Exploring “nostalgia” in the ambiguous and hybrid book Little Jerusalem

Little Jerusalem, by Elettra Stambouli and Angelo Mennillo (Jemma Press, 2015), is a black and white book that presents a challenge to both readers and theorists of literature because of its multi-faceted nature. Undoubtedly, it is a crossover book even though the multiple stories of memory that it contains are filtered through the narrative of a young first-year university student. It is also an illustrated book whose images can be hard to understand if one is not familiar with the accompanying historical text and the local setting. It belongs to comics books and, according to the most recently established terminology to graphic novels, but the words that are used in the sequential panels have a very condensed meaning which renders the content difficult to comprehend. The reader needs to refer to the textual information that is included in separate pages. My approach to Little Jerusalem is structured based on the theories about nostalgia, especially Svetlana Boym’s interpretation of the term, and its expression through text and image. It is a book with an implied reader, a “you” that comes from the family of the narrator. This “you” contains layers of memory that are connected to various traumatic historical events of 20th century Greece. These memories are transferred onto the narrator who, in turn, relays them to the reader in an ambiguous type of nostalgia. The narrator’s pilgrimage through time and place comes to an end in Thessaloniki that was known as “little Jerusalem” to its Jewish residents, a fact which explains the title.