Yiddish for Pirates is the story of a 500-year old polyglot parrot, Aaron, that hitches its star to that of a young Jewish adventurer named Moishe, who has a yearning for the sea. In plot terms, Yiddish for Pirates is a seafaring adventure par excellence, containing all manner of disasters, reversals of fortune, disguises, plot twists and last-minute saving throws. Author Gary Barwin, whom I can scarcely believe still has this many tricks up his sleeve after already writing 19 other books, has created out of the Spanish Inquisition a novel that feels both appropriately complex and yet vigorously adventuresome.............//.............
The real star of this book is the language – or, more properly, the languages. With a command of Yiddish that would leave even Michael Wex with little to complain about, and some of the freshest and most whimsical English ever contained between covers, Yiddish for Pirates is a language-lover's dream come true. The mordant observations offered by the talking parrot, the descriptions of historical scenes rendered intimate through the characters, and even the atmospheric settings are affecting precisely because they never seem careful or lapidary in their construction. Instead, the breezy and improvisational feel of the words as organized make the book sing like a jazz solo in the hands of a great artist. More than once I laughed aloud and required whomever was nearby to sit for a dramatic reading of an especially well-made turn of phrase, an affecting sentence or a paragraph that bubbled with artistry..............//...........
Yiddish for Pirates has an unmatched spryness in both thought and language. It doesn't conform well to any category or trope of literature, but instead makes a place as a fresh, new thing that draws from sea shanties and Talmud, history and fantasy, romance, adventure, linguistics, fashion, and the adventure serial of the early days of movies. This book is as irrepressible as my enthusiasm for it. You'll never read anything else like it, and that's a shonde.