The Slaughterman's Daughter

"An enthralling, picaresque tale of two Jewish sisters in late nineteenth-century Russia, filled with "boundless imagination, wit, and panache" (David Grossman), and enough intrigue and misadventure to stupefy the Cohen brothers. With her reputation as a vilde chaya, a wild beast, Fanny Keismann isn't like the other women in her shtetl-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 in a small village in Russia's Pale of Settlement. As a young girl, Fanny felt an inexorable pull toward the profession of her father, Grodno's ritual slaughterer, who reluctantly took her under his wing and trained her to be a master shochet-incredibly skilled with a knife. It's a knife that Fanny keeps tied to her right leg even now, as a married woman, cheese farmer, and mother of five, long after she's given up that unsuitable profession. Horrified by her brother-in-law's actions and heedless of the dangers facing a Jewish woman travelling alone in Czarist Russia, Fanny decides that enough is enough and 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. In irresistible prose, Israeli novelist Yaniv Iczkovits spins a family drama into a far-reaching comedy of errors that soon pits the Czar's army against the Russian secret police and threatens the foundations of the Russian Empire. The Slaughterman's Daughter is a rollicking and unforgettable work of fiction"--