Disclosure: I read this in manuscript. Peter's a friend and a former collaborator. He reviewed my recent book kindly. But all that said, I've a very good reason to loathe this book: because it's so good. There we were, sort of moving along on parallel tracks as writers. Then, this. Peter's left me in the dust. I ought to hate this book as a symbol of my own failures as a writer. But it really is so good that I can't hate it. Songs for the Butcher's Daughter is, depending on how you look at it, the weirdly inevitable culmination of Yiddish literature, or its last gasp. (Don't worry -- it's in English.) Peter is really *not* Jewish. His mother was a nun. His father still is a Catholic priest. (Don't ask. But if you do -- if you're that kind of Jew -- read Peter's deeply Yiddish Catholic memoir, *Vows: A Story of a Priest, a Nun, and their Son*.) I met him years ago when we both worked at the National Yiddish Book Center. We were a bunch of Jews enamored of the idea of Yiddish. Peter, the unbelieving Catholic, was one of the few people there who could actually read Yiddish. He was inspired to learn it by an African American cantor named Julius Lester.
Not that Peter was a convert. I think he was the one who introduced me to this line by the great Yiddish poet Yankev Glatshteyn that I've been quoting ever since: Der got fun meyn ungloybn iz priptek. The God of my unbelief is magnificent. Peter and I used it as an epigraph for a book we wrote together, *Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible*, but it'd work well for his new novel, *Songs for the Butcher's Daughter*, too. The plot: A goy much like Peter works at an outfit much like the Yiddish Book Center where he falls in love with a baal tshuva much like -- well, she's happily married now, so we'll just remind ourselves this is fiction. She, of course, doesn't know Yiddish, so she asks him to help her read an old Yiddish book in which she stores her bubbe's ancient love letters. Meanwhile, our hero gets a call from an equally ancient Yiddish writer who also needs a translator, for his memoirs. He's a Glatshteyn-like character, which is to say that he's like Edelshtein in Cynthia Ozick's story "Envy, or Yiddish in America." Which is to say, this old Yiddish writer feels forgotten by the world, unjustly ignored, bitter, envious of those were rescued from the Yiddish ghetto through the services of a translator.
So, what else is new? That's the story of Yiddish literature in a nutshell. Ah, but the story our hero translates -- the old man's memoir -- that's the treasure. You know Irving Howe's *Treasury of Yiddish Stories*? This story, *Songs for the Butcher's Daughter,* the translated memoir-within-the-novel, it's all the really good parts Howe left out: sex, violence, perversion, and -- oh, the worst of it, the nastiest of it, is a secret. If you know Yiddish literature -- af yidish, that is -- you might see it coming, because what Peter has done is to mine all the untranslated Yiddish literature on the dusty shelves of the Yiddish Book Center to create the great American patchwork Yiddish novel, in English. This is it: the greatest hits of Yiddish, bent, twisted, and -- forgive me -- born again in this novel by a man who is literally an abomination in the eyes of his own faith. To what end? A novel that captures the fundamental and enduring uneasiness of Yiddish in America like no other I've read, including Singer; a painful, cruel, bitter, funny and weirdly loving book that may well be the closest Yiddish will ever come to American English prose. It's not a translation or an approximation; it's a case of possession. This book is a dybbuk.
