The Irish Catholic Promoting Yiddish Literature
Peter Manseau on accepting Yiddish Book Center honor from the First Lady
First Lady Michelle Obama presents the National Medal for Museum and Library Service to Yiddish Book Center community member Peter Manseau (L) and Founder and President Aaron Lansky (C).(Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS))
By Hannah Dreyfus | May 16, 2014 12:29 PM
Last week, First Lady Michelle Obama awarded the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass the National Medal for Museum and Library Service. Accepting the honor alongside the center’s founder and president, Aaron Lansky, was author Peter Manseau, whose National Jewish Book Award-winning 2008 novel Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter was inspired by his summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center after college.
Manseau, who was raised Irish Catholic, is perhaps an unlikely scholar of the historically Jewish language. But he has become one of the most steadfast champions of Yiddish literature. “You might saying seeing Yiddish at the White House last week was bashert,” Manseau told me.
“For more than thirty years the Yiddish Book Center has been bringing together creative people interested in Jewish literature and culture.” he added. “For the Book Center to be honored in Washington was probably inevitable, too. A language lost through immigration and catastrophe only to be reclaimed decades later is a quintessentially American story.”
I spoke with Manseau–whose newest book, One Nation, Under Gods, a history of the experience of religious minorities in America, will be published next year—about his fortuitous summer internship, his favorite Yiddish phrase, and having “a strange name for a Jew.”
http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/172933/the-irish-catholic-promoting-yiddish-literature
