Writing Well Outside the Outside

By ANDREW FURMAN

SONGS FOR THE BUTCHER'S DAUGHTER
By Peter Manseau
384 pages. Free Press. $25.

Peter Manseau’s debut novel, Songs For the Butcher’s Daughter, might be seen as a postscript to Cynthia Ozick’s trenchant 1969 story, “Envy; Or, Yiddish in America.” In that story, a single boorish Yiddish writer manages to find English translators and resultant accolades for his work in New York, but the work of an aged Yiddish poet, Edelstein—and the literature of countless other Yiddish writers, the narrative suggests—will not be translated and will perish along with Edelstein. “You don’t interest me,” his last best hope for a translator devastatingly confesses. “I would have to be interested.” By contrast, the nonagenarian Yiddish poet of Manseau’s novel, Itsik Malpesh, miraculously locates in 1996 an enthusiastic translator for his memoirs in the novel’s narrator, a Catholic archivist at the Jewish Cultural Organization, modeled upon the National Yiddish Book Center where Manseau, like his protagonist, once worked. Through the narrator’s “translation” of Malpesh’s memoir, which takes up the bulk of the narrative, Manseau imagines the Yiddish writer’s eventful peregrinations from Kishinev (where the father of young Malpesh manages a macabre goose-down-plucking factory) to Odessa during the outbreak of the first World War, to the Lower East Side of New York during the most heady days of the Yiddish literati, to hardscrabble Baltimore, and, finally, to contemporary Israel—travels motivated primarily by Malpesh’s romantic quest to locate his bashert, the feisty butcher’s daughter of his childhood.

If this imagined realm lay well outside the felt experience of any young Jewish writer in America, Manseau—not merely a gentile but the son of an estranged priest and former nun!—writes from well outside the outside. Songs For the Butcher’s Daughter betrays Manseau’s keen anxiety over his authorial relationship to the material at hand, which to my mind pays mixed dividends. Sensing, perhaps, critic Ruth Wisse’s penetrating gaze over his shoulder—way back in 1976, Wisse wrote that “Writers... who feel the historic, moral, and religious weight of Judaism, and want to represent it in literature, have had to ship their characters out of town by Greyhound or magic carpet, to an unlikely shtetl, to Israel ... to other times and other climes, in search of pan-Jewish fictional atmospheres,”—Manseau takes few imaginative liberties with the broad historical record. In one of the “Translator’s Note” chapters, which pepper the novel, Manseau’s narrator even offers a nod to one of Wisse’s early nonfiction books, perhaps to disarm the redoubtable critic. One most palpably feels her influence in the narrator’s (and, by extension, Manseau’s) defensiveness over his “translation” of Malpesh’s Kishinev. If we weren’t utterly convinced of its verisimilitude, the narrator laboriously scrutinizes the Yiddish writer’s evocation of the city-as-shtetl against the more cosmopolitan “reality” of pre-war Kishinev.

Manseau’s outsider status serves the novel more productively when his Catholic translator reflects explicitly upon the thorny issues of literary translation and authenticity. In its most sublime manifestation—“translation is an intimate act,” Malpesh opines—author and translator achieving something of a Whitmanesque merge to “unzip” foreign words for a new readership. Yet if translation might be seen as an act of ecstatic retrieval and redemption, it can also be an act of appropriation and cannibalism, Manseau suggests. “A translator is a traitor,” his narrator recalls an old Italian saying. “Even in my meager efforts here,” he continues, “I have discovered how quickly the lines between one writer and another can become blurred. The translator transforms the original work...” Manseau examines this seamy underside of translation most trenchantly through the novel’s “translation-as-flirtation” subplot between the narrator and his coworker at the JCO, Clara Feld, a baal t’shuvah. In short, the narrator disturbingly exploits his linguistic facility—he begins to translate the Yiddish letters of Feld’s great-grandmother—to consummate under false pretenses a romantic relationship with the young woman.

As one might suspect, Manseau ultimately carves out a morally viable space for his narrator to translate Malpesh’s memoir. (How else could Manseau imagine and publish it?) When his narrator confesses his non-Jewish identity late in the novel to the aging Yiddish poet, Malpesh absolves him of any sin. “I understand,” he declares. “A lifetime it has taken, but I understand.” The narrator also receives absolution from other significant quarters, and implicitly through certain predictable developments of the plot, which is about as much as I should reveal here. Within the realm of the novel, these moments strike me as too tidy and (worse) unearned, given the severity of the narrator’s transgressions upon Feld. When he “unzips” his fly with the baal t’shuvah, he commits a shameful act of false intimacy if not outright rape.

That said, as a Jewish writer and critic, I agree with the broad implications of Manseau’s artistic argument. Writers should be free to imagine themselves into any person—human or animal—they choose. As Manseau’s narrator affirms, all writing is an act of creative translation from the beginning, regardless of the arguable immediacy of the material to an author. Holding writers to boundaries based upon bloodlines or any other terms (e.g., gender, age, citizenship) runs counter to the imaginative impulse, itself. Ultimately, Songs For the Butcher’s Daughter must be judged by the vitality and originality of Malpesh’s story. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

To Manseau’s credit, there are some shimmering moments here, from the haunting descriptions of the goose-down factory to the palpable rendering of newsrooms and printing presses in Kishinev, Odessa, and New York. Manseau evokes Malpesh’s emergence as a writer, his tactile love of letters and words, with particular precision as he learns the basics of early typesetting with wooden blocks. “[I]’d memorized the locations of all the different boxes and knew each block by touch. The alef’s curves and angles; beys, like a cresting wave. Gimel, called ‘camel’ for a reason, with its head looking here and there like a beast in the desert....” It’s fitting, indeed, that Malpesh absconds to New York locked inside a trunk with his wooden printing press letters, which serves as an apt metaphor for the arduous life of a writer: 

Their corners cut into my clothes, their edges came together to pinch my skin. With every frantic move I made, the blocks rolled beneath me and scraped gashes in my back. Terrified as I was, I knew then that this would always be a poet’s lot: to be isolated, alone, grasping for answers, with letters as his only company and his constant torment.  

Such moments affirm Manseau’s imaginative verve. I only wish there were more of them. His own narrator, however, gives voice to my essential problem with the novel when he confesses that “much of the life story recounted in his notebooks is nearly indistinguishable from that of other poets of his generation.” Yes! I couldn’t keep myself from scribbling in the margin. Those readers who have yet to encounter Yiddish stories and early Jewish-American immigrant writing will likely appreciate Songs For the Butcher’s Daughter. Yet the bulk of the narrative—from the obligatory blood libel and Easter pogrom in Kishinev, to Malpesh’s flight from conscription into the czar’s army, to the gritty goings-on in Lower East Side sweatshops, street corners, and Automats—strums all too familiar a chord. Again, one wonders whether Manseau, anxious over his writerly bona fides, adheres too closely to the conventional historical record. For crying out loud, did every Jewish immigrant to the United States in the early 20^th century work in a sweatshop?

Here, perhaps, I should ’fess up to some of my own prejudices and predilections regarding Manseau’s source material. For I have concerns about the sheer spate of recent Jewish novels—including Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America(2004), Amy Bloom’s Away (2007) Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), and Manseau’s Songs For the Butcher’s Daughter—in which I sense a discomfiting nostalgia among writers and readers (and, perforce, publishers) for our bygone immigrant Jewish story of marginality and victimization. Setting aside untenable charges of cooption and exploitation, why such outsized efforts among contemporary writers to pour new Manischewitz into such old bottles? Is the felt experience of contemporary Jewish life in America truly as impoverished as Wisse feared in 1976? I don’t mean to suggest that all young writers who wish to imagine Jews ought limit themselves to the contemporary American setting. It may be true, as some have argued, that the early 20^th-century Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant experience is far from tapped out as an artistic subject. Surely, there are more tales to tell. But for such works to represent a true contribution to our literature at this late date, the imaginative bar, in my view, must be set high. To recall my earlier metaphor, it better be some awfully new vino.

To limn the truly daunting challenge that contemporary writers accept when they tread upon the Yiddish territory, it may prove instructive to contemplate the contrastive terms of Ruth Wisse’s excoriation of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which appeared last year in Commentary. Wisse cannot help but wonder “how the cause of literature has been advanced” by what she characterizes as Chabon’s shlock and shtick in constructing his alternative Jewish history. Briefly: Chabon imagines that Israel loses its war of independence, after which Jews seek refuge in the all-Jewish territory of Sitka, Alaska, courtesy of the United States. It infuriates her, specifically, that Chabon makes passing comedic reference to the “corner of Ringelbaum and Glatshteyn.” Such a blithe reference to these actual, heroic Yiddish writers strikes Wisse as “a purely personal crack, and an exceptionally annihilating one.” Really? As I’ve suggested, I have my own broad concerns about a literary culture that continues to revive a shopworn narrative, but where Wisse sees annihilation, I see retrieval, where Wisse sees impermissible shlock and shtick, I at least see artistic innovation.

My hunch is that Manseau’s more sustained, engaged efforts to retrieve a fictional Yiddish writer’s more conventional narrative would strike Wisse as eminently more passable than Chabon’s ribaldry—and perhaps even laudable. But as much as I worry about the uses and misuses of our collective history, I worry at least as much about what Jewish imaginative fiction will look like and sound like if it’s cosseted by rigid cultural sensibilities. All of which is to say that the contemporary writer—broaching such historically resonant and artistically trod-upon outposts of the Jewish experience—necessarily labors between the Scylla of memory and the Charybdis of artistic innovation. Heck, no one said that it was easy.