10 September 2008

A review of and excerpt from the best Jewish novel of the year, by Revealer contributing editor Peter Manseau

Peter Manseau, a longtime Revealer contributor and occasional Revealer editor, has just published his first novel, Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, immediately shortlisted for the $10,000 John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. The novel follows Peter’s first book, Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, an experiment in religion journalism Peter and I wrote together, and a memoir, Vows: The Story of A Priest, a Nun, and Their Son. As the title of that book might suggest, Peter’s not Jewish; but Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter is.

This is no minstrel show. Peter is steeped in Yiddish literature, and what he’s brought forth inSongs for the Butcher’s Daughter is a not just a literary thriller the fine line between murder and memoir but also a Jewish novel that was waiting to be written, that needed to be written. And so it has been, officially by Peter but more likely, I suspect, by a host of dybbuks clamoring within his Catholic soul. Together they’ve created what Melvin Jules Bukiet, no easy critic, calls the best Jewish novel of the year; and, more importantly, the most insightful fiction about the death of a language since Cynthia Ozick’s masterpiece, “Envy, Or, Yiddish in America.”

“For no one who who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it,” Susan Sontag famously observed in “Notes on Camp. “He can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.”

Which is to say, Peter’s no anti-Semite, but he’s no philo-Semite, either. Which is good, since philo-Semitism, as John Hagee has amply demonstrated, is just another way of dehumanizing Jews. The revulsion that goes hand in hand with deep sympathy in Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter is not toward Jews, but in response to the desperation of Yiddish in America, the envy Ozick diagnosed and the sad self-deception Peter and I both witnessed working at theNational Yiddish Book Center (where Peter was, briefly, the Last Yiddish Typesetter in America). Novelist Michael Chabon captured that delusion in his essay “Say It In Yiddish,”about the phrasebook by Uriel and Miriam Weinreich of that name that the Yiddish Book Center gave out as a membership premium. “What were they thinking, the Weinreichs?” wrote Chabon

Was the original 1958 Dover edition simply the reprint of some earlier, less heartbreakingly implausible book? At what time in the history of the world was there a place of the kind that the Weinreichs imply, a place where not only the doctors and waiters and trolley conductors spoke Yiddish, but also the airline clerks, travel agents, ferry captains, and casino employees? A place where you could rent a summer home from Yiddish speakers, go to a Yiddish movie, get a finger wave from a Yiddish-speaking hairstylist, a shoeshine from a Yiddish-speaking shineboy, and then have your dental bridge repaired by a Yiddish-speaking dentist? If, as seems likelier, the book first saw light in 1958, a full ten years after the founding of the country that turned its back once and for all on the Yiddish language, condemning it to watch the last of its native speakers die one by one in a headlong race for extinction with the twentieth century itself, then the tragic dimension of the joke looms larger, and makes the Weinreichs’ intention even harder to divine. It seems an entirely futile effort on the part of its authors, a gesture of embittered hope, of valedictory daydreaming, of a utopian impulse turned cruel and ironic.

Chabon wrote that a decade ago. The cruel irony of those words now is that the novel that grew out of them, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is whimsical rather than brave, brilliantly written but entirely futile, a piece of valedictory daydreaming that retreats from the fire in which Yiddish burned — a reassuring subway novel for Jews comforted by the false remembrance of a mameloshn — a mother tongue — they’ve lost forever. Chabon’s novel is camp; superb camp, certainly, but artificial.

Peter, the outsider as insider, the son of a Catholic priest and a nun — an abomination in his own tradition! — a Gentile who has written of passing as a Jew, of lying to little old Jewish ladies to make them better when he came to take their Yiddish books away (he was the book collector for the Yiddish Book Center), a novelist who writes in English, speaks Yiddish, and, he once explained, dreams in Catholic whether he wants to or not, has produced the real thing. Or, rather, produced is not the word: he has manufactured it. Songs for the Butcher’s Daughterflows so fast you may read it in a sitting or two, but it’s not an organic creation. It’s assembled. The narrator of the novel is a writer much like Peter, who intersperses his translation of a Yiddish memoir with “Translator’s Notes” that tell us more about his own love affair with a young, secular Jew who is busy reinventing herself as an Orthodox woman. The bulk of the novel is the memoir, and that Peter has drawn from the dust of the Yiddish Book Center’s warehouse, borrowing parts and pieces from the Sweatshop Poets and Di Khaliastre, the Gang, Yiddish experimentalists in Warsaw between the wars, and the Big Three — Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz — and the author of the first play banned on Broadway, Sholem Asch, and the darker, even more forgotten writers, Lamed Shapiro and Yankev Glatshteyn and the writer who went by “Der Nister,” the hidden one. Peter, once a Yiddish book collector, has become a Yiddish book thief, snatching stories from limbo and resurrecting them as Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter.

I could go on singing its praises, but better you should sing your own. Following is an excerpt from the best goyish Yiddish novel in history.

–Jeff Sharlet

What happened was this: A long day’s journey north, in the little town of Dubossary, it was said that a body had been found. This was not unusual. Kishinev was a modern city, with sidewalks, streetcars, and factories such as the one my father managed. But Dubossary, though not very far away, remained rough country. The peasants there plowed rocky earth in the heat or the cold, as they had for centuries, and scarcely ate enough to stay alive. By local custom, the dead found in the fields were buried where they lay.

In Kishinev when such sad findings were reported in the daily Bessarabets, they were read with the same interest as would have been given to accounts of the czar’s bowel movements. Better in the Dubossary fields, the people of Kishinev liked to say, than on the merry-go-round in Chuflinskii Square.

This body, however, had caused some alarm. From the moment of its discovery by a vagrant great-grandson of serfs who’d stepped off the road to relieve himself, it was evident that this was a death for which someone would answer. First of all, it was only a boy, a youth of about fourteen, my eldest sister Beylah’s age. He’d been stabbed several times and had bruises about his face and neck. Furthermore, the boy was a Christian. Word spread that he was last seen alive accompanying his grandparents to the Orthodox liturgy.

Who is to say where lies grow best? In the dark, like a mold? In the bright light, like a flower? In Dubossary they were growing everywhere. They took root in the marketplace where they were tended by merchants. They were cultivated in the chapels, where they were harvested by priests. The boy had been killed, the rabble whispered, by Jews. The Jews needed his blood, the ancient tale went, to sweeten their matzah and thicken their wine; they needed his blood for their Passover feast.

Of course! Who else, oh wise men of Dubossary? Who but the Jews would kill a boy and leave him on the roadside for a Christian peasant to piss on? Who but the Jews would be so stealthy in their motives yet so careless in their execution? Who but the Jews would build their own gallows, tie their own nooses, and hire the hangmen to stretch their necks? All these years later, it remains baffling to me that Jews know this same lie has been told for a thousand years, while Christians hear it each time as a revelation. That we should be judged and murdered by such imbeciles is sorely vexing. With a Cossack’s boot on his neck, a Moldovan dirt farmer would strain himself to ask who was the Jew that knocked him down.

But such is the world. And such was our corner of it in those days that provisions traveled with difficulty over our rattling roads, but words moved like fire. Through the next three months, as I grew in my mother’s womb, the lies of Dubossary impregnated our city and likewise grew, waiting for the day when they might burst forth wailing in blood.

* * *

During the preparation time for Passover, Mama busied herself sweeping crumbs from the cupboards. She took all those foods the family could not eat during the days of unleavened bread and brought them to the Christian neighbors who accepted her charity gratefully. Mama fed a flour-thickened soup to the invalid woman in her bed and inquired in a sideways fashion if she had heard any news lately, or if one of her sons had read to her from that day’s Bessarabets.

“The newspaper says,” Mama told her, “that a group of Jewish chemists have invented a new method of making wine without grapes.” She studied the woman’s face even as she put the spoon to her sickly lips, watching for a reaction that might betray hidden sympathies. Seeing none, she went further, as though exploring a wound. “The newspaper says this new wine is as red as blood,” Mama continued, “but the Jews keep their recipe a secret. Have you ever heard such a thing?”

“All I have heard is nonsense,” the Christian woman said. “There may be some unpleasantness in the countryside but not here. Kishinev is a modern city.” She strained to lift her hand and used it to pat my mother’s cheek. “Look at us, two citizens talking over the news without fear of reprisal,” she said in a calming tone. “For how many years have you been caring for us in this way? Four years? Five? As long as we have been neighbors. If this is so, then surely the world is not as wicked as you suppose.”

Mama wanted to believe her, especially now that she was so close to the day of bringing an infant into the world. Her doctor had told her it might be early May, and she prayed for the tension in the city to pass before then. In the meantime, reading the mood of the goyim became a pastime as constant as divining the weather. When Father returned home from the factory each day, he’d catalogue the peculiar looks he received as he made his way through town. He knew that every Christian who tipped his hat and bid him, “Good day, Mr. Manager,” had some opinion about the boy whom the Jews had killed.

In such an atmosphere, it seemed as if Passover that year would be a somber affair, though it began without incident. Father’s brother, his wife, and their son Zishe came from the Jewish Quarter to fill our large table and together the family Malpesh sang the ancient songs of captivity and liberation.

I was by far the youngest at the table, but I was yet in my mother’s womb and so the four questions fell to my cousin, Zishe. Fate determined I would never meet this boy, yet I feel as though I can hear it now as if it were a memory: How is this night different from all the others? His words came haltingly as he was too early in his studies to understand their meaning.

As the Seder progressed, Mama perceived the dark mood around the table. Her two girls, usually so attentive, sulked in their seats, not even smiling when they were called upon to drop spots of wine on their plates in commemoration of Egypt’s plagues. In years past this had been a time of merriment among the children. Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, they rarely had the opportunity to openly and righteously play with their food.

Yet this night was indeed different from all the others, for it was then, after placing the last drop, signifying the plague by which God had slain the first born sons of Egypt, that my oldest sister Beylah, fourteen and brazen, dared to mention the fear that stalked Kishinev’s streets. Surely what she hoped to say was this: Father, I’m confused by what is happening. We have a lovely home and we’re happy here. Mama cares for the Christians next door, and I believe one of the boys there thinks I’m pretty. And yet when I step outside I feel cold looks from every window on the street. Could you please explain this for me?

When I step outside I feel cold looks from every window on the street. Could you please explain this for me?

But this is not what she said. Perhaps poets and children know best how elusive our fine language can be. Like a poem that will not fall into form, a child’s thoughts are often jumbled, stubborn, unappealing in expression despite their purest intent. How else can one explain why, sitting at the Seder table with her family in a time of great anxiety, my oldest sister Beylah would ask, “Is it true what the Russian girls are saying, that a boy in Dubossary was murdered by Jews? That Jews took his blood for their cooking?”

Father’s face flashed red in his beard. He was not a man given to outbursts, but on this occasion he shouted. “How could you say such a thing! A disgrace!”

The other children erupted with related questions, finally giving voice to all they had endured at the hands of their Christian peers, hardships and slanders which, until then, they had hidden from their parents’ notice. A full family brawl might have ensued had not Father’s brother taken control. Uncle Leib was a quiet man with a gentle air and a perpetually earnest tone. The children often found him distant but now he spoke directly to their concerns.

“Little Beylah, don’t be ashamed for asking,” he said. “What the Russian girls have told you they have heard from their parents, who heard it from their parents before them. It is a very old lie which some persist in telling about our people. An outrageous falsehood. Do you understand what I say?”

“Yes,” Beylah said, “but—”

“What ‘but’? From babyhood you have helped your mama make the matzah, yes? Did you help her this year?”

“Yes.”

“And did you add blood to the batter?”

Beylah looked away and said softly, “No.”

“And have you ever seen anyone add blood to matzah batter?”

“No,” Beylah said again. She studied her empty plate, not willing to meet her uncle’s serious eyes. It was still early in the Seder so by then her plate held only those watery symbols of the plague, the ten red wine drops she had placed there. She put a finger in the violet liquid and used it to paint the plate with spirals and flowers. Years later she would tell me that she felt as though she was being spoken to as if she were still a little girl, not a young woman of fourteen. She wanted to lash out in response to this indignity, so she gathered up all her courage and peevishness.

“But I’ve never seen anyone make our wine,” she said, “and the Russian girls say things about that, too. Why shouldn’t we believe them?”

Uncle Leib was about to continue, but Father held up his hand. The children braced for another showing of his temper, but he had regained his composure while his patient brother spoke. He now sensed that beneath her bluster his daughter wasn’t searching for answers, only reassurance. What she wanted was some suggestion that, whatever her Russian playmates said, the family Malpesh could still control its destiny. That Jews could still live as they pleased.

With the whole family waiting to hear what wisdom he would convey, Father winked at Mama and asked in full voice, “Mama, would you please pass the Christian blood?”

Beylah looked up in shock. Uncle Leib’s eye narrowed to slits of confusion.

“Yes, of course, Father,” Mama said and grinned. “A nice big glass of Christian blood. I’ve been reading in the Bessarabets that it is very nutritious!”

Her daughters could not believe their ears but giggled at the absurdity despite themselves. Across the table, Leib, too, got the joke. He laughed heartily – “Yes, more Christian blood for me as well!”—and at the sound of their earnest uncle joining the gag, the children felt free to burst.

“Some for me, Mama,” Beylah laughed. “Pour some blood for me!”

Cousin Zishe reached for his father’s glass and took a big gulp.

Freidl sang, “I want Christian blood! More Christian blood!”

At this Mama tsked-tsked, “No, no, baby. Maybe when you’re older,” and the family laughed together as it hadn’t in months.

Not everyone was amused, however. Grandmother had remained silent through Beylah’s troublemaking but now slapped the table with such force that the candles shook until they flickered out. “Shah! Stop! Someone will hear you!”

“Who will hear us?” Father laughed.

“The Christians,” Grandmother hissed. “They are always looking for an excuse! Better for us all if the murdered child had been Jewish!”

“Ach, Mother, please,” Father said. “I am the manager of the largest goose down factory in the province. I am the inventor of the goose-moving machine which has put feathers in every bed in Kishinev! Am I not safe in my own house?”

“Shah!”

“Is the Malpesh family not permitted—“

“Shah!”

“—to have some holiday fun around its own table!”

“Shah!”

“More Christian blood for everyone!” Father cheered.

Grandmother stood abruptly, knocking the table as she made for the stairs. Her plate crashed into her knife and her knife stabbed against her glass and before anyone could reach it, the fine crystal goblet toppled forward and met the Seder plate with a smash. A red stain spread across the tablecloth like a rising tide.

From Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, by Peter Manseau