Customer Reviews

Songs for the Butcher's Daughter: A Novel

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Despite the unpromising title, this may be the best contemporary novel I'll read all year. Malpesh, almost Yiddish for `Monkey Piss', swaps Russian pogroms for Ellis Island hospitality. Manseau can inject irony, yet, when urban immigrants in the New World's Lower East Side banter, it's obvious the author's observed some of the quickest wits in town. The variety of personalities, locales and insights keeps this book ticking over, with both running gags and running sores. This novel is evidence of what happens when religion and romance each pull the wool of the other's eyes.

A young Catholic-born translator with a love of Yiddish literature and the (self-proclaimed) last Yiddish poet living in America provide two narrative threads that converge after a shocking denouement.

Itsik Malpesh is a Russian Jew who grew up during the vicious czarist pogroms of the early 20th century. The son of a feather-plucking goose-down factory manager, he was exposed to the slaughter of animals and people at a tender age. His actual birth occurred in the midst of a brutal attack on his family. As a young boy, he is arrested by romantic fantasies of the butcher's daughter, Sasha, who was present at his birth. Although he has never met Sasha, he is obsessively in love with her and spends much of his young years on a journey to meet her. By the time they meet, he has composed hundreds of poems about his passionate love for her.

His epic memoirs from Kishinev to Baltimore are contained in a stack of accounting ledgers. His love affair with language is expressed continuously through symbolic language, extended metaphors (many of them relating to his early years in the goose-down factory), playful contradictions and aphoristic passages. Malpesh plucks words like his father plucked geese, he turns them, bleeds them (like his father's machine invention to pluck feathers from geese), lets them fall lightly like feathers until the lightness of words falls like snow that covers the earth.

Like the Kabbalist scholars, Malpesh understands that there is a mystical, earth-shaking relationship between the smallest letter and the mysteries of creation.
"You see how language itself explains the mysteries of man?" and "Such letters. The flexibility of the alef-beys impress me even now."

From his beginnings shoveling goose droppings through his apprenticeship with typesetting and then in a sweat shop in America, Malpesh's poetry travels with him and within him. At the age of ninety-three he meets the young translator.

The translator is in a liminal time of life, a recent graduate of religious studies working in a warehouse shelving Yiddish books. He meets a woman, falls in love, and suffers the consequences of a lie.

The novel alternates between Malpesh's life and the translator's notes. Although they are very different men who lived diametrically opposed lives, they ultimately mirror each other through their emotional experiences.

The writing itself deserves five stars. However, the denouement, as jolting as it was, was given a secondary treatment. The disruption of moral fibers left a taste like too many feathers in my mouth. Even by the story's end, I couldn't get rid of the discomfort. However, the journey of letters, words, language, religion, poetry, and love provide a provocative, piercing, and passionate adventure for the reader.

If you love the literature of Michael Chabon and Natahan Englander, I am confident that you will enjoy this book.

Its 370 pages long but I read it in one day just because I was so caught up in this rather outrageous and comic novel which is basically a tribute to the Yiddish language. There are two main characters here. One is the voice of "the translator", who, like the actual author of this book, is a Catholic who is intrigued by the Yiddish language. The other is the voice of Itsik Malpesh, born during a pogrom in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century.

Through these two voices the story emerges, one of the experience of being a Jew in an anti-Semitic world, where young boys are kidnapped for the Tzar's army, where people labor at menial and backbreaking jobs for a pittance and where there is never a feeling of safety. The other voice is that of a modern young man working in an agency that restores books printed in Yiddish. He has learned Yiddish even though he is not Jewish and is romantically involved with a young Jewish woman who doesn't know his true background.

From these two voices, Itsik's story is told, how he searches for the butcher's daughter, Sasha, who, at age four was present at his birth. She is his obsession but when they finally meet up he discovers that her story is different from his. No matter though, he loves her. But by then they are both immigrants in New York, experiencing a world that has its own kind of harshness. The book spans a century and it all turns out well, but not without the characters experiencing some rather horrible events that were described so outrageously that I had to laugh out loud.

This is a fun book to read, but it is also a learning experience about the Yiddish language and a culture that has come and gone.

This easy to read page turner was penned by the son of a priest and a nun. As a student,he fell in love with Jewish fiction. Before beginning the novel read the interview with the author in the back of the book. The story of the author itself is fascinating.

The book's protagonist, Itsak, is born in a small Ukranian city during a pogrom. He flees to Odessa because of both persecution and the draft. From Odessa he emigrates to the lower east side of New York. At last he finds a home in Baltimore where he meets a Christian translater of Yiddish. This book contains everything neccessary to make a fine novel. The story is compelling. The language is fluid, rich and unpretentious. The tale is about one of my favorite subjects, the persecution of Jews and their subsequent migration to the U.S.

This non-Jewish author has captured the Yiddish cadences which flavor a successful work of Jewish fiction. He has obviously researched his subject and his subject's native language well. He is coming to address a group of readers in my city, and I expect to be in the audience. For a first effort this novel is truly amazing. I look forward to more from this talented writer. This book is a quick read and a page turner.

There are as many ways to understand and appreciate this book as there are readers because we hear other people's stories in the language and context that we have grown up with. At one point Itsik says "How is it that we are to others what we are not to yourselves? Does a word know its own meaning? Does a letter know the sound that it signifies? How then can we pretend to know what our lives are for?" We shape and are shaped by the people and events of life, each of us simultaneously the translator and the translated, the story of who we are always in draft form. Peter Manseau also reminds us that it is a mistake to confuse facts with truth. "Songs for the Butcher's Daughter" would be a good choice for a book club and will play in your mind long after the final page.

"Make words your homeland, Itsik. Make them your lover as well. I swear to you, if you do, you will never be homeless and you will never be heartbroken. you will rise each morning and know that the world is yours, no matter in which corner of it you are awake." Pretty amazing stuff--spoken by Russian Jews to another young Jewish man, Itsik Malpesh, whom they are about to send off to America to rescue their language and race from the pogroms--Itsik has no idea what is about to happen to him, nor would his character understand the implications those words would have today, in 2009.

This is the story of one young Jewish man trying to discover who he is and what his life is for. His writing has been discovered by a non-Jew who pretends to be a Jew and who wants to understand everything Jewish. He works in a warehouse trying to save books of Yiddish and Hebrew language and translate them into English. The story of Itsik and of the Translator run parallel throughout the book--the story is really Itsik's.

Good reading, often sad. I wanted to give this book more stars, but I often felt bogged down and overwhelmed by this book. I am not sure if it was the writing or the story, but it had great moments that I really loved, and then would fall flat for a while.

I couldn't "get into" this book. I tried. I promise. I didn't relate to any of the characters and, in the end, I stopped reading, in part, because I felt like I was being manipulated by the author to "like" the characters.

Actually, it is interesting to me to note how much I have struggled with this review because so many seemed to like it so much. I started this review several times... and abandoned it each time. The writing is good (although not as breathtaking as other reviewers seemed to think) and the premise was fairly interesting, but in the end I just couldn't finish the book. For that, it get's 3 stars. That feels "neutral".