Migration and remediation in the Italian postmemory narratives of Wlodek Goldkorn

This article examines two autobiographical novels by the translingual author Wlodek Goldkorn: Il bambino nella neve (“The Child in the Snow,” 2016) and L’asino del Messia (“The Messiah’s Donkey,” 2019). Born in Poland in 1952 to Jewish parents who had survived Nazi persecution, Goldkorn emigrated to Israel in 1968 and settled in Italy in 1978. Firstly, the article considers how migration, travel and return function as structuring narrative devices and sites of memory negotiation in the two novels. Secondly, it analyses how the narrators construct memory and identity by translating and remediating other texts, moving between Yiddish and Hebrew, and between Israel, the Jewish Diaspora and Italy. To illustrate these practices, special attention is given to the intertextual relationship that Goldkorn establishes with Amos Oz’s Mikhael shelì (My Michael, 1967). The article argues that Goldkorn’s narratives of migration and practices of remediation forge a dynamic transcultural identity that moves beyond conventional theories of Holocaust postmemory.