The Trauma of “Fear-Induced Exodus:” The Case of Victor Magiar and the Italian Jews of Libya

Abstract

The Italian/Italophone Jewish community is amongst those that suffered from the Holocaust and other traumas. Drawing on the work of thinkers of trauma theory such as Dori Laub and Cathy Caruth, this paper aims to add to the current discourse on literary production by Italian/Italophone Jews by analyzing the trauma of the Italian Jewish community in postcolonial Libya, a topic often neglected by scholars. In 1967, the long-established Jewish community in Libya was forced to leave, abandoning all its property and economic funds. Victor Magiar, a Sephardic Jew born in Libya in 1957, was among those who — like all Jews who lived in Arabic lands — experienced trauma due to a myriad of factors, such as pogroms and the fact that he had no passport and true nationality. Through Magiar’s novel E venne la notte: Ebrei in un paese arabo (2003), this paper examines the trauma of the “fear-induced exodus” to Italy on the writer and his community. Moreover, a continuous dialogue with the author informs the analysis of the trauma involved in his story and the Sephardi community history, which also includes the elucidation of Jewish identity in postcolonial Libya. This paper highlights the details of history and stories that go beyond the novel itself, illuminating a nearly unknown facet of Italian history and of the country’s current multilingual and multicultural society.