The Slaughterman's Daughter: A Novel

ISBN: 0805243658

Author: Iczkovits, Yaniv

Condition: Used

"If the Coen brothers ever ventured beyond the United States for their films, they would find ample material in this novel."--The New York Times Book Review"Occasionally a book comes along so fresh, strange, and original that it seems peerless, utterly unprecedented. This is one of those books."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)**Winner of the 2021 Wingate Literary Prize****Finalist for the 2021 National Jewish Book Awards, "Book Club Award"**An irresistible, picaresque tale of two Jewish sisters in late-nineteenth-century Russia, The Slaughtermans Daughter is filled with boundless imagination and a vibrant style (David Grossman).With her reputation as a vilde chaya (wild animal), Fanny Keismann isnt like the other women in her shtetl in the Pale of Settlement-certainly not her obedient and anxiety-ridden sister, Mende, whose philosopher of a husband, Zvi-Meir, has run off to Minsk, abandoning her and their two children.As a young girl, Fanny felt an inexorable pull toward her fathers profession of ritual slaughterer and, under his reluctant guidance, became a master with a knife. And though she long ago gave up that unsuitable profession-shes now the wife of a cheesemaker and a mother of five-Fanny still keeps the knife tied to her right leg. Which might come in handy when, heedless of the dangers facing a Jewish woman traveling alone in czarist Russia, she sets off to track down Zvi-Meir and bring him home, with the help of the mute and mysterious ferryman Zizek Breshov, an ex-soldier with his own sensational past.Yaniv Iczkovits spins a family drama into a far-reaching comedy of errors that will pit the czars army against the Russian secret police and threaten the very foundations of the Russian Empire. The Slaughtermans Daughter is a rollicking and unforgettable work of fiction.