Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter – a note from the author
“When I talk to readers about my book I often lead with a joke that goes something like this: My last book Vows, was about how my father the Catholic priest met my mother the Catholic nun, so it was inevitable that my next book would be about Yiddish.”
It usually gets a laugh because, on the face of it, I seem the least likely person to write a novel in which the life and death of a Jewish language plays such a crucial role. Coming from Irish and French stock, raised in a thoroughly Catholic environment, I have no cultural, ethnic, or religious connection with Judaism. And yet to me it truly was inevitable that I would write about Yiddish, for what I have learned from this nearly lost language has shaped me as a writer at least as much as what I learned from the faith in which I was raised.
When my parents met in the late 1960s – my father a radical inner city ‘street priest’; my mother a teaching sister in a school nearby – it was a time of tremendous change in the world and in their faith. They fell in love knowing that being together was against the doctrine of their church, and so they chose to marry in hops of changing the rules of the church to better fit the modern age. They did not have an easy time of it: still a part of religious tradition but pushing against it with their lives, they were outsiders and insiders at the same time, and, as a result, so were their children.
I was vaguely aware of this through the years of my childhood, but I truly came to understand what they had been through only when I became an adult myself and came across – by accident or fate – a literature written by people facing similar circumstances. Through a job as a collector of Jewish books I discovered that the men and women who created Yiddish literature had likewise been given a thorough religious education and then pushed against it with their lives. They could never get fully away, and the tension which remained within them created a moving and vibrant tribute in fiction and poetry to both the power of religious imagination and the strength of will required to move beyond tradition.
As the son of fallen Catholic clergy who had found his own unlikely fellow travellers in the pages of Yiddish literature, I decided I wanted to write a book that would explore questions of religious identity and loyalty: what does it mean to be (or not to be) a member of a particular faith? Is it merely belief, or is there something more to it? Can one learn another religion as one learns another language, or are such things more fixed than that, despite the modern, pluralistic assumption that, spiritually at least, one can ‘be’ whatever one wants. In other words, I was wondering about the extent to which people can be ‘translated’ from one religious language to another.
During my time as a Yiddish book collector I met many older men and women who were very much like my protagonist, Itsik Malpesh. They were elderly, their prime years well behind them, and yet they carried within them histories of great adventure, accomplishment and suffering. I wanted to explore what it might be like to look back over a long tumultuous life from a position of relative calm. I learned a great deal from those older folks whose books I collected; I wanted to write a book that spoke to the lives they knew. Also, through the character of the translator, I wanted to examine my own fascination with those lives, and to ask the occasionally uncomfortable question: in asking to hear their stories, was I trying somehow to make them my own? As an outsider hoping to tell insider’s stories, I realized I should not ignore this question, but make it part of the story I would tell.
Watch a video of Peter Manseau talking about Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter:
Peter Manseau has been a carpenter, journalist and typesetter in his time, and is the author of two works of non-fiction, including the memoir Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun and their Son. He is thirty-four and lives with his wife and two children in Washington. Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter is his first novel.
