Jewish Belonging and Mourning: Separating Spaces of the Living from Places of the Dead in Myriam Moscona’s Tela de sevoya

• Main Author: Charlotte Gartenberg
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Prof. Dr. Vittoria Borsò, Prof. Dr. Frank Leinen, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Yasmin Temelli, Prof. Dr. Guido Rings 2019-07-01
• Series: iMex. México Interdisciplinario/Interdisciplinary Mexico
• Subjects: Haunting; Myriam Moscona; Tela de sevoya; Ladino; Jewish identity
• Online Access: https://www.imex-revista.com/xvi-jewish-belonging-mourning/

When a family member dies, the loss is of a person. But in cases where that person embodies the last living link to an exilic homeland – a not uncommon occurrence for Jews in the Americas – the death of a parent can also mean the loss of a home. Mexican writer and daughter of Sephardic immigrants, Myriam Moscona chronicles the experience of her unmooring grief after the generations before her die in her novel Tela de sevoya (2012). Compounded losses cause Moscona and her house to become haunted, and the journey seeking roots that that her mourning compels her to is as much about a search for spaces of identity as it is about combatting haunting. Moscona goes to the Balkans to record the last native speakers of Ladino and to see the places her parents once called home. While the trip does not give her new spaces of Jewish belonging in the form of these recovered homelands, it does allow her to divide the past from the present, to separate the places of the dead from the spaces of the living. Her process reveals a complex vector where haunting, belonging and Jewishness meet for children of Diaspora living in the Americas and ultimately proposes an alternative territory where an anchoring Jewish identity might inhere