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 ninety-something 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, ...
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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 ninety-something 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. 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.
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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
LorraineL
Nov 28, 2013
A moving story
Peter Manseau captures the heart and soul of the immigrant's tale and memories.
