2025 State Prize for Short Stories and Novellas

“Merkádo” is a novella about the plight of the Greek Jews of Rhodes during the Holocaust. A seventeen-year-old Sephardic girl, narrates her life in diary form (which alternates with a third-person narrative) as it unfolds in Rhodes during the Italian and German occupation, then in Marmaris and Istanbul, where she takes refuge until the end of the war, and later in Ashdod, where she visits—via Rhodes—her only relative who survived Auschwitz. Against the background of this narrative, the reader witnesses various important historical events, such as the Italian and German occupation of the Dodecanese, the deportation and extermination of the Jews of Rhodes, the “Renaissance” of education in Istanbul through the German-Jewish refugee scholars who taught in Turkish universities, and the final days of the Second World War. In the four short chapters that make up the novella, the heroine’s extroversion and a great love affair come to the fore, placing her outside the Jewish community of Rhodes. While her kinsmen were taken to Auschwitz, she herself follows another, voluntary displacement, which leads her to a painful adulthood, but also to her emancipation, at a time of great unrest.

merkádo is a person ransomed from the Angel of Death (Judeo-Spanish).