“The Slaughterman’s Daughter” by Yaniv Iczkovits (translated by Orr Scharf)

This novel, translated from Hebrew, has its fair share of Yiddish sprinkled in. It takes place during the nineteenth century in the Pale of Settlement. Most of the action takes place in Motal, a predominantly Jewish village with a few muzhiks in the mix. It has quite the cast of characters—a mute Russian Army veteran, a degenerate-gambling Jewish cantor, a hobbling Okhrana officer, a brothel owner, an apocalyptic Yeshiva scholar, and, of course, a slaughterman’s daughter or two. “Fanny feels the sheath against her thigh: Why has she continued to carry the knife even after abandoning her career of slaughtering? She does not know. She intended many times to bury it in the back of a cupboard, but whenever she removed the blade from her body she felt as though something was amiss, as if it were another body part in addition to the 248 that the Sages of antiquity had enumerated in the human body.” Fanny belongs to an insulated rural Jewish community, but is a bit of an outcast, having married a stoic cheesemaker, who lives dangerously close to the goyim. “The righteous do not take political positions, they strengthen their allegiance to the Blessed Holy One instead, and they could not care less whether the nobility is bickering with the peasants, and it is all the same to them if Polish nationalists are clashing with Russian oppressors. If there is something to sell to the gentiles or to buy from them in order to make a living, so much the better—but this is where the line between them and us is drawn. We share with them the same soil but not the same world.” The adventure Fanny will end up going on will bring death aplenty, as well as soul searching, hero-making, and reconciliation. “Now she is proud of the riff-raff she has gathered around her, the types that townspeople would point at and say: “See them? They’re exactly what we’re not.” Well, this is her army. And although none of them would admit it, she knows that whatever powerful thing it is that unites this divided, battered crew, it has made waves throughout the entire empire.”