Participants at the Global Jewish Modernism conference have demonstrated, though in different ways, that the boundaries of Jewish literatures are never stable but always liquid. They do not conform to the strict models of national literatures and make us rethink both literary and academic canons.

In the first place, Jewish literatures are often formed across borders, tracing unexpected connections between different cultures, countries, and languages. A perfect example of this transnationality is the diasporic Sephardic poetry discussed by Monique Balbuena. The map of these writings would include, among others, Bosnia and France of Clarisse Nicoïdski (1938-1996), Greece and Israel of Moshe Ha-Elion (1925-2022) and Margalit Matitiahu, Argentina of Juan Gelman (1930-2014), Bulgaria and Mexico of Myriam Moscona. Although for many of the authors, Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) is not the first language, they decided to write in Ladino or incorporate Judeo-Spanish elements in their texts in other languages. In their works, Judeo-Spanish acts as an intimate language of memory, exile, and trauma (not coincidentally, both Ha-Elion and Matitiahu wrote their poems about the atrocities of the Holocaust in Ladino and not in Hebrew). However, Judeo-Spanish represents not only death but also life: authors across the globe revitalize the dying vernacular of the Sephardic Jews, and paradoxically, this fragile language, which has no official status in any country, creates a tangible network of Sephardic poets and their texts.

Moreover, Jewish literatures frequently trouble established rules and predominant narratives within the existing scholarship and criticism, as Saskia Ziolkowski explained in her presentation “Modern Jewish Italian Writing as World Literature.” Academic works on world literature tended to focus mostly on the writings from the “centers,” ignoring the “peripheries” that refer both to Italian literature (since Italy is a Southern-European and less “powerful” country) and “minor” Jewish literatures. At the same time, in global Jewish literary studies, Jewish Italian writers do not gain much attention (apart from the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi), though many key twentieth-century Italian authors were of Jewish background (Italo Svevo, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Natalia Ginzburg, Giorgio Bassani, to name just a few). Rather than operating through labels and oppositions (“Italian” versus “Jewish”), one might see Jewish Italian literature as a fluid space that also includes non-Jewish authors. Some of them (Igiaba Scego and Claudio Magris) investigate the often silenced role of Italy in the persecution of Jews, while others (Donatella Di Pietrantonio, Nadia Terranova, and Jhumpa Lahiri) engage with works of the Jewish Italian authors of the twentieth century in their own novels. Such an unusual look at modern and contemporary Italian writings illuminates how “Jewish Italian literature is.”

This “intrinsic” Jewishness helps reconsider Italian literature from a transnational perspective. Many Italian authors (especially women writers), both Jewish and non-Jewish, that were mentioned in Saskia Ziolkowski’s presentation, have been recently (re)translated into English and other languages. As a result, Italian literature in its international reception is frequently associated with writers who exceed the rigid definitions of the Italian literary canon and national and linguistic identity. Some of these authors are particularly important to my own work. Helena Janeczek comes from a Polish Jewish family, but she moved from Germany to Italy and started writing in Italian. She is one of the most prominent contemporary Italian writers and the author of the award-winning novel The Girl with the Leica about the photographer Gerda Taro (I worked as a translation editor for the Russian edition of the book which came out in 2021). The Turinese Marina Jarre (1925-2016) was born in Riga to an Italian (Waldensian) mother and a Jewish-Latvian-Russian father and, similarly to Janeczek, later switched from German (the language spoken in her family) to Italian. Her autobiographical works are being at once rediscovered in Italy and discovered in English translations by Ann Goldstein, like Jarre’s memoir Return to Latvia that I recently reviewed for Reading in Translation. Multilingualism, translation, memory, and migration are only a few keywords that align both Janeczek and Jarre with many writers discussed during the conference “Jewish Literature, World Literature.”