No, it’s not the latest whacky facebook language option to spice up your social media experience, but a novel by Litvak Canadian author Gary Barwin which is up for the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize for best new novel or short story in English authored by a Canadian.
Yiddish for Pirates is one of six candidates for the annual prize, vying for the prestigious award with Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien, Wonder by Emma Donoghue, Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittal, Party Wall by Catherine Leroux translated from French and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad.
Every year the Giller Prize looks back at the previous year’s fiction and presents a winner from their shortlist. This year’s awards ceremony will take place in Canada on November 7.
Set in the years around 1492, Yiddish for Pirates recounts the compelling story of Moishe, a bar mitzvahed boy who leaves home to join a ship’s crew, where he meets Aaron, a polyglot parrot who becomes his near-constant companion. From a present-day Florida nursing home, this wisecracking yet poetic 500-year-old Yiddish-speaking bird guides the reader through a world of pirate ships, Yiddish jokes and treasure maps. Spain during the Inquisition, however, is a dangerous place to be Jewish, so Moishe joins a band of hidden or crypto-Jews attempting to preserve forbidden books. He falls in love with a young woman named Sarah. When the Jews are expelled from Spain, Moishe travels to the Caribbean with Christopher Columbus. Moishe eventually becomes a pirate and seeks revenge on the Spanish while seeking the ultimate prize: the Fountain of Youth. The book is filled with Jewish takes on classic pirate tales–fights, prison escapes, and exploits on the high seas–but it’s also a story of love between Moishe and Sarah, and between Aaron and his “shoulder,” Moishe. Rich with puns, colorful language, post-colonial satire and kabbalistic hijinks, Yiddish for Pirates is also a compelling examination of mortality, memory, identity and persecution from one of this country’s most talented writers, according to goodreads.com
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, multimedia artist, educator and the author of nineteen books of poetry and fiction and books for both teens and kids. His work has been widely performed, broadcast, anthologized and published nationally and internationally, and has been commissioned by the CBC. Born in North Ireland of South African parents of Litvak grandparents, he has lived in Canada since childhood. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario with huge and unsettling delusions about the nature of the Internet, according to his profile on goodreads.com