Songs for the Butcher's Daughter
Peter Manseau
Free Press
<p>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.<br /> <br />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...</p>