Award-winning author Manya Wilkinson: ‘You can't write directly about the Holocaust any more'

Telegraph

09-03-2025

In the small Jewish village of Mezritsh, near the Poland-Belarus border, there once lived a trainee merchant. He was young and determined to make his fortune, so he set off one day on foot with two friends to sell brushes in the nearby Polish town of Lublin. His name was Elya and although he exists only in the imagination of the author Manya Wilkinson, she likes to think of him as a 14-year-old version of her grandmother's brother, whom she never met. 'He was a businessman who owned his own factory in Mezritsh, where my grandmother was brought up,' she says. 'When she and her other siblings emigrated to America in 1910, he stayed behind. They never saw him again.'
Wilkinson's new novel, Lublin, loosely inspired by her family history, has just won this year's Wingate Prize, awarded to the best book to 'convey the idea of Jewishness to the general reader'. Part uncanny fable, part desolate comedy, with nods to Beckett and the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, it follows Elya and his reluctant friends, Ziv, a callow political firebrand, and the helplessly devout Kiva, who 'prays before every sip of water', on the road to Lublin with only a hand-drawn map for guidance.
Yet, as this ill-prepared trio keep walking, convinced Lublin is just over the next hill, the landscape around them changes. More and more villages lie abandoned, the heat intensifies, hostile Cossacks menace the empty roads, and the air becomes thick with a violence that speaks of the atrocious events of the 20th century yet to come. The novel never refers to either the pogroms that obliterated much of Eastern Europe's Jewish population in the decades before the war, or the Holocaust, but that obliqueness holds the reader both entranced and appalled. 'I was trying to compress time, trying to bring that lost Jewish world, and its moment of dissolution, into the present. But I did worry whether non-Jewish readers would get it'.
She wasn't alone in thinking that. Lublin is a masterful book, but it took her a long time to find an agent. 'They would tell me, 'It's wonderful, I love it, it will win prizes, but I can't sell it.'' She shrugs. 'I think it's partly because that aspect of Jewishness, the Yiddish culture, with all its humour and traditions, has become lost within the contemporary conversation about Jewishness. The way we talk about Jews today feels quite narrow.'
We are sitting in the front room of Wilkinson's house in a quiet suburb of Newcastle. Wilkinson, who tells me she is 'over 65', but 'would prefer not to specify', has lived here for decades – since meeting her husband, a Newcastle native, in America and with whom she has two grown-up sons. She published a first, more conventional novel, Ocean Avenue, a family saga set between America and Europe, in 1991, and has also written short stories and many radio plays, but she spent most of her career teaching creative writing at the University of Newcastle, only embarking on Lublin after retiring five years ago. It is, I tentatively suggest, an odd place to find a Jewish New Yorker. She agrees that we don't tend to hear much about Jewish culture in Britain beyond that of north London. 'That perspective also tends to be a very male one. We can definitely expand on that view.'
Did she ever encounter anti-Semitism? 'A bit. Although most people assumed I was English, since I used my English name, Margaret, instead of my Yiddish name, Manya. I'd overhear the odd talk about Jewish landlords, that sort of thing. But there's also an enormous Hasidic community in Gateshead, although I never felt any connection to that.'
The Hasidim come in for a bit of pointed flak in Lublin through the character of Kiva, whose knowledge of the world largely consists of whatever he has studied in yeshiva. ('Kiva's knowledge of the Holy Land is prodigious. If only he'd known as much about Poland, things might have turned out differently,' comments the narrator.) 'I was once sitting on a plane to New York next to two Hasidim who asked to be moved because they didn't want to sit next to a woman,' Wilkinson says when I bring it up. 'It made me feel awful. There's a lot of that [within that community] and we need to admit some of it.'
She sees Lublin as a personal reclaiming of sorts. Much of it is based on stories her grandmother would tell her about early-20th-century shtetl life, and the novel retains in places the outsized quality of a children's story: the hand-drawn map, for instance, features Jewish settlements with names such as Village of Girls, Village of Fools, and Russian Town – 'a dangerous place for Jews'. Yet it's also an attempt to reckon with the gaps. Her parents, who were both born in America, only spoke Yiddish at home. 'Those were the years of the melting pot in the US,' she says wryly. 'We were not encouraged to hold onto things.'
Including their own history. No one in her family talked about loved ones who had died in Europe long before Hitler came to power. Nor the family members who died in Treblinka, although she remembers a story about a brother who escaped by hiding in a barn. 'My parents, my grandparents, no one would discuss it. What hints there were were terrifically disturbing and intriguing. I remember a photograph turning up of my grandmother's family and she said 'they are all gone' in a way that made me know not to ask more. That silence became something I was carrying, like a weight. It was a generational thing: the Holocaust was something best forgotten.'
She is a little uneasy about the relationship between Jewish writers today and the Holocaust: 'A degree of Holocaust fatigue sets in, and it can't help but flatten the reader.' I tell her I think the publishing industry tends to milk it in quite shameful ways, churning out endless memoirs of dubious quality, and she nods. 'A memoir is an art form like anything else. The fact you went through something is not enough [to always justify it]. I personally feel you can't write directly about the Holocaust any more. It's not that there aren't new things to say, but we need to find new ways of saying it.' She's been asked to write a sequel to Lublin and feels torn. 'I don't want to be pigeonholed as a Jewish writer. On the other hand, this territory now feels very precious to me.'
She also finds herself torn to an almost unbearable degree by the events of October 7 and Israel's subsequent invasion of Gaza, and horrified by the anti-Semitism that has sprung up in its wake. 'I don't agree with Israel's current Right-wing government. I know Jews who do, although few feel able to say so publicly. I'm so tired of Jews being judged by one crazy government policy, but then there has always been a history of Jews being blamed whenever something horrendous takes place.
'As a Jew, it's hard to put your head above the parapet right now,' she adds. 'It feels very scary and I'm not very brave.' If she could speak out, what would she say? 'I'd say, I'm not just a foreign-policy decision. There is so much more to my culture that I want you to listen to and respect and enjoy.'
Lublin is published by And Other Stories, £14.99