Three Jewish boys set off on a perilous journey from a backwater shtetl to Lublin. One is a devout scholar, one a sceptic and the third a budding entrepreneur. What happens next?
It might sound like the start of a joke, but in fact it’s the premise for Manya Wilkinson’s fable-like tragicomedy Lublin, which last week won the prestigious Wingate Prize.
“It’s such confirmation, at this point in my life,” says Wilkinson, a New Yorker who moved to the North East nearly 30 years ago to teach creative writing at the University of Newcastle after meeting a man from Yorkshire in New York. “It is just delightful and wonderful.”
Set in in 1907, on one level Lublin reads a bit like a boy’s own adventure, albeit with marauding Cossacks instead of pirates or cowboys, and brimming with traditional Jewish jokes. These – including gags about shtupping, rabbis and wealthy men – are courtesy of her various uncles and the humour she heard in her youth.
In fact, the book is a product of Wilkinson’s Brooklyn upbringing, and specifically her grandmother’s stories about her childhood in a town known as Mezritsh.
“In Polish it’s Międzyrzec, which still exists now, although obviously not in the same way,” she says. “It was almost three-quarters Jewish, maybe more. My grandmother emigrated to the US in 1910, so the shtetl was very alive in her mind and I grew up with those stories.”
She grew up in a Yiddish-speaking house, a knowledge base she has tapped for the book. “My grandfather was a great Yiddishist. It was just the air I breathed.”
My grandfather was a great Yiddishist. It was just the air I breathed
It’s also a tribute to writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer or Sholem Aleichem; at times Lublin reads like a companion piece to Fiddler on the Roof, following the town’s sons, rather than its daughters.
“They are great influences. What I wanted to do was bring that world into the present,” she explains, which is why she wrote it in the present tense. “I deliberately wanted to make it very immediate, to bring it close to the reader.”
Perhaps surprisingly given the book’s vivid detail, Wilkinson opted not to visit. “There was a moment where I thought, should I go?” But she worried it would inhibit her; all that is left today of its once-thriving Jewish culture is the old Jewish cemetery. “I thought if I went I could look at the cobbles or at the sky or I could see what the air felt like. But I wanted it to be the world of imagination.”
The book’s beating heart is Elya, who is on a mission to sell brushes in Lublin (Mezritsh was famous for bristle making) and who was conceived as a tribute to a great uncle Wilkinson never met. When her grandmother left for America with her siblings, one brother opted to stay behind. No one in her family spoke of what may have became of him and Wilkinson doesn’t even know his name. “Why didn’t I ask?” she says. “There’s the eternal question. Always ask. But I do know he had became a wealthy man and so I imagined him as a 14 year old.”
Wilkinson used to write radio plays for the BBC alongside her teaching and, perhaps as a result, she knew three characters is an instant recipe for the sort of fights and scrapes the trio get into on what turns out to be a circuitous journey aided only with a hand-drawn map, bearing names such as the Village of Lakes or Russian Town.
Reading it, I felt Elya and his friends Zif and Kiva represented three diverging paths for Jewish life. One exclusively religious, another revolutionary and perhaps leaving Jewish life behind, then finally Elya, who sees a future for Jews that is bolder and less fearful. “They do,” she says smiling, but it wasn’t planned.
“I was trying to find three boys who were pals but had contrasting personalities and that sort of led to these three. Yet everybody has mentioned the symbolism. And the thing is, these wonderful accidents happen. I did recognise it as it was happening but that’s the nice thing about writing, you control it, but you have to be open to accidents.”
What was deliberate was celebrating pre-war Jewish life, a world to which Wilkinson thinks we may be in danger of losing our connection. “It’s so rich, it’s so wonderful. And we shouldn’t lose it,” she says. “One of my aims was to write in a very contemporary way, to write an edgy novel. That’s a way in which I see myself as bringing this rich shtetl world to contemporary readers and keeping it alive.”
The real Elya perished – almost Mezritsh’s entire Jewish population was murdered in the Holocaust – but in Wilkinson’s mind, he finishes his journey and makes it to Lublin. “In my mind, he does become owner of a brush and bristle factory, so in some ways his dreams are fulfilled.”
His experience is emblematic of the Jewish story: survival against the odds, or at least, the belief this is possible, because otherwise you’d sit on the side of the road and give up (as Elya’s companions are prone to do).
Still, the book is peppered with reflections on the future: what will be invented when, what will happen to Europe’s Jews. There is a wedding party scene where Wilkinson writes in unflinching detail about how each will die: gassed, shot, in a cattle truck. How can she illuminate this period knowing what is to come? “It was heartrending, very upsetting,” she says. “As I was writing, I was thinking, you can’t mention ditches and trains and box cars in that world without it carrying so much baggage. Even ordinary words become loaded. And yet because that world was on the verge of being lost it seemed so, so important to dignify it, to look at it carefully, to relish and enjoy it.”
She started the book on retiring five years ago.
As I was writing, I was thinking, you can’t mention ditches and trains and box cars in that world without it carrying so much baggage. Even ordinary words become loaded
It was published last spring in the wake of October 7 – not necessarily the best time to be writing about the Jewish experience, or indeed exploring the precarious diaspora experience that gave succour to Zionism.
“Of course I was nervous,” she says. “And it makes me very sad.” She has heard from other writers that publishers are wary of Jewish subjects. “I hope it’s not true.”
In fact, she’s had nothing but positive reactions, critically and at events around the country. “I was very frightened about [something coming up at a reading],” she says, but it hasn’t thus far. “I don’t know whether it’s just waiting to happen.”
She has lived much of her adult life in Newcastle, where she married and brought up two children, yet when she first arrived, it was a culture shock after the Jewishness of New York.
“It was very, very strange,” she says. “But sometimes a situation like that makes you treasure what you have. It made me feel that loads of the things I knew and was familiar with from my culture were more poignant than they might have actually been, or funnier or sadder. It just gave what I had real heft. Strangely, I don’t know if I could have written this in New York, because I was living it there, in some way.”
She grew up irreligious and remains so, although Jewishness is ingrained in her. “It’s my background and many of my interests and my humour and outlook. It’s all of that. It’s me.”
Wilkinson recently had her DNA tested, determining she was 100 per cent Ashkenazi. “It’s rather great. I thought maybe it would be a slightly Asiatic, but no, you know, in these shtetls, they didn’t go anywhere.” Until, as with her characters, they did.
If only people would take one or two words of Yiddish out of this book and use it in their everyday life, that would be a great pleasure
Next up is a book on ageing, and alongside that a semi-sequel to Lublin, this time about a woman in her grandfather’s hometown, set in 1919. “I hope to write it in a similar way to Lublin,” she says. “I don’t know there is an end to this. I don’t want to stop.”
Now that she has won the Wingate Prize, Wilkinson’s audience will almost certainly grow. “My hope is people will read it and have some understanding, some interest, some compassion, that they’ll open their hearts and also they’ll love a little bit of Yiddish. If only people would take one or two words of Yiddish out of this book and use it in their everyday life, that would be a great pleasure.” Mazel tov, perhaps, being two that apply here.
Lublin by Manya Wilkinson is published by And Other Stories
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