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Songs for the Butcher's Daughter: A Novel
Peter Manseau
Free Press
September 2008
On Sale: September 9, 2008
384 pages
ISBN: 1416538704
EAN: 9781416538707
Hardcover
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Fiction
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.
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