Pirate communications
Author Gary Barwin revisits memories of swashbuckling with slapstick, dark humour
Gary Barwin was working on the manuscript for his novel Yiddish for Pirates one day when his daughter came home from school, and caught him having a chuckle. “Dad, you’re laughing at your own jokes again.”
It’s obvious that the Hamilton author enjoyed writing this humorous, pun-laden twist on the classic adventure story which at its heart deals with the very serious issues of religious persecution and identity — as told by Aaron, a 500year-old, immortal, gay, Yiddish-speaking parrot.
“I was thinking this is a pirate story; who is the perfect narrator, who is there all the time? I was thinking of a GoPro camera, he’s sitting on the shoulders the whole time and he observes,” says Barwin. “The other thing I love about parrots is that they are like humans, they can only communicate with the language that they’ve learned. I feel like that’s what I do.”
Set in the early 1490s, Yiddish for Pirates tells the story of Moishe, a young boy who joins a ship crew, helps a group of hidden Jews during the Spanish Inquisition to smuggle out forbidden books, falls in love and travels to the New World with Christopher Columbus before becoming a revenge-seeking pirate. Despite Barwin’s long resumé as a poet and performer, this is his first novel for adults, released under Random House Canada’s prestigious New Face of Fiction program.
Writing Yiddish for Pirates gave Barwin the opportunity to engage more deeply with his own religion.
“There’s something about being Jewish and Jewish identity and its relationship to language and story that’s really captivating to me,” he says. “I had to constantly be open to where the story would take me next. I never believed this when other writers said this before, but it really felt like the characters and the language really took me — I just followed along.”
While the book deals with historical tragedies, many of which have jarring similarities to today’s world, it does so through dark, ironic humour, a trait Barwin also finds empowering in Judaism. He resisted using puns, but as he prog- ressed, his characters demanded more slang and slapstick (many of which involve various bodily functions).
“Pirates were these word-invention machines. These insults and swashbuckling threats are such a juicy joy to speak,” he says. “There’s a component of that in Yid- dish as well. People who speak Yiddish love to revel in the Yiddishisms and clever charismatic ways of saying things. It’s so fun to riff off of those.”
Writing the book also brought back childhood memories of voraciously reading adventure stories and watching pirate movies. Although he was a “not-adventuresome kid,” Barwin recalls turning a radio aerial into a sword and pretending he was the swashbuckling pirate.
“The thing about being a pirate is that you’re almost flying through the air — you can leap over convention and you live in this place of adventure and self-definition, and fighting for what you think is important.” Sue Carter is the editor of Quill & Quire.