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Songs For the Butcher’s Daughter: An Afternoon with Peter Manseau
March 23 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Novelist Peter Manseau presents this year’s Albert and Anita Goldin Endowment for Yiddish Culture Lecture in the Susan and William Yarmuth Jewish Studies Reading Room (in Ekstrom Library) at UofL on Sunday, March 23rd at 2:00.
In a five-story walkup in Baltimore, nonagenarian Itsik Malpesh—the last Yiddish poet in America—spends his days lamenting the death of his language and dreaming of having his memoirs and poems translated into a living tongue. So when a twenty-one-year-old translator and collector of Judaica crosses his path one day, he goes to extraordinary efforts to enlist the young man’s services. And what the translator finds in ten handwritten notebooks is a chronicle of the twentieth century. From the Easter Sunday Pogrom of Kishinev, Russia, to the hellish garment factories of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Itsik Malpesh recounts a tumultuous, heartrending, and colorful past. With the ardent and feisty Itsik Malpesh, Peter Manseau has created a narrator for the ages and given him a story that will win over readers’ hearts and keep them turning pages long into the night. Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter is a rich homage to Yiddish culture and language and a literary triumph, winner of the National Jewish Book Award, the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Jewish Literature, and the Ribalow Prize for Fiction.
Peter Manseau is a renowned novelist, historian, and museum curator. He is the founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s Center for the Understanding of Religion in American History. He is recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and he has also been shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Prix Médicis étranger, awarded to the best foreign novel published in France.
This event will be lightly catered. Please RSVP: hayley.salo@louisville.edu
