Publication
Imprint: New York : Free Press, 2008. Responsibility: Peter Manseau. OCLC Number: 180755942. Physical: Text : 1 volume : 370 pages ; 24 cm.
Call number
Fiction / Manse
ISBN
9781416538707
Original publication date
2009
Collections
CSS Library Notes
Description: 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.--from Publisher description
FY2017
FY2017
Physical description
370 p.; 24 cm
Awards
National Jewish Book Award (Winner — Fiction — 2008)
Center for Fiction First Novel Prize (Shortlist — 2008)
Sophie Brody Medal (Winner — 2009)
Harold U. Ribalow Prize (2009)
Description
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.--from Publisher description (http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0838/2007049787-d.html)… (more)
Language
Original language
English
Similar in this library
User reviews
LibraryThing member ForeignCircus
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,
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.
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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.
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LibraryThing member suetu
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
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.
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
Show More
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.
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LibraryThing member LibrarysCat
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
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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. Show Less
LibraryThing member nbmars
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
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.
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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.
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LibraryThing member SqueakyChu
I thoroughly enjoyed this book for a variety of reasons. An odd one was that the author of this award-winning book of "Jewish fiction" is not even himself Jewish!
The story is of a poet, Itzak Malpesh, who is an immigrant from Russia where his family endured a harsh life from the many progroms that
I enjoyed the many plots twists that convoluted themselves in this story. I also enjoyed the "Tranlator's Notes" which were part of the story as well.
By the way, an excellent companion book to this novel is Aron lansky's "Outwitting History", a story of the author's efforts to save aging Yiddish books from being destoyed
The story is of a poet, Itzak Malpesh, who is an immigrant from Russia where his family endured a harsh life from the many progroms that
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were visited up their tiny village. When Malpesh gets to the United States, his goal is to publish his life story, originally written in his beloved and native tongue of Yiddish, but translated into English. This novel contains many Yiddish phrases that are very easy for me to understand since I know conversational German fairly well, and these two languages are very similar.I enjoyed the many plots twists that convoluted themselves in this story. I also enjoyed the "Tranlator's Notes" which were part of the story as well.
By the way, an excellent companion book to this novel is Aron lansky's "Outwitting History", a story of the author's efforts to save aging Yiddish books from being destoyed
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LibraryThing member heike6
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.
LibraryThing member the_awesome_opossum
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
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 nowhere 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.
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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 nowhere 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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member philippa58
I liked the plot line and the artifice of translator's comments...but I didn't feel the character development/s of Itsak, our narrator, the Butcher's Daughter or the girl friend kept up with the story...
The two collections of books appealed...but possibly a smaller canvas would have given more
The two collections of books appealed...but possibly a smaller canvas would have given more
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space for character nuance...the business of the action precluded this...and I don't think Itsak is his action Show Less
LibraryThing member polarbear123
A tale of lives intertwined and fate, chance and 'bashert'. A modern day translator/student finds himself translating the life story of the last Yisddish poet, Itsik Malpesh. The strength of this book lies in the earlier part of the story with the colourful descriptions of life in Kishiniev and the
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little Itsik growing up. There is humour here and great human tragedy. The prose flows freely and there are beautiful turns of phrases throughout. There are particularly clever ruminations on the nature of litereature and the power of a translation. Although the story later on might fall into traditional love/life/tragedy fare this is still a novel to relish with a hugely satisfying feeling to it. Show Less
LibraryThing member raizel
I didn't like the ending, there is a horrific act by one of the main characters, lots of terrible things happen. And yet I know people who love the book.
On page 45, the narrator explains, "This word is tehilah. Prayer." Is a Psalm a prayer? OK, maybe I'm just being cranky.
On page 45, the narrator explains, "This word is tehilah. Prayer." Is a Psalm a prayer? OK, maybe I'm just being cranky.
LibraryThing member aglater
Although I was disappointed by the ending, I loved the rest of this book.
LibraryThing member suesbooks
I liked this book for what I learned about people coming to the US to avoid pogroms in Russia. The writing was ok, not great, and a lot of the book was unbelievable, but I thought it was worth it for what I learned. The author showed a warmth for his characters.
LibraryThing member Rdra1962
This is a really special book, in the vein of History of Love. It is written by a catholic (son of a former nun and a still-priest!!) Peter Manseau was turned on to Yiddish by an African American pastor, and has turned his love for the ancient , dying language into a poetic story. See the Jeff
The story is very engaging, and tells the love story of a boy in Russia who eventually winds up in America. It is NOT heavy and depressing, but quick moving and lighthearted. The novel has a predictable, not trite, and yet tear inducing ending.
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Sharlat (?) review in Goodreads for a more personal background write-up, he is friends with the author. He also gives background into the history of Yiddish lit, and the efforts to keep the language alive.The story is very engaging, and tells the love story of a boy in Russia who eventually winds up in America. It is NOT heavy and depressing, but quick moving and lighthearted. The novel has a predictable, not trite, and yet tear inducing ending.
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