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36 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nicely presented, but a strange dichotomy of messages, August 28, 2008
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Sometimes, depending upon our respective backgrounds, readers enjoy a book on varying grounds. I enjoyed this one quite a lot but I doubt for the reasons which the author intended -- the story that I seized upon was perhaps a different one than what Manseau believed himself to have written. I'll try to clarify this as I explain further.
Here we have chiefly a love story, perhaps even a couple. The opening backdrop is that of Jewish persecution which mostly transpires in Europe but some in the U.S. as well. We get to know the protagonist from his birth and we follow him for his lifetime... in fact, this fictional work is his life story. He is a Yiddish-speaking Jewish man by the name of Itsik Malpesh, born in Kishinev (Russia), a temporary resident of Odessa, and eventually an immigrant to Baltimore, Maryland.
For a long while the reader is shrewdly drawn into Itsik's world which seems a cruel one indeed. In fact, it's a cruel time and place for all Jewish people as Itsik is born into a period of Russian Pogroms. Yet, as I approached the end of this novel, in retrospect, I had to revise my thinking about Itsik because his numerous life disasters seemed a direct result of his own obstinacies and intolerance for taking good advice. Only when he was forced to do certain things did life smile upon him a bit including both his immigration to the United States as well as the obtaining of a job.
But even in the face of good advice, Itsik often managed to train wreck his own existence. Ultimately, he commits an act which is notably glossed over but which would have been an outright horror for his victim -- and I could not personally get past this singular incident and share any further empathy with Itsik. In fact, his agenda became more and more clear to me as self-serving. In Itsik's world, everything is all about Itsik and I doubt that the author really intended for his readers to reach this particular conclusion.
Many others will perhaps draw a different picture from this story, in contrast to my own reading experience. I suppose it's possible to say that if life has treated you horrifically enough, then maybe you have some sort of right to be excused later on down the road for your own heinous acts; however, that's simply not a philosophy which, personally, I can either accept or support.
Itsik spoke practically no English until later in life and, given this actuality, he wrote his poems in Yiddish and later required a translator for his work. Thus, for the purposes of the novel we get an intermittent "translator's note" (that is always more like a short chapter) which tells a converging story. It's relevant to point out that the "translator" here is a Catholic. Toward the end of the book, these two tales do in fact come to a junction and that format is one of the book's big pluses. This is a unique presentation and it's nicely facilitated.
The novel itself flows like oil and, in that regard, is some of the best contemporary writing which I've recently experienced. You can read this book in two days without much difficulty. I will comment that it's helpful if you have some prior knowledge of 20th Century European history and/or of Jewish culture -- but if you don't, you'll still generally get the big picture of the story.
In summary, I would definitely recommend this title to anyone interested in recent Jewish history or in good, solid fiction -- but those who are emotionally sensitive should be prepared for a few bumps along the way.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How did a Catholic boy write this?, September 23, 2008
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I am a secular Jew. Like myself, this novel is far more ethnic than religious. It's incredibly Jewish, but at the same time wonderfully inclusive. What I mean is, you do NOT have to be Jewish to read and enjoy this novel. In fact, it is a tale literally being told by an outsider.
Songs for the Butcher's Daughter is a story within a story. On the surface, it is the fictionalized autobiography of Itsik Malpesh, "the last Yiddish poet in America." Born in 1903 in the middle of a Russian pogrom, Malpesh leads a picaresque life that takes him from the town of his birth to Odessa, from Odessa to New York, and eventually to Baltimore, Maryland. It's a long, eventful, tragic, dramatic, funny, and occasionally joyful life. In the course of its telling, Malpesh documents anti-Semitism in the old world, the birth of Israel, the death of Yiddish, the American immigrant experience, and a saga of star-crossed love. But it's so much more. Itsik's is such a human story! It's beautiful and compelling and grabbed me right from the opening pages.
The story within this story comes in the form of copious "translator's notes." Itsik's memoir was written in his native tongue, Yiddish. His story is being filtered through an unlikely translator, a young, non-Jewish, college grad with an all-but-useless theology degree. The most marketable of his skills is his knowledge of the Hebrew alphabet. It's enough to get him a job in a warehouse of Yiddish literature run by a Jewish organization. Bored beyond belief, this nameless narrator teaches himself the language and embarks on his own journey which eventually leads to nonagenarian Itsik Malpesh.
Amazingly, Itsik's story and the narrator's story have strange little connections that reminded me of the subtle connections between the stories in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. However, these coincidental connections shouldn't have surprised, as the past never really seemed to stay the past in Itsik's long life. People came and went and reappeared when and where you least expected them. Or perhaps where you most expected them. Call backs and foreshadowing were used to good effect, and overall the writing of this debut was impressive. The story started to drag just a bit late in the novel, but the ending was so satisfying that it hardly seems worth mentioning. This is a truly auspicious debut, and I will be waiting with considerable interest to see what Peter Manseau writes next.
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35 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Envy; Or, Yiddish in America, August 22, 2008
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.
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