Caught Between Homes: Depiction of the Diasporic Dilemma in Sethu’s Aliyah: The Last Jew in the Village

Abstract

The paper analyses the depiction of the dilemma regarding ‘return to homeland’ as experienced by the Jewish community residing in Kerala after the creation of the nation of Israel. Responding to the Zionist call, the Jewish settlers started their journey back to the ‘promised land’. But the people were torn between their loyalty to home land and host land. Sethu’s Novel, Aliyah: The Last Jew in the Village depicts this psychological and ontological dilemma experienced by the Jewish community in Chendamangalam, a rural village in Kerala. It also depicts how the idea of the ‘imagined’ promised land comes in conflict with the reality of the ‘experienced’ homeland. By skillfully merging history and myth in the narrative structure of the novel, Sethu also portrays how the concept of homeland becomes problematic in the postcolonial world of transnational and transcultural identities.