Abstract:

The fictionalized autobiography of Eliya Karmona How Eliya Karmona was born, how he grew up and how he became the director of Djugetón casts a critical eye on the tribulations of a young Jewish man in the last years of sultanate from 1884 to 1908. In sarcastic mode, with self-irony, he builds on his disappointments a picaresque novel which conforms to the law of the genre, but which has common features with other aspects of genres cultivated by Spanish Jews: accounts of travel, exemplary narratives, the treatise on the ways and customs, the fictionalized remembrances, the proverbs. Very Ottoman elements are also found there, like the private diary recounting minor deeds expenditure and receipts, which have shown concerned an Ottoman practice very useful as a source of historical information. The author has a sharp and comical critical view of gravity of the Ottoman system which obstructs every initiative, but he also criticizes the communal inflexibility which heavily constrains personal initiative, the inadaptability of the structures and consequently the ineffectiveness of the strategies put in place by individuals to survive. Nevertheless his work indirectly reveals a certain nostalgia for the vanished world. One perceives the hero’s admiration and his attachment to certain old world values, and one cannot refrain from admitting that he is correct when one measures what the Jewish communities have lost with the disappearance of the Ottoman empire.

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