This book is a superlative tale of two intersecting lives that takes place amid a swirl of words and languages and the alphabets that produce them. The result is such a melodious harmony of coincidences that you will feel as if you are at a transcendent orchestral performance of literature. I was thrilled to discover an author with such an ability to capture the essence of characters and culture and memories in motion.

Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter has two interwoven stories: one is a fictitious autobiography of nonagenarian Itsik Malpesh, the self-described “last and greatest Yiddish poet in America,” who was originally from Kishinev in the Russian Empire. The second consists of “translators notes” by a young man – a recent college graduate never named – who purportedly has translated Malpesh’s life story into English. [In real life, troubadour Itzik Manger is often referred to as the “last and greatest” of Yiddish poets. One wonders if the similarity between the two names was intentional.]

In alternating voices, we learn the story of Malpesh and the story of the translator, with amazing correspondences between the two. This perhaps reflects the theme of bashert in the story, or fate, which all the characters seem to repudiate, even as it binds them all tightly together.

Malpesh was born in 1903 literally in the midst of a pogrom. [These were sometimes spontaneous and sometimes officially organized massacres directed toward Jews. Even spontaneous riots were ignored by government officials.] Hiding in a bedroom upstairs during the pogrom were Itsik’s mother, grandmother and sisters as well as the butcher’s small daughter, Sasha. The butcher had left Sasha there to go help guard the synagogue and his butchering shed. Itzik’s mother unexpectedly went into labor, and her screams alerted the Russian marauders to their location. According to family legend, everyone froze except for little Sasha, who raised her tiny fist against the intruders. From the time he could write verse, Malpesh composed poems dedicated to Sasha, who, he felt, gave him life and was his bashert. He called the collection “Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter.”

As a young boy, while supposedly studying Jewish law in a Yeshiva, Itzik surreptitiously discovers the world of Russian language as well, and becomes fascinated with words. He works as an apprentice printer for many years, all the while hoping one day to have his poems published. On the cusp of manhood, his employer and benefactor sends him to America hidden in a trunk of printers blocks, each of which features a Hebrew letter. Inside, Itzik traced the shapes, “naming the letters with which God had made the world.” After being released from the trunk by a crewman, he still could not escape its hold on him:

“Yet in my mind I remained locked among the printing blocks. As I wandered the decks and breathed the salted air, my fellow passengers – speaking languages I had never heard, wearing costumes I had never imagined – seemed to me so many jumbled letters, all waiting to be assembled into stories, poems, songs; moving together across the wordless ocean, empty as a waiting page.”

He lands in New York, and gets a job with a printer recommended back in Kishinev. He still dreams of Sasha, and finally one day, reading his poems aloud in a bar, she is there.

When Itzik finally meets Sasha, he is amazed that the reality of her is different than his verse, and also, that she was something else to him than she was to anyone else:

“How is it that we are to others what we are not to ourselves? 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?”

Their involvement with one another is echoed far in the future, with the translator and a girl, Clara Feld, who works with him at the Jewish Cultural Organization, which is devoted to rescuing Yiddish books. In a rather humorously ironic twist, the translator is a Catholic passing for Jewish. He falls for Clara, and she for him, partly because he is “so Jewish!” But their relationship, like that of Itsik and Sasha, is built on a shaky scaffold of idealization, omissions, and half-truths. And yet, maybe it too is bashert.

Discussion:

There are at least three important debates taking place in this book.

One is the place of Yiddish in Jewish life. The Yiddish language is about a thousand years old. Elements of Yiddish even predated Hebrew, which became the language used strictly for religious purposes. But it was Yiddish that was always associated with Jewish culture. When the time came to settle Israel, passionate debates arose; this was the language identified with illiterates, with women, and with the abysmal status of Jews in society: shouldn’t it be abandoned? But wouldn’t that be equivalent to rejecting Jewish cultural history? These debates are waged intermittently throughout the book.

A second debate is the distinction between the semiotic (symbol, or word) and the semantic (meaning). An alphabetically-written word, of course, does not indicate “the real thing” – it is simply a linguistic symbol that corresponds to a real thing. It is therefore natural that it is represented differently in different languages. But in the process of changing the word from one language to another, the meaning invariably shifts through shades of difference also. Thus, in order to try to stay true to the "real thing" represented by the symbols, a translator must be an active participant in the process. In this book, one way that the translator becomes an active participant is by virtue of living a very parallel life to that of Malpesh.

The translator's active participation is also inherent on a meta level because of the very nature of his charge. The author evinces awareness that the whole idea of translation is central to the Jewish faith. The lack of “pure” or objective meaning in text was recognized by early Jewish sages, and viewed as positive: one must come to faith by active engagement. In fact, the Hebrew Scriptures contain only consonants, not vowels, so that the possibility of plural understandings above and beyond the contingency of text forces the worshipper into a creative process. Furthermore, the Talmud, which is the Jewish commentary on the law, reflects this dialogic understanding. The main text is centered on the page, surrounded by annotations from scholars in different ages. This encourages the students of the Talmud to participate in the making of meaning as well, and to see in media as well as message that "truth" depends on interpretation.

Somewhat amusingly, the Talmud holds that even God has no authority in the interpretation of the Scriptures, because in Exodus (supposedly the word of God) it is said “One must incline after the majority.” Moreover, the fact that He created a myriad of people with a myriad of opinions meant that all of these opinions were ipso facto words of God! And thus “truth” can reside in any person.

This leads us to the third debate, which interrogates the nature of truth about history: because memories are mediated by time, language, and interpretation, do we ever really know what happened? And how much does what we think happened influence who we become?

As the translator goes through Malpesh’s notebooks chronicling his life (each labeled consecutively with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet), he finds that memories are constantly renegotiated; the shadowboxes of old events are filled in over time, until finally we get something fairly close to a fully furnished memory about which all agree. Words are magic, Itsik tells Sasha, and she scoffs. But in the end it is words that finally brings out something approximating the truth, and leads them all to their true bashert.

Evaluation: The autobiography of Malpesh is rich with unforgettable characters; a more or less accurate portrayal of what it was like for Jews at the beginning of the 20th Century in Russia and during one of the peaks of immigration in New York; and a portrait of a man you come to understand as well as you can understand any man. The translator, too, is a wonderfully sympathetic character that you want to know, and feel that you do know. With excellent writing, an imaginative plot, a bit of Isaac Bashevis Singer and a bit of Richard Powers, this is a beautifully-crafted piece of literature. It has romance, it has history, but above-all, it has intelligence and introspection. Highly recommended. ( )

Songs for the Butcher's Daughter by Peter Manseau was mesmerizingly wonderful. I am so thankful to other bloggers who reviewed it which encouraged me to pick it up. The story is told in two voices and two time periods. It is a story of love and loss, beauty and truth, and faith. It is an old man's memoirs and a young man's thoughts and dreams. The voices and stories are alternated between an old Jewish man, Itsik Malpesh, who has written his life story via the Yiddish alphabet and a young Catholic man who, through translator's notes written as he translates Malpesh's story from Yiddish to English, interjects his own story and problems. Malpesh's story begins in 1903 in Bessarabia, follows him through the two world wars, and to Baltimore where the collaboration begins between the two men. The younger man is a college graduate with a degree in religions and languages. He has recently learned to read Yiddish and comes to meet with Malpesh. This is the great coincidence of the book and holds the wonder of both men's stories. ( )

The reader receives Songs for the Butcher's Daughter as the translated memoir of Itzik Malpesh, the self-proclaimed greatest Yiddish poet in America (having outlived the rest of them). Malpesh is now in his nineties, and trying to preserve Yiddish and Jewish history as best he can in a world that's not especially interested in either.

Itzik's life begins with strife and tragedy as the Russians attack his house in a pogrom on the night of his birth; the tensions between religion and society and Jewish identity only get worse as he grows up and sees more of the world. In New York, he finds only a half-hearted Yiddish press, and nobody interested in publishing Yiddish poetry. We see Itsik struggle against this - how does one react when a language or culture has been made obsolete?

This is a bittersweet and sincere novel, a seemingly simple and clean story that focuses on so many issues and does it so well. Its pitch is both Jewish and American, figuring out how to reconcile the culture gap just as Itsik tries to navigate it. ( )

You can read my full review on my Jew Wishes website. http://jewwishes.wordpress.com/2009/0...

Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, by Peter Manseau, is a novel that is quite an accomplishment in many aspects, but especially in Manseau’s ability to convey the adversities and horrors of the Russian pogroms at the turn of the twentieth century.

Itsik Malpesh was born in Kishinev during the the Russian pogroms, to a well off family. The events of his birth, as told to him by his mother, are what has shaped his life, and shaped his perception on love. This novel is Itsik’s story, although it reads like a memoir that could be based on an actual person. That is due to the fact that the format includes a novel-within-the-novel, which is part of Manseau’s writing brilliance and creative edge.

Itsik is a poet, and he has considered himself one since he was a young boy. In 1996, he gave his poems, written in Yiddish, to a translator, to be translated into English. The translator is not Jewish. He works at a warehouse that is storing Yiddish books, books of a dying language, a language that is becoming lost within the modern world of the mid 1990s. He reads and speaks Yiddish. He is not Jewish, but has been assumed to be so, and does not reveal the truth about himself in order to try to win the affections of a co-worker named Clara.

Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter has an unusual format, with chapters alternating between “Translator’s Notes”, and Malpesh’s notebooks, “The Memoirs of Itsik Malpesh”. Malpesh’s notebooks details his life story, his love for Sasha, and the people and events that played a major role in his life’s quest towards his bashert, his destiny. He believes that his poems are a masterpiece, and his arrogance shines through the pages. His determination to publish his works, and his steadfastness in keeping the memory of Sasha alive, is the only thing that motivates him. From shoveling goose feathers and excrement from the floor of the down factory, to his learning to read Russian through the tutoring of a fellow yeshiva student, the novel takes Malpesh to Odessa, takes him penniless to New York, and eventually to Baltimore, and with each step, Sasha is at his side, through his poetry.

Manseau has given the reader much to ponder as far as bashert/destiny is concerned. What about the ramifications of believing in bashert or destiny? It isn’t always the romantic vision that one replays in their mind. It can imprison individuals, can hold them back from moving forward with their lives, unmotivated and not choosing to exercise their free will. What about the events and tragedies that can lead up to that moment when a person meets their soul mate, their bashert or destiny? Does it then signify that it is fine for others to possibly die or be involved in horrific situations all in the name of bashert? I asked myself these questions while reading the book. I asked myself many other questions, such as what is the meaning and the depth of language as far as our identities are concerned?

The heightened images also include some humor, and the book isn’t entirely depressing or dark. The Eastern European Jewish immigrant and their experiences are portrayed with extreme illumination, and nothing is left to the imagination. We experience Malpesh’s frustrations, his heartbreaks, the tragedies, etc., through his eyes, and through the compelling and creative imagery of Manseau.

In my opinon, Peter Manseau has written a classic novel, and one that will be considered such for decades to come. He touches on the very core elements of life, such as ethics, responsibility, language, and our roots. Both happiness and sadness fill the pages. Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter is masterfully written, and the pages evoke an extremely strong sense of time and place, immigration and assimilation, love and longing, and language and identity. I highly recommend it to everyone. ( )

I know that "butcher" is in the title, but I didn't expect the book to be so graphic. It started out really good, then I gave up as the author was explaining the down factory where his father worked.

Thoroughly good read - was going to say enjoyable but perhaps that is not the most appropriate word given the context of the start of the story.

The book provides a real feel of the emotions of Malpesh as he journeys from his birth town and family to the 'new world' and supposedly safety from persecution. It will appeal also to anyone who enjoys 'errant knight tales' or romantic heroes - since he is 'led along his life path' looking for a lost love ... and the tender ending with a journey completed is delightfully poignant.

All the characters are believable; the background detail of the locations is well researched and the linguistic elements lend additional authenticity to the tale without being intrusive.

A 'make you think' book which is also a well written story. ( )

How did a Catholic boy write this?

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. ( )

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. ( )