Making a paper swan12/6/2023 ![]() ![]() Though Gilligan’s Ruth is already Jewish, she faces a similar choice in her relationship to Ireland. While Gilligan shares a name with her heroine, Gilligan’s naming choice likely draws from the Biblical character of Ruth, who famously converts to Judaism. Because despite how she called it home, despite how she spoke English and read the papers and knew every scrap of local news, really this was the first time she had seen the country properly - the maps finally come true. Tateh once told her that instead of knowing a thing off by heart, some languages say that it is “written on your spine.” So Ruth sighed for that now, longing for Ireland to be written onto hers. ![]() Though Ruth did not choose to live in Ireland, she soon finds herself feeling a certain kinship with the Emerald Isle, her new home: The conflict of being simultaneously Jewish and Irish is most difficult for the novel’s Zionist characters, who find they can no longer stomach their duality. Irish culture’s deep ties to Catholicism means that religion is a crucial facet of being “Irish,” accounting for much of the isolation of the novel’s Jewish characters and suspicion toward the native-born Irish. The legacy of diaspora runs throughout the novel, culminating in Aisling’s present-day narrative, after generations of characters of both Jewish and Irish descent find their families pulling them in a multitude of directions, migrating to England, Palestine, and the United States, among other places. Dissimilar at first, each character soon confronts similar crises namely, a reconciliation between their familial identity and one that is thrust upon him or her by a compromising set of circumstances, be it love or Zionism. In 2013, an Irish obituary writer named Aisling is faced with an ultimatum by her Jewish boyfriend, who threatens not to marry her if she doesn’t convert to Judaism. In 1958, there’s Shem, an 18-year-old mute committed to a Catholic sanatorium where he befriends an elderly double-amputee named Alf. The novel follows three cross-sections of Irish-Jewish life throughout the last century, starting with Lithuanian eight-year-old Ruth in 1901 and continuing until, almost, the present day. Tasked with recreating homes in new, strange places, each character faces an unavoidable question: how does a person make themselves whole from two disparate parts? Through three story strands that stretch over the course of a hundred years, the many ways of being both Irish and Jewish become inextricably linked in Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan, Ruth Gilligan’s fourth novel. ![]() Yet providence has other plans, and the bewildered family lands in the city of Cork, Ireland, instead. IN 1901, A JEWISH LITHUANIAN FAMILY filled with boundless hope and dreams of the new world, get themselves on board a chartered ship to New York, where a relative awaits. ![]()
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