Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan seems especially interested in storytelling. Was this your goal from the start?
Storytelling was one of the first parallels I saw between the Jews and the Irish, a storytelling culture and especially an oral culture that they both had in common.
How much did language and identity play into your approach to the novel?
In earlier drafts, there was more about the Irish language or language in general. In the early 20th century, Hebrew was being resurrected and when Israel was established, Hebrew was the national language. But, in Ireland, this never happened. As soon we got our independence we thought: "ah, it's easier to stay in English", which is hilarious given the whole point was to gain independence and reassert our cultural identity.
Was it difficult to adopt a Jewish identity when you were creating your characters?
It was hard, but I have a lot of Jewish friends. I've spent a lot of time in North-West London at Friday-night dinners, so I could glean some of the day-to-day texture of Jewish family life. My favourite author is Colum McCann; like me, he's from South Dublin but his books are about entirely different communities while acknowledging how that could be problematic. Nowhere was that more true than the whole starting point of Nine Folds where I thought: "Aha! The Jews and the Irish are kind of similar. We're both persecuted minorities, we've got this amazing literary tradition blah blah blah." But the more research I did, the more I found this was being used a lot to pretty troubling ends. I found school curricula in the States teaching that the Famine and the Holocaust were the same thing. Irish politicians were using this rhetoric that the Irish were the "Chosen Race" but were deeply antisemitic. I suddenly felt I'd kind of dug myself a bit of a hole… but then decided to embrace the hole instead of cover it up.
Did you find any positives to drawing these analogies?
I think it comes down to empathy. Ireland has had a pretty mixed reaction to its recent influx of immigrants, but having been a minority group ourselves, we should know how it feels. As a people who have always had a huge diaspora around the world, we should know what it's like to be on the run or to need to move. We should make any newcomers to our country feel at home.
'Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan' is published by Atlantic. Zander Sharp is a writer and musician living in Oxford