In this acclaimed fiction debut, "a rich, often ironic homage to Yiddish culture and language" (Publishers Weekly), Peter Manseau weaves 100 years of Jewish history, the sad fate of an ancient language, and a love story shaped by destiny into a truly great American novel. In a five-story walkup in Baltimore, nonagenarian Itsik Malpesh-the last Yiddish poet in America-spends his days lamenting the death of his language and dreaming of having his memoirs and poems translated into a living tongue. So when a twenty-one-year-old translator and collector of Judaica crosses his path one day, he goes to extraordinary efforts to enlist the young man's services. And what the translator finds in ten handwritten notebooks is a chronicle of the twentieth century. From the Easter Sunday Pogrom of Kishinev, Russia, to the hellish garment factories of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Itsik Malpesh recounts a tumultuous, heartrending, and colorful past. But the greatest surprise is yet to come: for the two men share a connection as unlikely as it is life-affirming. With the ardent and feisty Itsik Malpesh, Peter Manseau has created a narrator for the ages and given him a story that will win over readers' hearts and keep them turning pages long into the night. Songs for the Butcher's Daughter is a literary triumph. Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Known for Vows, his memoir of growing up the son of a former priest and nun, Manseau uses an alter ego to tell the story of fictional Yiddish poet Itsik Malpesh, born in the Moldovan city of Kishinev in 1903. Itsik's story is told through his Yiddish memoirs, which he helps a young American Catholic (working, like Manseau once did, as a Yiddish archivist) translate. Inspired by the image of Sasha, the brave butcher's daughter who was present at his birth, Itsik reaches America in young adulthood through haphazard luck, a taste for troublemaking and the inventiveness of a printer. Sasha continually inspires and confounds Itsik throughout his life, becoming an apt symbol for Yiddish humor, sorrow and idealism. As Itsik's darkly picaresque immigrant narrative unfolds, it competes with the translator's modern romance and with insights into the art of translation and the history of Yiddish. Occasional narrative missteps are not enough to undercut this rich, often ironic homage to Yiddish culture and language. (Sept.) Copyright ® Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Booklist *Starred Review* Fleeing violent anti-Semitism in Russia and then in Poland in the 1920s, Yiddish poet Itzik Malpesh stepped off the boat in New York at age 16 in the Golden Land, "alone, with nowhere to go and no way to get there." Now, in his 90s and living in Baltimore, he employs a 21-year-old religious scholar to translate his memoirs into English. Far from your usual immigrant journey to the promised land, the intricate narrative weaves together Malpesh's account of his "life and crimes," including his job scrubbing floors, with the translator's discoveries of the poet's secret life, then and now. Always on Malpesh's journeys what sustains him is the story of his birth during a pogrom, when Sasha, the ritual butcher's daughter, just four years old, chased away the killers and saved the baby. Ever since being told of the girl's courageous feat, his romantic obsession has been to find Sasha--until she arrives in America in the 1930s, a tough, beautiful, Hebrew-speaking Israeli, who despises Yiddish and the old ways and tells him what really happened. Rooted in the sharp, bittersweet Yiddish tradition reminiscent of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Manseau's thrilling tale of secrets and revelations captures the diversity among Jews, then and now, in shtetl, city, and kibbutz, and the elemental meaning of bashert, or destiny. Like the translator in the story, the writer Manseau is not Jewish. --Hazel Rochman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.