Excerpt: Review of Yiddish Writers...

Songs For the Butcher's Daughter
By Peter Manseau | April 2009

[...] (Retrieved by PD HERE) "In the midst of Malpesh’s highly articulate narrative, what is the effect of the hackneyed rhymes and inept scansion of his verses? How does this presentation of his poems reflect on his self-image and reputation as a poet?"

...All these threads weave together into a tightly structured, ingenious, and moving plot that crosses geographical, literary, and emotional boundaries in unexpected ways. Manseau is himself a lapsed Catholic who has been at the heart of Yiddish literature without ulterior motives, for the sheer love of it; Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter is his shir-hashirim (Song of Songs) to Yiddish culture.

Excerpts

[I]f Yiddish writers had one thing in common, I discovered, it was the kind of passionate irreligiosity that can only be found among those who’d been born, raised, and sickened by spiritual tradition. In a poem by Malpesh’s contemporary Jacob Glatshteyn, a line struck me as few ever have: The God of my unbelief is magnificent.
Like so much of what I would find in the warehouse’s holdings, these words spoke to me as if they’d come from a catechism for those whom faith had failed. (pages 6–7)

The shop’s tables, I now saw, were covered with wooden blocks of varying sizes, each one carved with a single letter; they were literally the building blocks of words. There were also blocks carved with every imaginable mark of punctuation. [The editor] lifted one displaying a cartoonish “!” and put it in my hand.
“Have you ever held a shout before?” he asked. (page 70)

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself, Isaac, if it is bashert that we be together, what that truly means?…
I ask you, Do you believe that God watches over us as your father once watched over his goose-plucking machine? Do you believe that we are moved through life as though on wheels and belts to be plucked and killed for purposes beyond our understanding?
That is what bashert entails, and I do not accept a universe that functions with such appalling precision.
I will not send you this letter because I know if I do, you will find me. And when you do, I would fall into your arms as autumn leaves fall from the trees, naturally, inevitably, with no choice but to do what they were made to do. But in finding me, we would once again say yes to bashert. We would once again be strapped to God’s awful machine. (pages 355–356)

Questions for Discussion

1. The young narrator (and his author) have absorbed Yiddish and its world not through indelible cultural memory transmitted by parents and grandparents, but by an act of deep cultural sympathy and compulsive reading. How do you respond to the inquisitive and loving, rather than hostile, gaze of a non-Jewish writer who has learned some of the family secrets?

2. For immigrants in the early 20th century, being Jewish was often a source of shame. To the lapsed-Catholic narrator and his bal-tshuve (“born-again”) girlfriend, being Jewish is interesting and even somewhat glamorous. What generational differences in attitudes toward Jewishness have you observed among your own family and friends?

3. Clara’s “pretty little prayer book” is based on a real 20th-century publication. Similar publications go back almost all the way to Gutenberg, and in fact represent some of the earliest printed Yiddish books. What are your reactions to this history?

4. The young narrator apologizes for his inadequate translations of Malpesh’s poems (and Manseau as author takes a sly dig at bad translations of Yiddish poems generally). In the midst of Malpesh’s highly articulate narrative, what is the effect of the hackneyed rhymes and inept scansion of his verses? How does this presentation of his poems reflect on his self-image and reputation as a poet?

The Jewish Reader is a publication of the National Yiddish Book Center | Amherst, MA | editor: Nancy Sherman | www.jewishreader.org