La biblioteca de los sueños rotos

by Peter Manseau

Summer, sweltering, 1996. A book warehouse in western Massachusetts. A man at the beginning of his adult life -- and the end of his career rope -- becomes involved with a woman, a language, and a great lie that will define his future. Most auspiciously of all, he runs across Itsik Malpesh, a ninetysomething Russian immigrant who claims to be the last Yiddish poet in America. When a set of accounting ledgers in which Malpesh has written his memoirs surfaces -- twenty-two volumes brimming with adventure, drama, deception, passion, and wit -- the young man is compelled to translate them, telling Malpesh's story as his own life unfolds, and bringing together two paths that coincide in shocking and unexpected ways.

Moving from revolutionary Russia to New York's Depression-era Lower East Side to millennium's- \end Baltimore with drama, adventure, and boisterous, feisty charm to spare, the unpeeling of this friendship is a story of the entire twentieth century. For fans of Nicole Krauss, Nathan Englander, Richard Powers, Amy Bloom, and Lore Segal, this book will amaze at every turn: narrated by two poets (one who doesn't know he is and one who doesn't know he isn't), it is a wise and warm look at the constant surprises and ineluctable ravages of time. It's a book about religion, love, and typesetting -- how one passion can be used to goad and thwart the other -- and most of all, about how faith in the power of words can survive even the death of a language.

A novel of faith lost and hope found in translation, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter is at once an immigrant's epic saga, a love story for the ages, a Yiddish-inflected laughing-through-tears tour of world history for Jews and Gentiles alike, and a testament to Manseau's ambitious genius.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Jewish, Russia, Roman, Historical, Book Club

446 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Make Words Your Homeland

Near the town of Paarl in the South African Karoo stands a structure constructed in 1975 which may be unique in the world: the Taalmonument, an architectural symbol of the Afrikaans language. As far as I am aware, only the Afrikaners have ever chosen to commemorate their culture through a physical representation of a central tool of racial hatred and repression. Mainly used in the rural areas of Cape Province, Afrikaans is spoken by around 7 million people. The symbolism of the Paarl Taalmonument is intended to show the history of Afrikaans linguistic development from archaic Dutch, Malay, and a smattering of native dialects. The year after the monument’s construction the inhabitants of Soweto began a rebellion against Afrikaans as a main language of school instruction. The government succumbed almost immediately to one of the first acts of organised civil rebellion and virtually all non-white schools under the apartheid regime chose English as the language of instruction. Since the death of apartheid, Afrikaans remains the lingua franca in parts of South Africa but is still associated with white supremacy. It is likely to die a slow death.



Yiddish is another language put under intense pressure in the 20th century. But for precisely the opposite reasons as Afrikaans. Although much more ancient than Afrikaans, Yiddish too is a syncretic mix of German, Slavic, Aramaic and Hebrew. Just prior to WW II it is estimated that there were 13 million Yiddish speakers, mainly in an arc of trans-national Jewish culture that ran from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Thanks to the Holocaust and subsequent emigration, Yiddish today is probably understood by perhaps a million native speakers, mostly survivors of persecution. Although there are many academic attempts to resuscitate the language, it seems unlikely that it will ever be recovered as a living part of modern life. Yiddish doesn’t have a Taalmonument, quite likely because it never was a language of repression or colonisation. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t commemorated, indeed mourned in a way that the death of a language like Afrikaans could ever be.

Songs of the Butcher’s Daughter is just the kind of commemoration that Yiddish deserves. Ostensibly a sort of love story and immigrant history, its backbone and binding theme is Yiddish and the culture it expressed, first in Eastern Europe and then in New York City. What was constant about being an Ashkenazy Jew, regardless of place, was language. As the protagonist, appropriately a Yiddish poet, is advised, “The Jewish future, like the Jewish past, can only be found through words. Not nations. Certainly not land…Make words your homeland Itsik. Make them your lover as well.” The suffering of oppression and dislocation is not eliminated but at least somewhat mitigated by language: “Can any solace equal that which is found by finding the proper words for all we encounter?”

In fact, as with Afrikaans but in exactly the opposite sense, Yiddish is the central symbol of Jewish culture as the vehicle for learning which is absent in the peasant culture of ignorance and bigotry in which it had to survive. It identified precisely what made that culture different: “The goyim are a curious people…Not curious that they want to know things,…curious that they don’t.” The only weapons that Jews had traditionally been allowed to possess are words. And words are honed through practice among non-lethal opponents arguing about whether Yiddish or Hebrew is superior: “How do Jews settle anything? With shouting such has not been heard since Babel.” Words may not be magical, but they certainly are sacred: “... the kabbalist’s lessons about the significance of letters as the building blocks of creation. Each told a story if one took time to read it.”

There is of course another memorial to Yiddish, which is implicit throughout Manseau’s narrative: its legacy in other languages, especially English, and specifically American English. At one point the narrator muses, “Who but a writer in a lonely room could impregnate the thoughts of so many.” Americans, and through them other English-speakers, have been impregnated by Yiddish vocabulary and even Yiddish thought patterns, not just through translations of literature (one thinks of Singer, Aleichem and so many others mentioned by Manseau), but in the influences of Yiddish on everyday usage. Growing up in a suburb of New York City in the 1950’s, I found, demanded a minimal familiarity with Yiddish vocabulary. Mensch, mazel, mitzvah were used without conscious thought but entirely appropriately in English conversation. Tsouris, simcha, and meshugenah were universally understood as states of mind with only the most contorted, and therefore ignored, translations into English. And of course, in light of the peculiar directness of much NYC social intercourse, the numerous Yiddish designations of bodily parts and functions were heard everywhere.

So the monument to Yiddish is not some fixed totem that attracts visitors who (for a fee) want to experience some historical experience of dominance. Nor are Yiddish language and culture something to be appropriated by non-Jews as a sort of historical trinket. The monument to Yiddish lives in literature and in other languages, that is in our social existence. Manseau’s novel is but one, very enjoyable, creative component of that monument.

[Jan Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book tricked me into reading it--but in a good way.

It's a double story, one part set in this day and age (give or take a few decades), and one beginning a hundred years ago in Eastern Europe, translated from the Yiddish, as the story goes. The latter, I thought, would be opaque to me, off-putting in some picaresque way.

In looking up picaresque novels, though, I see I love many of those listed. Well, the ones I didn't like, then. Hmm. Anyway, according to some slight foretaste I had made a prejudgment.

The modern-day story involves a young man of Catholic descent who has graduated college in religion and biblical languages. His crisis is that he's lost his faith while in school and, having graduated, finds himself without marketable skills.

The back story here is that the author in real life is the son of a former priest and a nun. He's written another book about that (Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son). That's not in the present story, though.

So the protagonist finds himself working in a warehouse for rescued Yiddish books. At first this is no better than a warehouse job for him, since Yiddish isn't a biblical language. Although written with Hebrew letters and sharing an occasional word or several (loshn kodesh: holy language) with biblical Hebrew, it's a distinct language. But then he sounds out Hem-Ing-Vay, the author of Der alter un der yam, which becomes his Rosetta Stone. And that leads him to discover a certain kinship:

Thereafter, making sense of the books in my care became for me an obsessive preoccupation, not least of all because, as I learned to read, I was learning also about a culture immensely appealing to a fallen Catholic like myself. For if Yiddish writers had one thing in common, I discovered, it was the kind of passionate irreligiosity that can only be found among those who'd been born, raised, and sickened by spiritual tradition. In a poem by Malpesh's contemporary Jacob Glatshteyn, a line struck me as few ever have: The God of my unbelief is magnificant. (p. 5)

Itsik Malpesh: In his work with Yiddish translation, the protagonist finds his destiny, one that puts him in touch with that 95 year-old character calling himself the last (and hence the best) Yiddish poet in America, whose translator he is to become. And having hooked me on the modern-day story, this book thrust me into the story of another place and time, complete with pogroms, uprootings, fateful encounters, violence, and badly damaged psyches. Not that the past has any monopoly on damaged psyches, when you get right down to it.

But there was another thread to my entanglement: romance. The protagonist has one coworker in the warehouse of Yiddish books: Clara, a beautiful baal t'shuva--a Jew who decides her upbringing has been too secular, a "born-again Jew." She is irresistibly attracted to our protagonist, who appears to her to be the most Jewish man she's ever met.

So it is that our protagonist finds himself passing. How not to? His employers, who didn't ask questions, assumed he was Jewish. The fellow tenants in the warehouse building, a cluster of Vietnamese seamstresses and a floor filled by drug-rehab furniture refinishers, refer to them collectively and as a matter of fact as, "the Jews." What's he supposed to do, holler back that he's not one?

Not to mention the beautiful coworker. As the character Itsik Malpesh says:

"A man is in his pants what he is not in his heart." (p. 41)

So at first I was reading Itsik Malpesh's story to get back to the modern story. And I see better what was blocking me: the impression given, by those looking back and telling the story, of enforced passivity. Now we realize that those people were so embroiled in a negative situation, one not of their own making, that they were sitting ducks. It's hard to read when you know no good is going to come of it.

Looking back, we feel we're so unlike them. Nowadays we all are free agents with free will who are captains of our own fates and get what we earn or what we deserve. Or so we convince ourselves.

Nevertheless, I was hooked, so no matter how fast I had to read through the old story to get to the new, I did read it, until it caught on with me, too. And I won't spoil it by telling you how, but it extricates itself and slips the bonds of the inevitable.

Or, does it? What is bashert (destiny)? Is it what leads us courageously onward? Or what binds us to the inexorable, crushing wheel of history?

Does it lift us, or does it sacrifice us on its alter?

The story in this book is characterized by the knaytch (the "twist"), in fact, by quite a few of them.

"Do you know this word? It is the sudden turn of the story or poem, when all at once the writer's meaning is revealed. In English, knaytch is the 'twist.' It is the same word a baker might use if he is making a pastry. But a writer is not a baker. A writer should be more like a butcher. And not just a butcher but a shoykhet (ritual butcherer)....

Do you know what kind of a knife a shoykhet uses? When a shoykhet kills an animal, he must select the right blade--a halaf--for the size of the beast. It may not be the sharpest knife, or the most deadly, but it is the most graceful.

A writer's work is not very different. Faced with poems and stories of all sizes, one uses whatever style is most graceful at the time...." (p. 177)

I haven't even told you about the titular butcher--or his daughter! Suffice it to say here that there's an art and a science about it and that faith is required, that is, the shoykhet believes in what he's doing. When the process is kosher (that is, done right), the animal to give up its life to become food is calmed and lulled, dying without panic and distress.

Itsik Malpesh's metaphor for the narrative twist is the halaf, the blade wielded by the ritual butcher.

Or, we could call it the "black swan:" the unforeseeable event that cuts the action and introduces discontinuity, so that everything can turn out as it should.

[Susan Sherwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's much to like in this novel. The story is told through the memoirs of a Yiddish-speaking man named Itsik Malpesh, born in 1903 in Kishinev, Russia during a pogrom and who by chance immigrates from Odessa to the U.S. when he's sixteen. Malpesh believes himself to be the last of the great Yiddish poets and he believes in the power of words. His poems and "reason for living" are motivated by his "memories" of his muse, Sasha, the butcher's daughter four years his elder whom he believes scared away the Russian bullies attacking his family at his birth. The reality of the American immigrant experience is not exactly what Malpesh envisioned, though, and the reader gets a glimpse of anti-Semitism, the waning of Yiddish, the birth of Israel, the difficulty of assimilation and the way in which some re-invented themselves. The convergent story of this novel is that of a Catholic college grad with a degree in theology and knowledge of Hebrew who becomes the translator of Itsik's memoirs.

Interestingly, the author of this novel is not Jewish, and he actually reads Yiddish.

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Library Of Broken Dreams

Peter Manseau's 2008 novel "Songs for the Butcher's Daughter" is a sprawling yarn which covers virtually the entire 20th century with settings in Kishinev, Odessa, New York City, Baltimore, and Jerusalem. Much of the book is about the Jewish immigrant experience and about Yiddish. Manseau has a fresh and sympathetic grasp of his materials made all the more impressive because he is not Jewish. He has been a wanderer in religion and in spirituality, and it shows in his novel. Before writing this debut work of fiction, Manseau co-authored "Killing the Buddha" about American spiritual journeys and a memoir titled, "Vows". His interest in religion in the United States is also central to his most recent book, "One Nation Under Gods: A New American History".

The book includes two first person narrators and tells the unlikely saga of how their lives interweave, The first narrator is Itsik Malpesh who when the book begins is a frail, aging man in his nineties living alone in a shabby apartment in Baltimore. Malpesh has written poetry in Yiddish and describes himself as "the greatest" because "the last" Yiddish poet. Malpesh's memoirs, the source of his portion of the book, trace the course of his life. He was born in Kishinev during a Pogrom which is vividly described. He fell in love somehow with a woman whom he had never met, Sasha, four years his senior, who was present at his birth. Malpesh was born a poet and Sasha was his muse. The second period of Malpesh's life is set in Odessa during the early years of communism. He works for a Jewish printer, hears stories of Sasha's life in Palestine, and finds himself whisked off to America on the boat.

The second half of the book is set in America as Malpesh works in sweatshops in he Lower East Side and struggles to establish himself as a Yiddish writer, a language that already is dying. He meets several people from his past life, including Sasha, the imagined love of his life. Malpesh is a secular, earthy character devoted to his poems and his love. He also commits a terrible crime which causes him to stop writing poetry.

Contacts from the old world help Malpesh meet another immigrant, Knobloch, who has become weatlhy operating sweatshops and publishing a Yiddish newspaper. Knobloch keeps a large library of old Yiddish books; he rarely reads but is devoted to the library. The nature of the library is eloquently described by Knobloch's secretary and sister:

"For years [Knobloch] haunted the entry point to the city from Ellis Island. Many a man comes to these shores so certain he will make his fortune that he brings all his books along with him from the Old Home. Every Jew off the boat dreams he will have a house with an extra room in which to keep his books. They realize soon enough that they will be lucky to find a home with room enough for their families. And so the books must go. My brother tells them, I will hold your books for you until you are on your feet, but he knows they will never be back for them. I call it his Library of Broken Dreams. There isn't a week that goes by that a few more disappointed men don't wander in here and make a deposit."

The second narrator is a young lapsed Catholic American in his 20s with a college degree in religion. He finds work for an organization devoted to the preservation of Yiddish literature and meets and falls in love with a young Jewish woman with aspirations to be Orthodox. In the course of his work, the narrator meets Malpesh who tells him that a large library of Yiddish books, the "Library of Broken Dreams" is about to be lost to a demolition crew. Malpesh asks this at first casual acquaintance to translate his memoirs. Thus, the novel consists of Malpesh's memoirs together with sections in which the translator speaks in his own voice.

"Songs for the Butcher's Daughter" is exuberantly written with descriptions of places and characters and reflections on love, Yiddish, translation, and the promise of America. It is an emotive, heart-on-sleeve book. With its portrayal of the Jewish immigrant experience, the novel made me love the passions of Yiddish and its poetry and even more America's boisterous and varied secularism and plurality. Here is some descriptive writing from Malpesh's memoirs late in his life as the aging poet wanders the streets of Baltimore.

"I had finally learned my English by then -- working in a housing project was a great education -- and so perhaps for the first time in my life I wandered freely around the city in which I lived. No regard for Jewish neighborhood or not, I walked and stopped wherever I chose. In a bar by Camden Yards I learned about baseball, and in my conversations with men whose names I rarely learned, men who welcomed me with beer-buying American charm despite the difference of our origins, I sometimes felt a bit of the passion I had felt through Yiddish, through poetry, but none of the pain."

Even though "Songs for the Butcher's Daughter" has an overly broad scope, includes a few less than inspired stretches and has plotting marred by contrivance and coincidence, it won me over with its liveliness, love of poetry and of books, and descriptions. The songs and people of this book are not always pretty, but the book sings. The novel is bittersweet and is itself full of poetry and of the love of life.

Robin Friedman

[Jeff Sharlet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in manuscript. Here's what I wrote about it for Jewcy.com: 'm nominating a book by a goy, and a goy who happens to be my friend. Also, the book isn't even out yet -- it's coming in August, I think. But bear with me on this one for a moment, because the book -- it's called 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.) The author, Peter Manseau, 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 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 really already in the Jewish canon, but if you're clueless, add this to your shelf now and pretend you knew about it all along). 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 chest. You know Irving Howe's Treasury of Yiddish Stories? This story, "Songs for the Butcher's Daughter," the translated memoir-within-the-novel, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter, 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.

[Marco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ontegenzeggelijk een lekker leesbaar boek, voor je het weet ben je erdoorheen. Twee verhaallijnen die aan het einde bijeen komen. Het reisverhaal is buitengewoon, ook is veel op te steken over het Joodse geloof, het Jiddisch en Hebreeuws en de tradities. En daar wringt de schoen die mijn aandacht gaandeweg deed verslappen. De beschreven disputen tussen Joden of met Christenen, de pogroms, voegen iets toe aan de uitleg over het Jodendom, maar de betreffende karakters zijn plat en de toon is veel meer serieus en feitelijk dan de fantasievolle verhalende reis van de Joodse protagonist. Dat gezegd hebbende: het leven is onwaarschijnlijk, kent de meest verrassende wendingen en heeft vaak te veel serieus en feitelijk verdriet. Dat wordt mede veroorzaakt door onszelf en de keuzen die wij zelf en onze naasten maken. Dat kunnen onbegrepen keuzen zijn. Dit boek pleit voor woorden die verzoenen en voor een vreedzaam samenleven. Altijd. In die zin is het een pleidooi voor humanisme dat in dit geval ook nog eens heel Amerikaans goed afloopt voor de hoofdpersonen.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been trying my best to recall a quote by Franz Kafka describing the essence of Yiddish. If I remember correctly, he explained that the language was verbal expression of everything the gentiles felt about European Jewry. Yiddish is a bastardized German, mutated like a cancer cell, laid out in letters from the dark places of the Middle East. Spoken by an alien people who moved from one walled ghetto to another, the language, like the Jews, was at once disturbingly familiar and troubling foreign. Trouble is, in the late nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries, many European Jews felt the same way.

Enter Itsik Malpesh, a Yiddish poet from Kishinev. Through his eyes, we see the plight of the Eastern European Jew a century ago, a life of fear and trepidation. He survives a pogrom, a forcible drafting into (and escape from) the Russian army, and life in Odessa as the ports slowly closed on Jewish emigration. Smuggled out of the Old World in a trunk of Hebrew letters meant for Yiddish presses in the New World, Malpesh struggles to compose his poetry amidst the frustration of learning English and the American way of life. Throughout his travels in the novel, one theme remains the same: the uneasy standing of Yiddish in both the Jewish community and the world at large.

One chapter in particular captures the combative nature of the Jewish “national” languages, Yiddish and Hebrew. A Zionist-leaning Jew in a bar is intent on resurrecting Hebrew, a language that was more ancient dust in the mouth than anything, while a socialist Jew insists that Yiddish will always hold the Jewish heart. In a vaudevillian routine that would make any respectable Catskills comedian jealous, the two battle for the linguistic fate of a 5,000 year old religion. Sides are chosen, drinks are thrown, and Jews continue to perpetuate the “two Jews, three opinions” saying into eternity.

There’s a clear winner in the battle of the tongues. Yiddish maintains an uneasy throne in tiny Jewish communities, most of its kingdom buried in mass graves dotting the European countryside. Hebrew, on the other hand, has turned from dust in the mouth to a breath of life to Jews from all over the world. It’s telling that I, an Ashkenazi Jew whose grandmother spoke Yiddish in her childhood home, can speak whole sentences in Hebrew and only swear haltingly in Yiddish. With one’s decline came another’s birth.

Surprisingly, author Peter Manseau is Catholic, the product of a priest and a nun (his memoir Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son is on my Cannonball list). His story is also part of this novel—the translator who shares Malpesh’s story (and occasionally inserts his own commentary) shares quite a few characteristics with Manseau, who worked at a Yiddish book conservatory in New England. Peter Manseau, for those of you who insist that their authors be nice people, is a nice person. Anyone who can deal with a line of cranky old Jewish women and still remain smiling when he signs my book is a keeper.

Adorableness of the author aside, Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter is a deep book, a book that I can’t possibly explain in a poorly executed review. It transcends religions, continents, and languages. It’s a strange and wonderful novel that I was sad to put down. Now it’s time to foist it off on my family and see if they get anything out of it.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Noce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Travolti da un insolito bashert, nell’azzurro mare di Manseau

Essì che anche Zamenhof era ebreo. E infatti, un piccolo dubbio, una piccola spinuccia nel fianco deve averlo avvertito che una lingua priva di storia, anima e identità culturale, come l’esperanto, non avrebbe avuto un successo che fosse veramente universale. Altrimenti chi glielo faceva fare a ufficializzare l’yiddish per i suoi connazionali, a creare parallelamente un’alternativa per i suoi conterranei così attaccati alle proprie radici. Avrebbe potuto dire, Aò, mi sono fatto un mazzo tanto per inventarmi una lingua novella, ora vi mettete sul banchetto degli scolari e ve la imparate per benino, ché io son stanco e ho bisogno di pennicare.

Malpesh al contrario, protagonista estroso di questa storia e molto più furbo di Zamenhof, capisce perfettamente che l’unico ponte universale tra le lingue, è l’oceano, oppure all’occorrenza il Santo Traduttore. E così, come se ci dovessimo dividere tra due amici che ci raccontano la propria versione di uno stesso avvenimento, ci troviamo una sera a braccetto con il protagonista, e una sera a braccetto con il traduttore/volgarizzatore. Un capitolo a testa per dare voce a un’unica storia.

L’odissea di Malpesh attraverso l’amore lungo una vita intera, per la sua lingua e la sua donna, acquisisce contorni sempre più colorati e rotondi via via che passa per la voce dell’interprete, e se il livello di soddisfazione del lettore avesse un’asticella più alta, c’è sempre la storia del minestrone sopra e sotto. Sotto, vuol dire che voi lettori, vi infilate il costume del secolo, ed entrate con tutt’e due i piedini nella storia, accorgendovi che è un vero pot-pourri letterario, un minestrone di eventi dickensiani, singeriani, dostoevskjiani , e la lista si allunga a seconda di quanto avete letto precedentemente e quanti riferimenti cogliete all’interno della storia. Sopra, vuol dire che una volta sfilato il vestitino del lettore immedesimato, date un’occhiata all’opera dall’alto, e qua le opinioni improvvisamente diventano variegate. Ho letto di gente a cui il romanzo di Manseau ricorda un po’ Richler, un po’ Chatwin, un po’ Roth e chi più ne vede tra le righe, più ne metta. A me ad esempio, ha ricordato il Maggiani del Coraggio del pettirosso, provvisto all’uopo di un pizzico di ironia alla Auslander, in cerca del porto sepolto e della sua Fatiha, irraggiungibile come la Sasha di Maplesh. Vi dicevo appunto: minestrone sopra e sotto.

Poi, a ben guardare, oltre alle citazioni e ai rimandi extra Manseau, ci si vede anche un po’ di paraculaggine, come il finale accattivante e un po’ melenso, ma nonostante qualche sbavatura, la cosa più evidente è che comunque, questo passato di verdure emotivo diventa più trainante della Promenade di Chagall in copertina. E il bashert- destino, dalle molteplici chiavi di lettura, diventa improvvisamente una ballata, che ti culla attraverso le vicissitudini di una bizzarra esistenza e l’ironia tipica di chi ne ha viste tante. Inevitabilmente gradevole a questo punto, rimanere in sua balìa fino alla fine.

[Mindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the few books I read this year that I could not put down and still cannot stop thinking about. I was interested in reading this book because of its Jewish themes but even though Jews will find much familiar here I think it will be just as enjoyable for non-Jews. The narrator, who is a main character of the novel, is not Jewish.

The book is a story within a story. There is the story unfolding in the autobiography that is being translated from Yiddish by the narrator. Then there is the story of the narrator mostly in the form of “translator’s notes” and the current day situation of the characters.

Eventually these two stories coincide in ways that I found wonderful and intriguing. In fact, throughout the novel, there are coincidental connections that add depth and interest to the story.

This is a wonderfully human story that touches on so many interesting topics: Star-crossed love, love of books, the immigrant experience, death of a language, obsessions, and the beauty of poetry.

[Catherine Davison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I loved it for the story and the ancient language it celebrates, Yiddish. I loved it for all the references to Jews and Jewish writers I've admired since my teens; Chaim Potok, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Adler, Sholom Alechoim, I smiled and teared up while reading this. I skipped the too descriptive bits about the goose plucking machine but other than that I loved this book and recommend it to anyone who has an appreciation of literature and Jewish humour, writing and culture. ( it's not a holocaust story.)

[Colleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This wonderful book tells the tale of a young Catholic graduate with a love of language who finds himself the custodian of a library of Yiddish texts. He finds himself drawn into the story of Itsik Malpesh, the self-proclaimed greatest Yiddish poet in America. The book unfolds along two timelines, gradually merging together at the end into one seamless story. Itsik's love for Sasha, the butcher's daughter he believes is his bashert provides the main thread to both the narrative and his entire life.

I was drawn completely into this novel that traces the often dark experiences of an Eastern European Jew who ultimately immigrates to the US. The story was compelling, the characters engaging, and the denouement exciting. Manseau's use of Yiddish was masterful and the language of the novel overall was lyrical. I highly recommend this book.

[Ffiamma · Rating 4 out of 5]

ci stanno tantissime cose, in questo romanzo: la poesia, due piani temporali, troppe coincidenze, qualche forzatura, due mondi lontani e confliggenti. eppure, gli ho dato un voto più alto di quel che merita perché per me tratta temi irresistibili e mi sono immersa nelle sue pagine senza potermi staccare fino alla fine.

[Ayelet Waldman]

I love a good Yiddish tale.

[May-Ling · Rating 3 out of 5]

i don't know how i keep picking up all of these jewish books, but somehow when i randomly choose titles off the shelf, a lot of them happen to be by jewish writers.

this book was hard to get into for that reason (i think i just need a break for awhile), and plus, it's told from 2 viewpoints - that of itsik malpesh, a fictional yiddish poet, and a translator in the present day, who is telling the story of malpesh's life. he sometimes explains possible things lost in translation and i tended to skim those parts.

i was on an airplane, so i forced myself to get through it, and i'm glad i did for the following reasons:

* i have a better understanding of yiddish vs. hebrew and the many differences in jewish culture
* the story and the ending ends up becoming very compelling
* the way in which the story told ends up connecting with the present-day is remarkably done and truly touching

[Vivienne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book written on 2 levels with 2 protagonists whose paths cross: the epic history of a fictional Yiddish poet and his escape from the pogroms of the shtetl to New York via Odessa and the modern day young Yiddish enthusiast, who interestingly is not Jewish and clearly represents the author who is Catholic. Despite being written with warmth and humour, the book left me with a huge sense of loss. This recurrent theme is portrayed through the poet's loss of family, the loss of the love of his life and the loss of success, but more importantly I was affected by sadness for the loss of such a vibrant language and culture. That said, I am glad I read this book. It has strengthened my resolve to learn Yiddish although I may need to live up to the Yiddish expression and live "biz hundert un tsvantzik" in order to achieve that goal!

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Na alle enthousiaste reacties was ik nieuwsgierig geworden maar helaas het is niet helemaal mijn boek. In de vorm van de levensbeschrijving van Itsik Malpesj, vermengd met het verhaal van de niet-joodse archiefmedewerker, is het eigenlijk vooral een ode aan het Jiddisch. En daar is op zich niets mis mee maar het verhaal pakte me gewoon niet zo. Al die oude bekenden uit Rusland die Itsik in Amerika weer tegenkomt, tot zijn muze Sasja aan toe, ik vond het een beetje erg veel toeval en drama bij elkaar en dan blijkt Clara ook nog de achterkleindochter van Itsik! Meer dan: ‘wel aardig’ kan ik er niet van maken.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alternating action in the distant past with events in the present. Reconcilliation of the two contrived but a good ride just the same.

[Judy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Weird story of a translator posing as a jew intertwined with the story of the jewish poet he is translating. I did not like it very well.

[Boris Feldman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Jewish life story, from the Kishinev pogrom to the Lower East Side. Beautifully written. Engaging, unpredictable, plot. A very touching work.

[Hermien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely story and languages are close to my heart so I especially enjoyed that angle.

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well-written. Intelligent and educating. The ending was a bit too contrived, but on the whole, a good concept.

[Pamela Golton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book

[Daphne · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5 sterren.
Hoe de liefde voor taal, land en liefde mensen tot geweld kunnen aanzetten. Een vlecht van verhalen die niet mistaat in de Jiddische traditie. Aanrader!

[Laura]

I have stared at this book for awhile now at the indie bookstore. I wanted to commit, yet there was always another book on my to be read in the more immediate future. Serendipity struck when I spotted this on the edge of a table at the annual library book sale. Out of hundreds of thousands of books there and countless spines, I touched, I happened to notice this one and remember it from the bookshop. It was beshert (Yiddish for fate or destiny).

The back of the book promises it is the tale of two poets (one who doesn't know he is and one who doesn't know he isn't). I was intrigued with the premise of an identity that hasn't been actualized or acknowledged and the denial of truth. The book, however, deals with those issues indirectly and secondary to the themes of remoteness, isolation, loss, hidden truths, and most importantly beshert.

It blends two stories of a young man who stumbles into the task of translating memoirs of the poet Itsik Malpesh from Yiddish to English and Itsik himself, "the greatest Yiddish poet." I think the story telling technique of adding the translator notes between chapters was an interesting one even though I nearly skipped over the first one assuming the book had originally been written in another language. But they, too, are a part of the fiction. The translator's story is a lighter journey and one without as much at stake. While he was a likable character (one that you wouldn't mind hanging out with and grabbing a beer with), I was less invested in his ending.

Itsik's story is more paramount. It is his memoirs after all that make up the bulk of the novel. Songs for the Butcher's Daughter reads a bit as Gone With the Wind with a cast of Jewish immigrants. You don't envy or empathize with the protagonist Itsik. You admire the strength it took to survive. And there is much to survive. So imagine reading the defensive elitist tone of Scarlett O'Hara's memoirs, but make her a romantic and cast out Jewish boy, and you have Itsik Malpesh.

While Itsik is under the illusion that the greatest love affair of his life is with the butcher's daughter Sasha, that isn't true. The greatest love affair he has (and the translator and I imagine Manseau) share is with the Yiddish language. Just as place is used effectively as a character, as a plot, as a living force, so is the very love of the art and power and honesty of language in this novel. Even if you are bored with the plot of "just another immigrant story," if you love your native tongue and you love literature, you will find the songs among the pages of this novel recognizable. I was near tears when the author wrote a scene in which the Yiddish typeset letters go floating and are thought to have washed up on a more distant shore. A beach of words and letters!

Itsik Malpesh may not always be likeable or intelligent or endearing. He is made of naivete and dreams, but he is just as determined as the steel that built up New York that he is true to his story and his history. He will be the last to yield.

The ending has more than a touch of colliding coincidences. It takes a bit of suspension of disbelief to get down with it, but y'know I've read far worse endings that really stretch the connections of a braided narrative. This one wasn't too bad, but I think it could have benefited from another chapter to help the pacing reach its conclusion.

[Yoka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Een boek dat zo’n prachtige titel heeft zorgt voor hoge verwachtingen en wat mij betreft worden deze verwachtingen helemaal waargemaakt. Een fantasierijk boek dat me regelmatig kippenvel gaf omdat ik zo bij de hoofdpersoon betrokken was. In het boek lopen eigenlijk twee verhalen door elkaar heen, waarin allerlei toevalligheden voor een verrassend einde zorgen. Aan de ene kant het verhaal van een katholieke jongen uit Boston die zoekend naar werk terecht is gekomen bij een Joodse culturele organisatie die boeken uit de hele wereld verzamelt. Omdat hem nooit is gevraagd of hij Joods is gaat men daarvan uit, met alle gevolgen van dien. Door zijn werkzaamheden bij deze Joodse culturele organisatie komt hij in aanraking met Itsik Malpesj, volgens eigen zeggen de laatste Jiddische dichter in Amerika. Itsik werd geboren in Kisjinev, tijdens een pogrom. Sasja, de vierjarige dochter van de Joodse slager, was bij deze geboorte aanwezig. Zij hief volgens Itsiks moeder haar vuistje tegen de indringers, waarop deze beschaamd de ruimte verlieten. Sasja verdwijnt uit Itsiks leven als hij nog maar net geboren is, maar hij blijft haar geestelijk volgen omdat zij volgens hem zijn basjerte is, de vrouw die voor hem is voorbestemd. Sasja is eigenlijk de muze van Itsik, en komt in al zijn gedichten terug. Sasja, die naar Palestina is gegaan, behoort tot een groep Joden die het Hebreeuws beschouwt als de landstaal van de Joden en neerkijkt op het Jiddisch. Langzamerhand ontvouwt zich het levensverhaal van Itsik Malpesj, waarin de toevalligheden als een rode draad door het boek lopen. Itsik, wiens enige doel de publicatie van zijn gedichten lijkt te zijn, heeft hier alles voor over. Door allerlei gebeurtenissen komt hij uiteindelijk in New York terecht, waar bijzondere ontmoetingen plaatsvinden met mensen die hij kent uit zijn verleden. Al deze personen spelen een rol bij zijn pogingen om zijn gedichten gepubliceerd te krijgen. Deze voorbestemming speelt een grote rol in het boek, alle personen lijken met elkaar verbonden door het lot. Een prachtige debuutroman van een schrijver die volgens mij het verhalen vertellen in zijn bloed heeft.

[Vic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting, compelling, slightly disturbing, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter is a highly readable, beautifully written story. At times philosophical, other times educational, always entertaining, Peter Manseau takes readers on an odyssey from late nineteenth century Kishinev, Russia to modern day Baltimore as seen through the eyes and experiences of Itzak Malpesh, the last and therefore greatest Yiddish poet(according to Malpesh).

Concurrently, Manseau creates a secondary protagonist, a young man, non-Jewish, recently graduated from college with a degree in Religion and scriptural languages who takes a job working for a Jewish Cultural Organization that is collecting and preserving Judaic literature. Thinking his understanding of Hebrew acquired through academia will serve him well in this endeavor he is surprised to learn that much of the donated literature has been written in Yiddish, a language of which he knows nothing.

Eventually the life story of Malpesh, as told through his collection of poems and journals catches up to Malpesh the nonagenarian and intersects with the secondary story, being narrated by the young college graduate. It is Malpesh's life long obsession with poetry, Yiddish and a girl from his hometown in Russia that forms the heart of Songs for the Butcher's Daughter.

It was easy to resonate with the story. I grew up with relatives and family members who spoke Yiddish and a grandfather who emigrated to America to escape the Czar's army. What I found most fascinating was how much more prominent Yiddish was as little as a century ago. I always thought of Yiddish as slang, kind of a bastardized language that emerged from the ghettos of eastern Europe. What a surprise to realize that Yiddish, not Hebrew was the primary cultural language of Jews and that the formation of the state of Israel played such a pivotal role in the eventual dismissal of Yiddish as an everyday language.

[Scot · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very sophisticated debut novel for Peter Manseau, the author. There are two narrators with alternating plotlines, living in different time periods and places, but as the book moves forward, eventually they intersect. Such is their bashert—a Yiddish word for destiny that recurs throughout the book.

The first narrator, Itsik Malpesh, is a man determined to be the greatest living Yiddish poet. He is born in Kishinev, Russia, on Orthodox Easter in 1903, during a pogrom. His father invents a goose plucking machine that leads to success for a Christian capitalist’s down bedding factory, a place where young Itsik will learn the merits of shoveling goose shit. As these two details indicate, Itsik’s life is one of dark humor and considerable suffering, yet he demonstrates resilience, and unwavering dedication to his art. The sensibility is, in a word, profoundly Jewish.

The chapters of Itsik’s tale are ordered in the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. They are interspersed with translator’s commentary, and that unnamed translator, a modern day goyim who took a job working in a large warehouse of uncatalogued, donated Jewish books, teaches himself Yiddish. Both men share a fascination for language and the power of words. Both, too, have a love interest that begins as a poet’s idealized fixation. Do we make our own fates? Could we escape them even if we tried? The beautiful detail from Marc Chagall’s painting “Birthday/L’anniversaire” (1915) on the front cover nicely conveys the wistful tone that pervades this work, which offers doses of realism and outbursts of romanticism amid an ongoing patter of wry humor.

Thank you, Peter Manseau. For me, this novel was a mitzvah.

[Stacie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Between the historical research that went into this book, and the complexity of the characters, I very much enjoyed this novel. There are so many levels of appreciation, I'm not even sure I can recall them all.

First and foremost I loved how the journey of the characters represented the journey that ancestors of American Jewry experienced. From the pogroms in Russia, to pioneers in Israel (then Palestine), to Ellis Island, to New York City sweatshops...I loved the Jewish history that this book represents.

What I strongly appreciated about the historical aspects was the core issue of language. The author managed to capture the struggle within the Jewish population of how to proceed with their culture during this time period. It was a very intense argument that took place within Judaism. Some felt that Hebrew was the language that kept the Jewish people unique, and that if they were ever to reclaim their right over Israel, Hebrew would need to be the official language. Others felt that Yiddish best represented the Jews, while others (especially in America) felt that the Jewish people needed to forfeit their uniqueness and assimilate with the language (and therefor culture) they were surrounded by. Songs For The Butchers daughter beautifully illustrated this struggle and depicted representatives from all sides of the historical debate. More specifically it captures the way Yiddish began to die out among the Jewish population in the 1900's, which is an important part of history yet is severely under represented.

I am excited to refer this book to anyone who is interested in Jewish history. It is both an interesting story with well written characters, as well as a good resource for anyone looking to catch a glimpse of this time period and culture.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hadn't intended to start this book (or finish it) during the High Holy Days, but much of this book is about bashert (fate) so let's just chalk it up to that, shall we?

Manseau's book Vows caught my attention at ALA years ago, and when I heard him at RUSA's Notable Tastes Breakfast this year I knew I needed to read it. The experience of Itsik/Isaac may very well have been the experience of my family: the escape from the tsar's army, the coming to America and living in an American shtetl, the changing from Jewish to American to who knows what.

To my knowledge, however, none of my family are the poet, failed or otherwise, that Itsik was. It is his journey, his willful choices to do/not do, see/not see that make this such an incredible read. At times I felt that he needed a Simon Cowell to say 'look, you'll never be a real poet', because clearly no one had ever said that. The lives he casually ruins and the obliviousness he has to those results is stunning and yet very familiar.

For those that are not Jewish, this is a great way to experience what it was like (albeit with a little fantasy - the self-delusional kind, not the dragons/castles kind - thrown in).