You Don't Have to be Jewish to Love Malamud

Peter Manseau

The woman blocking my path had me at “I read your book”—a shibboleth that marked her membership in a tribe so small that each meeting with one of its number seems likely to be the last.

“Tell me,” she demanded. “Did you ever meet a Jew who abused a goose like that?”

I was about to take the stage at one of the many JCCs I have visited in the past year to talk about my novel, Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter. My protagonist, the self-proclaimed last Yiddish poet in America, works in his youth in a goose down factory in czarist Russia. I have nothing against geese, of course, but they don’t fare well in a book that was written in homage to Yiddish literature, which rarely featured a bird that wasn’t being bayoneted by a Cossack or plumped up for shmaltz.

So I was perhaps due for some heckling from the goose rights community. Yet something in the way this woman had emphasized you and Jew made me think her challenge wasn’t about poultry, even if it was a cry of foul.

Though I had written a novel as Jewish as the pope is Catholic, I am anything but. A son of New England with French Canadian roots, I was raised in a town with more hockey rinks than shuls. And so what my irate reader really wanted to know was this: You aren’t one of us; what gives you the right to write as if you are?

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Peter Manseau is the author of the memoir Vows and the novel Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter. He is a lecturer in journalism at Georgetown University.