32. Songs for the Butcher's Daughter by Peter Manseau I read about this book in Hadassah magazine because it was a National Jewish Book Award winner. I picked up a used copy at Harvard Book Store about a month ago, and a few days ago dug it out of one of my boxes of books. The book quickly fit into a comfortable tradition for me, a book like The History of Love, People of the Book, Everything is Illuminated and other modern Jewish fiction. One of the main characters or rather, "the translator," is, like the actual author, not Jewish, but a Catholic raised in Boston. The book takes place in Massachusetts and in Baltimore, Maryland, both places I know well. Even the saga of the book's fictional author, Itsik Malpesh, from Kishinev to Odessa to New York City, feels familiar from my reading,though I have never been to the first two and never lived in the last. The unnamed translator begins the book with the story of how he came to learn Yiddish, pass for Jewish, an...
Life, Books, and SFF