Gary Barwin‘s latest  novel, Yiddish for Pirates was short-listed for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize.  I had the privilege to meet him at the Between the Pages event in Toronto leading up to the announcement of the winner.  Gary’s sense of humour had the audience chuckling as he spoke about his intense historical fiction which shared knowledge about the persecution of the Jewish with a sense of irony and touch of humour.  I am very pleased that Gary has shared answers to Novel Questions and for those of you that have not read Yiddish for Pirates, it would be the perfect book for a snowy afternoon by the fire.

After previewing the Q&As, I hope that I don’t find Gary having a temper tantrum in the middle of the grocery store and love that he has enjoyed Party Wall which was another short-listed book for this year’s Giller Prize.  I laughed out loud to read that he was scolded by his Hebrew School teacher about some of the Yiddish in the book but for many readers the Yiddish added charm and authenticity to the book and errors would go unnoticed.

Thank you Gary for taking the time to answer these novel questions!

What is your favourite childhood book?  Why?

I read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings as a young teen. It was years before I looked at nature except through Tolkein’s eyes: some kind of pan-European syncretic pastoral/romantic/medieval filter of story, loss, nostalgia, beauty, wandering, poetry, music, mystery, and notions of grand narratives (metaphysical, social, emotional, cultural, linguistic.)
When I was twelve, I read Kafka’s The Castle. I remember how vivid it made trudging through the snow on the way back from school. But it wasn’t metaphysical or existential alienation, it was rather a warm feeling of being in a story, of being able to conceptualize an experience larger than me (that snow was metaphysical, ontological. Epistemological, even.) I walked through the music of Kafka’s language. I didn’t need to get into the Castle like K. I was happy wandering.

Did you always want to be a writer?

As a small child, I drew, I wrote, and I created music. No one told me that I should stop and so I didn’t. I do all these things to this day. The one thing I do less of since I was little, is have tantrums, though, of a day, I might lie down in the grocery store and have a good one, if, say, my favourite kefir happens to not be in stock, or they’re out of coffee.

Where is your favourite place to write and why?

My neighbour, the writer Jeanie MacFarlane, asked me to write about this for a series on her blog. I thought I’d share it here because there’s pictures of where I often write and I go into a whole shmear about it and tell, as my parrot narrator in Yiddish for Pirates would say,  the whole megilllah from fore to aft.

http://thewestdaler.com/blog/2016/4/5/where-i-write-gary