However, the novel is interested not so much in questions of belief as of cultural belonging, practice and ritual. As neither Noah nor Aisling seems particularly religious, readers may wonder why Noah requires conversion and why Aisling considers it. At Noah’s London home, Chanukah is celebrated and marked by ritual at Aisling’s Dublin home, Christmas is marked by different rituals. Judaism and Irish Catholicism are presented as institutions through which traditions are passed down. The final and framing strand presents Aisling, a contemporary Irish immigrant in London who must decide whether or not to convert to Judaism and marry Noah. In the development of an unlikely, Beckettian friendship, Alf dictates his memories and Shem records them in stolen hours and on hidden pages, underlining the fact that such narratives – of Irish Jews of the many who suffered institutional abuse in Ireland of those who cannot speak for themselves – have gone largely untold until recently. Institutionalised because of his silence, Shem is called upon to write the story of another mid-century Dublin Jew. The second strand gives us Shem who, like his namesake in Finnegans Wake, is a literal penman, having forsaken speech on the eve of his bar mitzvah. The key question, of course, is whether Jewish emigrants to Ireland will ever be given the stage – will ever be truly at home.
PAPER SWAN FULL
Her father, pedlar and would-be dramatist Moshe Greenberg, is full of ideas for plays that he shares with the sympathetic Ruth: a recurring favourite is “about a man and a woman who court via pigeon mail, until the woman falls in love with the pigeon instead”. Unlike Ulysses, which pieces together elements of Irish-Jewish history during Bloom’s day-long travels, Nine Folds enters into communities of Irish Jews with a deliberation that sees the narrative extend itself across a century, gradually and elegantly weaving together three strands.īeginning with the accidental arrival in Ireland of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who mistake “Cork” for “New York”, the novel sets up one track that follows the Greenberg family in Ireland, and particularly Ruth, the second of two daughters. There aren’t many young writers willing to risk comparison to James Joyce, but with Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan, Ruth Gilligan documents the Irish-Jewish community in a complex historical novel reminiscent in aim and form of Colum McCann’s Transatlantic. E ven in 2016, writing an Irish novel with Jewish characters takes chutzpah, since so many critics and readers will immediately remember that most famous of Irish literary heroes, Leopold Bloom.
0 kommentar(er)
