Although her slaughterman father, Meir-Anschil Schecter, was never one to lavish affection on his daughters, he had made them banquets fit for kings. In recent times, however, Mende has scarcely touched meat herself, only ever sucking out the marrow of the chicken bones her children leave on their yontev plates on feast days. But now a terrible craving for meat has awakened within her, an uncontrollable desire for the taste of beef. A chasm opens up in her stomach and her head spins. Her mouth waters like the high seas, and she is so weak that she has to lean against the wall of the nearby synagogue. This will be her birthday present, it's a clear-cut decision. A mechayeh, what a treat.
I felt lucky to have been sent an ARC of The Slaughterman's Daughter – the English translation of which is about to be released – before a recent trip to the Middle East; what a treat to be able to read something by an Israeli author while in Israel. Turns out, this story isn't actually set in Israel, but when I finished, I realised that this whole thing seems to be a metaphor about modern Israel and it left me with plenty to think about. On the surface, The Slaughterman's Daughter is quite long, intensely detailed about Jewish culture and history, sometimes funny and often farcical, and ultimately unspools a complex and tension-filled plot. Digging a little deeper, it's (I believe) a call for Israel to examine its past in order to evaluate its present. On every level, it's a fascinating read. (Note: As I read an ARC, passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
It is not every day that one comes across three dead bodies, Jewish slaughter techniques, accusations against a belligerent military convoy and one large and terrifying woman, all of which are supposed to come together to form a consistent story. I'll be damned, thinks Novak. This country is losing its mind.Set in the Pale of Settlement (an area in western Russia where Jews were allowed to settle between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, with harsh restrictions), at some point after the Crimean War, The Slaughterman's Daughter opens with the stories of two sisters: Mende Speismann (whose husband disappeared over a year before, leaving her and their two children at the mercy of his parents' charity) and Fanny Keismann; a notorious wilde chayeh who decides to abandon her own beloved husband and five children in order to track down her sister's missing husband. Fanny picks up a disparate group of allies along the way to Minsk, and between descriptions of village life for the sisters in Motal, conscription practises for the Czar's army, and the dangers and discrimination that Fanny et al. face in their underground journey to the big city, author Yaniv Iczkovits paints a very vivid picture of Jewish life in this time and place. Ratcheting up the tension, Fanny and her group are being tracked down by the Secret Police, and the sections told from the perspective of its chief detective, Colonel Piotr Novak, make very clear the uninformed and racist views that the Russians had towards the “dirty zyds” living in their midst. As historical fiction, this book is a fascinating education.
As I wrote above, situations are often farcical (especially those scenes involving a drunken and incontinent cantor), often funny, and also, often, heartwrenching. The writing can be beautifully descriptive:
The moonlight is wrapped around the night like a tie, its beams sliding down a suit of darkness. A cool wind caresses the earth's curved back, which has grown limp beneath the weight of the day's heat, pleading for relief.And Iczkovits employs many intriguing metaphors and similes:
He has managed to prove yet again that his thick-headed deputy is incapable of thinking creatively, because, like a short blanket, Dodek's brain is destined to leave the essentials uncovered.Taking it all at face value, I thought that The Slaughterman's Daughter was a well-written, well-researched bit of historical fiction reminiscent of the world of Fiddler on the Roof. But when I got to the author blurb at the back, I read that Yaniv Iczkovits “was an inaugural signatory of the 'combatants' letter', in which hundreds of Israeli soldiers affirmed their refusal to fight in the occupied territories, and he spent a month in military prison as a result”. And then I needed to reevaluate the storyline, which I will oversimplify here. As it turns out, Mende's husband, Zvi-Meir, had been a student at the yeshiva but was kicked out when he became obsessed with a question surrounding Adam and Eve's exile from Paradise: How could they have understood the difference between right and wrong before they had tasted of the fruit that gave them that knowledge? Essentially, the thesis becomes that people can only avoid doing wrong when they have knowledge of what's wrong, and I think that Iczkovits' point is that a people who have experienced the kind of racism and oppression and second-class citizenship as the Jews did in the Pale of Settlement (and elsewhere) ought to know better than to impose these same conditions on others. (Note: I'm trying to avoid getting political here, this is simply what I believe to be the author's intent.) And unsurprisingly, upon reevaluation, the literary value of this book was elevated in my estimation, and despite feeling a bit too long and slightly repetitive, I am left with heightened admiration for the effort. Turns out, this was exactly the right book at the right time for me.
Bonus: This is the book that I'm "reading" while floating in the Dead Sea here -
