Integracija v švicarsko družbo: primer Meral Kureyshi

Meral Kureyshi is a resident of Bern, Switzerland, and a recent nominee for the Schweizer Buchpreis literary award for her debut novel Elefanten im Garten (Elephants in the Garden). Born in 1983 in Prizren, Kosovo, in what was then Yugoslavia as a member of the Turkish minority, she moved with her parents to Switzerland in 1992. Her novel is a universal story of a family that left its native multicultural city of Prizren behind for Switzerland in search of a better life. In the novel, the author paints a vivid, no-holds barred picture of immigrant life in Switzerland, a land known in her “first motherland” of Kosovo as a land of milk and honey, although the reality of immigrant life in Switzerland is far from perfect. This paper uses the novel as a lens through which to examine the status of immigrants in a host country and investigates whether, considering the new reality in which Europe now finds itself, we are capable of realising that heterogeneity and diversity are primarily a mutually beneficial experience, one we can learn a great deal from and use to create a more tolerant world, rather than insurmountable challenges