It is raining. A man walks into a village, without an umbrella, yet he is dry. Either he has gone to great lengths to keep the rain off - and hidden the means to do so - or he's using magic. And, from the perspective of a child, says Gavriel Savit, both are equally likely.
This is the world-view of Savit's debut YA novel, Anna and the Swallow Man. (Bodley Head, £9.99). Anna is seven when her father disappears (these things happen in 1939 Krakow) and nobody will look after her except the vagabond Swallow Man. She has no frame of reference for her precarious existence beyond fairy tales.
Soldiers may turn out to be wolves or bears, while a strangely shaped gun may morph into a klezmer's clarinet.The dark background of fairy tales fascinates Savit and his own tale has a similar sense of eeriness and off-stage threat. This, he believes, is how the war must have felt to the ordinary Polish farmer in the turnip field.
Both Anna and the Swallow Man are multilingual but both must now converse in "Road", the language of evading capture. Michigan-born Savit learned Hebrew and Yiddish early (Hebrew in school and Yiddish as part of his father's child-rearing vocabulary).
"Language and identity are closely linked," says Savit, "and, when you have more than one language, it raises the question of who precisely you consider yourself to be. I find this very interesting." In addition, being multilingual enables one to access a "magical space of uncertainty. Is it a door or a delet? It divorces the referent from the word in a way that makes room for abstraction in the universe."
To Savit, such nuance is a moral imperative. "Particularly in books for younger people, human beings seem to be sorted easily into good and evil and this is quite a dangerous habit," he says. "If we turn our enemies into monsters, they're no longer culpable human beings."
Writing another book will have to take turns with Savit's career in musical theatre (as actor as well as writer, he has just finished a Broadway run). He is also learning Icelandic - useful for talking about people on the subway. "There are only 320,000 Icelanders, so the likelihood of people catching you is pretty small," he says. Perhaps it's a peacetime version of Road.
JC children's books editor Angela Kiverstein will be speaking to Gavriel Savit at Jewish Book Week on February 21
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