A Plurilingual Memory: Representations of the Sephardim in Contemporary Spanish Literature

Abstract

In the context of the universalization of the Ashkenazic canon, the publication of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad (a novel of novels, to use the author’s subtitle), in which Sefarad becomes a generic term to refer to the diasporas provoked by Nazism and Stalinism that traumatized Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, seems to, paradoxically, silence Sephardic identity once more. By inserting Sephardic experience in the genre of Holocaust literature, and expanding it to represent the political prosecution of communist dissidents, Muñoz Molina would have seemingly failed to bring to light the complex transnational, multiethnic, experience of the Sephardim.