Peter Manseau – Jewcy

Why Fact Needs Fiction

Peter Manseau — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 03:26:26 +0000

Many in the publishing world will caution a writer with an interest in both fiction and non-fiction to pick one genre and stick with it, as if a journalist writing a novel was somehow akin to a chiropractor taking a scalpel to your brain: a dangerous and messy mistake. My fourth book is coming out this spring, and for better or worse I’ve basically ignored that advice. Three have been non-fiction of very different kinds, and the book that brought to me to Jewcy this week is a work of fiction about the perils of trying to turn real life into art. I switched to fiction with Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter because my previous book, a memoir, was published at a very bad time for memoirs. James Frey was being ritually humiliated for his fabrications, a white porn writer took the name Nasdijj and passed himself off as a Native American abuse-survivor to great acclaim, and the author of supposedly autobiographical works like The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things turned out not to exist at all. Easy as it is to pile abuse on such writers, I mostly have sympathy for them, as I do for the most recent, most audacious, and saddest of memoir fabulists. Watching them all raked over the media coals, I couldn’t help thinking about the fact that a memoir might be unintentionally false, and so I made that one possible interpretation of the life and times of my alter kocker anti-hero Itsik Malpesh. Yes, to greater and lesser degrees, writers of fake memoirs are liars, or they are chumps who allowed themselves to get caught up in the genre-driven machinery of publishing, or they are simply self-deceivers who have come to believe their own tall tales. What I am most interested in, however, are the ways in which our own life stories are just that: stories. We make sense of what we’ve experienced by thinking about and retelling what we have heard of our experiences. We’ve been told stories all our lives – about who we are, where we came from, who we should be, and why – but who among us ever fact-checked family history? Of course, when it comes time to write it down and put it between hard covers, we should do just that — or else someone else might do it for you. But we shouldn’t pretend it’s as straightforward as making sure memory is in line with the historical record. As even the most vaunted memoirs remind us, our understanding of the stories we’ve lived changes with time, and inevitably so will the ways we tell them. In a nutshell, that’s what my novel is about, and it’s the reason I think anyone interested in getting at the truth of the way we live with stories needs to dabble in a little non-truth now and then.

Thanks for your time, Jewcy fans. That wraps up my guest-blogging duties. If you read any of my books, please let me know what you think.

Peter Manseau, author of Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy. This is his parting post. Want more? Buy his book!

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Missionary Yiddish

Peter Manseau — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 08:00:08 +0000

When I worked in the Jewish world, I was at first surprised, then annoyed, and eventually amused to find that my motives for being there were often suspect. People sometimes wondered if I was some kind of missionary, which to me was the greatest laugh of all, since if I was to convert anyone it would only be to the restless, wishywashy agnosticism that was my creed at the time. As far as I was concerned, I was a harmless novelty, harmlessly enjoying a novel experience. Except I wasn’t so novel. I didn’t know it then, but I had stumbled into a long and fraught history of Christians mucking about in Jewish linguistic waters. Not too long ago, "Missionary Yiddish" was a common term used to refer to the attempts of Christians to use the language of Eastern European Jews in their evangelizing efforts. In the 1920s, the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago even began offering its own program in Jewish Studies. No strictly scholarly pursuit, the program was created for the purpose of educating evangelists in the basics of Jewish culture and language. The missionaries’ hope was that the first voices Jewish immigrants heard as they entered the New World would missionary voices speaking in Yiddish – stilted, classroom Yiddish, but Yiddish nonetheless. If there is a funny part to all this, it is that these missionaries had no idea that the language they were appropriating to spread the gospel had already inoculated its speakers against the faith.

In Yiddish as in no other langauge, the basic assumptions of Christianity were undercut. By the time Moody began teaching it, Jesus had long been a figure of both fear and derision in the Yiddish speaking world. The savior was regularly referred to by dismissive nicknames like Yoizel, Getzel, and most creatively Yoshke Pandre. The layers of meaning in this last name are amazing: Using the diminutive Yiddish suffix "-ke," Yoshke might be translated as "Little Joe," tweaking Jesus’s non-biological relationship to the credulous husband of Mary. Pandre, meanwhile, is Yiddish for "panther," a reference to the allegations dating to Origen (and repeated in the Talmud) that the father of Jesus was neither God, nor Joseph the carpenter, but a plundering Roman soldier called Pantera (Latin for "panther"). Thus the name slyly makes Jesus’s birth illegitimate and those associated with it either rapists or fools.

Thanks to the multilingual flexibility of Yiddish (and to its capacity to add insult to injury), this nickname was further elaborated upon. Taking the first part of Pandre as the Russian honorific Pan ("Sir" or "Lord"), and adding a letter to the second syllable to form the Yiddish drek, Yiddish speakers spoke derisively of Yoshke Pan Drek, applying to Jesus Christ a name roughly equivalent to a vulgarized version of Joe the Plumber: "Little Joe, Lord of Shit." I’m still not a Yiddish speaking missionary, but I must admit I feel for those hapless fellows speaking about Jesus in Yiddish. The poor shlimazels thought Jews didn’t know about the messiah they were peddling. In fact, Jews knew him well. They just didn’t like him.

Peter Manseau, author of Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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Life as a Non-Jewish Jewish Novelist

Peter Manseau — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 04:26:14 +0000

In my last post I wondered if my unlikely career as a non-Jewish Jewish novelist began with the religious environment in which I was raised: with parents who broke one of the Catholic Church’s most distinctive rules simply by bringing me into the world, where else should I look for religious rebellion? But that’s only half the story. The other half is this: For three years after college – just as I was getting it in my head that there were stories worth telling about the odd place of religion in American culture, and that I might make a life’s work of finding them – I worked for an organization that collected used Yiddish books. I took the job mainly because I could find no other, but it turned out to be the perfect writer’s education. A few times a month we’d leave our warehouse in Western Massachusetts and drive north, to Montreal, or south, often to New Jersey, mainly to New York: Brooklyn, Williamsburg, Co-op City. Wherever Jews grew old, they were afraid of leaving their books as orphans, so they called us, and we came. Most of the books we collected were saved only to die among their own; destined not to be distributed to a university, but to crumble on our bookshelves. Nevertheless the books’ owners always seemed gladdened by our efforts. At least once every trip I heard the same grateful sentiment: The very fact that we cared enough to come for the books proved that Hitler hadn’t won; that young Jews came for the memories of the old and the lonely ensured continuity. We were, it was often said, "the future of the Jewish people." Who me? The extent of my Jewish bonafides at the time were only that I had studied religion as an undergrad, picked up some Hebrew, read Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud, and generally developed a Judaic literacy totally alien to my French-Irish-American upbringing. All of this together brought to me an interest in that other Jewish language, and that was what opened the door to becoming, as my coworkers occasionally said, "functionally Jewish." Without thinking too much about it, I ended up a Catholic moving through a Yiddish-speaking world. Early on I made no effort to conceal myself.

One old man laughed when I told him my name, "S’iz a modne yidishe nomen…" Peter is a strange name for a Jew, he told me – to which I shrugged and answered, "Ober bin ikh nisht keyn yid." Well, I’m not a Jew, I said, which is so unlikely a sentence to hear in Yiddish that he stared at me, blinking for a full minute, before he switched to English and told me which books to take and which to leave behind. At best I was seen as a curiosity. More often I was greeted with suspicion, sometimes hostility. Once, while picking up books in a Montreal elementary school, I was accused of being a missionary, sent to convert the children of Canada’s hasidic community. What to do in the face of such a bizarre accusation? What else could I do? Following the time-honored assimilationist tradition, I learned to pass. Just as in my high school French class I was not Peter but Pierre, in the Yiddish class I was then taking I was known as Pesach. It didn’t take much to begin using this name on all my book collecting trips. "Vi heystu?" they’d ask. "Ikh heys Pesach," I’d answer. Beyond that I said very little. It was assumed I was a Jew and so, in a way, I was. I never meant it as a deception. Yet through a combination of shyness, an eagerness to please, and a desire to fit in, I was just as surely passing as any Jew who became an Episcopalian to join a country club. One recent, mostly negative review of Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter calls such an act "shameful." Granted, in the book the character who passes does so for the sake of bedding a sexy baal t’shuva, which is surely more morally dubious than passing just to hear stories. But still I wonder if there is anything truly wrong with being someone else for a while, if only in other people’s eyes. Shameful or not, that might be the definition of what it is to be a novelist, Jewish or otherwise.

Peter Manseau, author of Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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How a Priest’s Kid Won a Jewish Book Award

Peter Manseau — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 07:34:56 +0000

Peter Manseau, author of Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, is guest blogging this week as one Jewcy‘s Lit Klatsch bloggers. Peter’s book is about a fictional Yiddish poet born in Moldova at the turn of the 20th Century.

If there is anyone out there who doubts that America is a place where anything can happen, let this be your answer: Last week the National Jewish Book Award for fiction was awarded to a French-Irish son of a former priest and nun. In other words: me. I won the prize for my first novel, Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, and I am all at once pleased for my little book, grateful to those who chose it, and humbled to join a list of past winners that includes names like Roth, Roth, and Roth. (That’s three wins and counting for the Bard of Newark.)

At first I thought I might be the only non-Jew who has captured this particular piece of the Jewish literary world, but a quick glance at the previous recipients proved me wrong. In only its second year, 1950, the award went to a blueblood son of English-American missionaries, John Hersey. Most famous for Hiroshima, which still sells by the boxful to high school English classes around the U.S., Hersey won for The Wall, his novel about the Warsaw Ghetto. With fifty-eight years between one goy and the next, I wondered if Hersey and I might have anything else in common that would shed some light on how two such conspicuously Jewish books could flow from a pair of conspicuously gentile pens. The books themselves could be cousins: Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter tells the story of a man who believes he is the last Yiddish poet in America. It’s love story, a tragedy, a rereading of recent world history, and ultimately an epic about the stubborn persistence of a way of life that refuses to pass from the world. Hersey’s book is about a man much like Emanuel Ringelblum, the historian-hero of Jewish Warsaw who recorded endless notes on the ghetto and saved them from Nazi discovery by burying them in milkcans. It’s a love story, a tragedy, a rereading of recent world history, and ultimately an epic about the stubborn persistence of a way of life that refuses to pass from the world. Other than our apparent preoccupations, it’s hard to find much of a resemblance between us: Hersey lived a life of wandering, following his parents across China before moving to the US; I live in the same city where I was born. At the end of adolescence, Hersey was a big man on campus in the Ivy League; I went to a state school and still proudly wear the chip on my shoulder. After college, Hersey moved easily into one high status journalism gig after another; I’ve worked as a carpenter, a truck driver, a Yiddish typesetter, and a dozen other odd jobs that would make any Yalie blush. Roll the clock back before we both were born, however, and things get interestingly familiar: Both his parents and mine, it seems, thought they were on a mission from God.

My parents are former Catholic clergy who met in a storefront church in a riot torn city in the late 1960s. When they married against the rules of their religious vocations, they did so with the conviction that they were called to convert their church into a new way of living the faith. As a result, they have spent most of their lives in a kind of Catholic exile, outsiders and insiders as the same time. Hersey’s parents were Protestant evangelists sent to Asia early in the 20th century. Far from home in a country inhospitable to their faith, they thought it was a great place to start a family. They all were, that is, true believers; people who allowed their beliefs to lead them beyond the comforts of being part of a dominant culture, into places far from the worlds in which they were raised. Aside from having read Hiroshima almost twenty years ago, I have never given Hersey a thought until now. I don’t what he believed, or what, in his case, prompted a Christian minister’s kid to write a very Jewish book. For me, though, it had something to do with an inherited sense of exile, and with the notion that if there are no risks associated with belonging to a religious community, then maybe it’s not worth belonging after all. Peter Manseau, author of Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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