Songs For the Butcher’s Daughter: An Afternoon with Peter Manseau

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 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. 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 Haddasah Ribalow Prize.

Peter Manseau is a 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 has been shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize and the Prix Médicis étranger.

This event is free and open to the public. RSVPs are encouraged and should be directed, along with any questions, to Hayley Salo (hayley.salo@louisville.edu).

The Ekstrom Library, including the Chao Auditorium, is an accessible facility. Please indicate if you need any special services, assistance, or accommodations to participate in this program by contacting Hayley Salo (hayley.salo@louisville.edu) by Monday, March 10.