malls of Giselle. One hundred years ago, a European traveller was shocked seeing Jews who ate non-kosher food in the Bazaar. In practice, our community in Egypt do not observed strictly religious laws, but the synagogue had an important place in the life. It was a meeting place for [...] We used a small synagogue located above a throw-in in a private garden in the neighborhood of Zamalek. It was full of men that moved like wobbling from left to right (no back and forth as the faithful in Eastern Europe, but from left to right). Spanish and Moroccan songs sang dirges monotonic melodies, Syrian and Iraqi, but also recite the Qur'an and Egyptian national songs ... The centuries-old co-existence with the Arab world is also caused by the discrimination of Sephardic Jews in the current state of Israel. The fellow Jews of European origin, Ashkenazi, they watched (I prefer to use the past tense, although they are still visible traces of the phenomenon) Sephardim as primitive peoples, "Arabic" and not European. In the early 1990s, the position of a "Moroccan" (or Iraq or Yemen) in Israel was not very different from that in France or the Netherlands, except that in the case of Israel the "Moroccans" were Jews, and forever. The Jewish community in Tripoli, which dates back to the second Temple period (6th century BC), no longer exists, but the late 1930s consisted of about 36,000 people. In the analysis of literary production in Italian Jewish writers of Tripoli several items deserve special attention: first multilingualism evident of these works, characterized by the presence of Arabic words, tripoline (a particular King variant of classical Arabic) and jewish. The description of post-colonial reality, often accompanied by a veiled nostalgia, it is also helpful to understand Italy's economic relations with its former colonies. This is even more evident in Libya, where a bitter civil war and long accompanied the Italian conquest began in 1912 with the Italo-Turkish war. During World War II, when the fascist regime built the Giado concentration camp, Italian-Jewish community chose to remain in Libya, although the relations with the natives were difficult for what happened in previous years. In addition, through the special Italian-Jewish literary history, you can find those characters of diaspora, cosmopolitanism and multilingualism that characterize the literature of postcolonial migration and Italian. The authors analyzed here are shown with multiple identities – Italian Jewish Libyan – to which a language associate hybrid, and a particular sensitivity to multicultural issues. There are also important because they show a new kind of "italianità", quite different from the monocultural and mono-religious that even today some members of the political class tend to present. The migration was for them to write, because all the work has been published in Italy several years after the exodus. Analyzing their history is understood as the Italian identity should be built by Association and commonality and not for exclusion. The Tripoli of the 1960s, at a quick glance, it doesn't look very different from contemporary multi-ethnic city: live together, not without difficulty, Americans, British, Italians and Greeks, Arabs, Christians, Jews and Muslims. The Jewish community lives perhaps the most flourishing period: after the pogroms of 1945 and 1948, with takeover decreed by King Idris, the situation looks absolutely calm. Libyan Jews are generally affluent, their children speak Italian and attend Italian schools, but in the community the Exchange takes place through a specific language, a mixture of Arabic, Hebrew, and Italiano f Tripoli. The moderato in domestic politics of King Idris helps the community, although the weather slowly begins to worse-rare: the rise of Nasser in Egypt and especially the six day war of 1967 put an end to an apparent tranquility. The pogrom of June 1967 convinced much of the community that it is time to leave the native land; with the military coup of Colonel Gaddafi in 1969 for the Jews in Libya becomes impossible: migration to Israel is prohibited, the goods are confiscated, many of them reach Italy and Israel only through it. The jalaa, the expulsion, with which Gaddafi will terminate the Italian presence in Libyan land, also marks a historical moment for Italy important: the news is forcing the public to back over the years and the colonial atrocities, including the concentration camps recently discovered in Libya are just the most egregious. The white ships that carried the Italians on the Sicilian coast, in what is commonly known as "the exodus of 20,000," have forced the Italy to relate to a void: the critical reflection on its colonial actions. This period of history is an important literary representation in Journo, Gale and Magiar. They are also very interesting texts for the literary genre used, a hybrid between memoir and fiction where real data are transferred from the plant. Arthur Journo, with his the rebel, drawing a picture of colonial and postcolonial realist and sometimes embittered Tripoli. Lively, conversational style, the book lacks narrative drive, especially towards the end, that looks pretty in a showdown of the author with the people who humiliated. The text has a great value as a document of the daily life in Libya, also because Journo, not without irony, describes very well the Tripoli cosmopolitan and multi-religious of the forties and fifties and makes no secret of the atrocities carried out by the British and by Arab nationalists during the period of decolonization and independence, with expropriation and violence worthy of the worst colonialism. But the book is also apparent in the Tripoli bathing establishments, entertainment such as cinema and the stage: some elements of the Libyan capital, tied with those in other writers, form a perfect map of a city gone. Also important is its message of nonreligious Jew, fierce fighter of all fundamentalists, who can't read nor Hebrew or Arabic (languages who also speaks with ease) but he feels tied to both cultures. The author manages to never fall in between-in of nostalgia: the multiculturalism of Tripoli, who in his childhood was the most fascinating part of the city, becomes a simple consequence of the imposition of colonialism and war. Does not spare criticism, Journo, even Israel, promised land very virtual, mainly because of internal strife among Sephardic Jews, to whom belongs the author, and the Ashkenazi. That year is the autobiographical book peacemakers by David Gale, which traces the ups and downs of his family forced to flee from Tripoli and fortuitously the Italy. The book of Gale is pretty interesting politically, as it proposes a parallelism between the Jewish refugees in Arab countries and the Palestinian refugees in Israel: in both cases nostalgia and frustration dominating the mind and becomes so difficult to establish guilty. Narrative level is certainly important the fact that, while examining a period quite wide (from the second world war until 2002, when Gale manages to return to Tripoli), the whole work is characterized by the feelings of the author baby, when he played with Arab friends and co-existence seemed a natural fact. The writer more mature than this group though is definitely Victor Magiar, descended from a family of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in the 15th century, Spanish, wandered through the length and breadth of Europe before settling in early nineteenth century in North Africa. Currently residing in Rome, the author was born in Tripoli in 1957, in the post-colonial period, but was forced to leave Libya in just ten years. His most compelling and complex is no doubt and the night came, sort of fictionalized autobiography, along with the author's family history and adventures of his uncle, Leon, fascinating and contradictory character. The story begins in the 1930s, and descriptions of life under Italian colonialism is very meticulous, even because Magiar uses to his narration of newspapers of the era and other historical sources, diligently cited in the text. The story uses a classic structural artifice to space the novel from mere autobiography: while narrated in the first person, in fact, the young protagonist (the writer himself) becomes Hayim Cordoba, which, if it keeps the Sephardic origins the author, immediately leads the reader on a fiction and literary character. The part that is more related to the post-Italian colonialism, and the most interesting literary level, lies in early paintings describing the girlhood of Magiar/Hayim: you notice the background once Tripoli multicultural and multi-religious, where classes of children of different races and religions will be challenged on a daily basis with the diversity learning to understand, even by tackling the difficulties to comment on the story. It is not easy to teach history in a former colony. The dispute is not between Europeans and Africans in antiquity but among Italian colonialism and the struggle for the independence of this century. Are perhaps those 100,000 deaths out of a population of one million inhabitants, which make it so contemptuous and long is always polite Warda.

From us doesn't and take advantage of the occasion to review the names of the fruits of the school garden: apricot, mish-màsh; oranges, burtugàl; dates: tamàr. «Watermelon?», and looks at me. «Watermelon? I do not know what is the watermelon. " Remain all appalled. The teachers not believing that seek an illustration in a book, finally they are showing me a drawing. «Ah! Yes, watermelon!» «Watermelon? That's how you say home?» "No home we say karpùs". «Karpùs but that dialect is?» «Not dialect, is Spanish ". «Spanish?» Sanchez, my classmate, is scandalized. "But no, it's a Greek word! It says karpùzi» now even Ivy betrays me. It is the beginning of chaos, everyone starts to say in their own way the name of the fruit of discord: the American girl, Jenny, is called to the Blackboard to write the name of the fruit in English, in Italian. Follow Sanchez and then Nàdan that writes it in store: Ivy knows how it is said in Greek but he can't write it. «And in Arabic? " He insists the teacher. «Dellàh» Mazhàla cut short, but not exact: dellàh's dialect. Then is Sayìda to give the right answer: «batih».

On pages relating to the description of the author's childhood tripolina, cannot be hushed up references to the work of the Tunisian Jewish writer Albert Memmi, who in his autobiographical text La statue de sel describes the life of a young Jew in an Arab country. It is no coincidence that the subtitle of the work, the Jews in an Arab country, which picks up again, once the title of the essay by purposely does not explicitly mention De Felice, Tripoli, Libya and in order to give a sense of General information at i.e perienze Jewish communities living in countries bordering the Mediterranean. If in the course of the narrative, following the historical events, the coexistence between Arabs and Jews is becoming increasingly difficult, the author never fails to warn the reader of the dangers of religious fanaticism, also thanks to the teachings of his family and of the father, able to have a child educated, of not respecting the shabath, the Sabbath, the traditional day of rest for the Jews, registering it in a public school, where rest days were the Christian Sunday and the Friday Islamic. The book of Magiar has an additional purpose, to bear witness of the language of the Sephardic Jews, the ladino, which according to the author is the "true Spanish». The manner in which the author uses the Ladin language is extremely sensible and precise: every word, although perfectly understandable in Italian, is translated to avoid incorrect rendition of the text. At the beginning of the book, also, Magiar plays in a table of the Ladin language transliteration rules according to the norms of the National Authority for Ladino and its Culture of Jerusalem, not forgetting to put alongside the words transliterated examples of pronunciation. Such scruple is the narrative: in fact from the book suggests that for many Sephardic Jews is the ladino language better known and more widely used, not Arabic nor the local Italian – sort of lingua franca among different populations of Tripoli – and even the young Jewish State of Israel, which constituted an obstacle for Sephardic Jews to emigrate to the Holy Land, where the Ladin language is not spoken. The text of Magiar connects, in many ways, the novel Ghibli of Luciana Capretti, so far the only woman and the only non-Jewish author present between postcolonial writers of Italian expression coming from Libya, which is the same age (and friend of Magiar of family, because the parents had befriended in Tripoli before the exodus). With Magiar, Luciana Capretti also shares the fact that they had to abandon the hometown Tripoli during childhood, in just five years, due to the progressive worsening of the economic conditions of their families who decided to return to Italy. Ghibli, a title that refers to the hot desert wind that seems to engulf the town, is actually an effective metaphor to analyze the situation of the Italian community during the jalaa. Choral novel, the real star is the Libyan capital, that is treated by the author as a character, as if it had its own personality. Returns with even more nostalgic echo of intense-many works previously covered: the multicultural world of yesteryear seems vanished forever under the blows of political or religious fanaticism that should certainly appear meaningless to those who for years has lived without. The houses of the Incis built from fascism to civil servants, the colonial district of the City Garden, the Medina, the Sicilian ice cream shop, Hara, the Jewish quarter, the shops of dealers: Tripoli becomes a set of concrete places, described specifically, yet held together by an imaginary aura, like she wasn't really a city to tie them. Become places of memo-ria and together places of imagination, giving shape to a sweet city, "as the dates that ripen there, like bananas that the smell". Luciana Capretti in the novel uses the history of the Jewish community as privileged Prism to interpret what will happen soon: the Jews, who had arrived before the Italian colonialists and that they felt in all Libyans and Castello, drop out City after the pogrom of 1967; the Italians however fail to realize what is really going on. Their colonial mentality still prevents them from throwing a polished look on the surrounding reality and the consequent feeling of invincibility or impunity will be revealed as a bad ally at the time of the expulsion. With Luciana Capretti virtually closes off the descriptions of jalaa, which incorporates more generally the dynamics of the expulsion of the Jewish community. The violence of colonialism have not been absorbed: the contradictions of current Libyan society should consider the consequences of such historical removal in Italian. From the literary point of view, it becomes necessary at the current time, operate a widening of the corpus of postcolonial works of Italian authors ' texts mentioned expression born in Libya, are certainly added the productions of writers and writers coming from the Horn of Africa (Igiaba Scego, Ubax Cristina Ali Farah, Gabriella Ghermandi, Fazel Shirin Ramzanali, Carla Macoggi) and from Dodecanese (George Honey).

Luciana Capretti

Obviously this extension assumes even transgenerational analysis: writers like Alessandro Spina or Erminia Dell'Oro, originating in Italian families settlers found in colonies, entering fully into the postcolonial corpus widened, as evidenced as the post-coloniality, even literary perspective, is a complex issue and that the mere juxtaposition colonizer/colonized not always effective to understand all the changes and upheavals that were certainly more than a generation. A post-colonialism intended to that effect would also help to reflect on the concept of national literature, surely by definition rethink (or reform) in the modern era .

Bibliography

1 Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food, Knopf, 1996-1997, pp. 21-22.

2 Cfr. Raniero Speelman, Ebrei “ottomani”, scrittori italiani. L’apporto di scrittori immigrati in Italia dai paesi dell’ex impero ottomano, «Ejos», n. 2, 2005, pp. 1-32.

3 Cfr. Eric Salerno, Uccideteli tutti. Libia 1943: gli ebrei nel campo di concentramento fascista di Giado. Una storia italiana, Il saggiatore, 2008.

4 Arthur Journo, Il ribelle, Le Lettere, 2003.

 5 Storiadi un ebreo profugo dalla Libia, presentazioni di Walter Veltroni, Elio Toaff, Dalai Lama e Laura Boldrini, Appunti di Viaggio, 2003.

6 Victor Magiar, E venne la notte. Ebrei in un paese arabo, Giuntina, 2003, p. 21.

7 Albert Memmi, La statue de sel, Corréa, 1953 (trad. it. La statua di sale, prefazione di Albert Camus,Costa & Nolan, 1991).

e Felice, Ebr8  Renzo Dei a tra colonialismo, nazionalismoin un paese arabo: gli ebrei nella Libia contemporane arabo e sionismo (1835-1970), il Mulino, 1978.

9  Luciana Capretti, Ghibli, Rizzoli, 2004, p. 5.