Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items

THE SLAUGHTERMAN'S DAUGHTER

Yaniv Iczkovits

The Avenging of Mende Speismann at the Hand of Her Sister Fanny

The townsfolk of Motal, an isolated, godforsaken town in the Pale of Settlement, are shocked when Fanny Keismann devoted wife, mother of five, and celebrated cheese-maker leaves her home at two hours past midnight and vanishes into the night.

True, the husbands of Motal have been vanishing for years, but a wife and mother? Whoever heard of such a thing. What on earth possessed her?

Could it have anything to do with Fanny's missing brother-in-law, who left her sister almost a year ago and ran away to Minsk, abandoning their family to destitution and despair?

Or could Fanny have been lured away by Zizek Breshov, the mysterious ferryman on the Yaselda river, who, in a strange twist of events, seems to have disappeared on the same night?

Surely there can be no link between Fanny and the peculiar roadside murder on the way to Telekhany, which has left Colonel Piotr Novak, head of the Russian secret police, scratching his head. Surely a crime like that could have nothing to do with Fanny Keismann, however the people of Motal might mutter about her reputation as a vilde chaya, a wild animal . . .

Surely not.

Yaniv Iczkovits is an award-winning author and was formerly a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Tel Aviv. His previous works include Pulse (2007), Adam and Sophie (2009) and Wittgenstein's Ethical Thought, based on his academic work, in 2012. In 2002, he was an inaugural signatory of the "combatants' letter", in which hundreds of Israeli soldiers affirmed their refusal to fight in the occupied territories, and he spent a month in military prison as a result. The Slaughterman's Daughter is his third novel and won the Ramat Gan Prize and the Agnon Prize in 2015, the first time the prize had been awarded in ten years. It was also shortlisted for the Sapir Prize. Yaniv Iczkovits previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University and lives with his family in Tel Aviv.

Orr Scharf is a translator of select literature and has a post-doctorate fellowship on the works of Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber and Walter Benjamin.

Available products
Book Published 2020-02-01 by Maclehose Press
Book Published 2020-02-01 by Maclehose Press

Comments

"A major novel that zigzags lovingly between characters and plots, between history and psychology, amidst brilliant narrative."

Boundless imagination and a vibrant style . . . a heroine of unforgettable grit

Technicolour characters, pathos and humour are all wonderfully captured in a nimble translation from the Hebrew

A story of great beauty and surprise

A Prayer After Midnight is novel exceptional for its daring, the breadth of its canvas, its craft, and its imaginative force. Yaniv Iczkovits leads his characters with full confidence through the pathways of White Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. Iczkovits sets his story on the indisputable terrain of classical Jewish literature. In A Prayer After Midnight readers will find echoes and echoes of echoes of the works of Mendele and Berdichevsky, Peretz and Agnon and their contemporaries, and especially their characteristic comic and grotesque strains. This is a perfect, if rare, example of a contemporary Israeli narrative that is in living dialogue with the literary and historical past, drawing on it and constructing an utterly original, independent artistic structure on its foundations. Iczkovits has created a sensual, richly vibrant Jewish world devoid of stereotypes, with flesh-and-blood characters to whom nothing human is foreign. There is no doubt. Iczkovits has pulled this off with wondrous success, yielding a virtuosic novel.

Approaches history in a fabulist style reminiscent of Sholem Aleichem and his disciples . . . The folktale tradition evoked in the storytelling has an estimable history, but perhaps even more old-fashioned is this novel's length and leisurely tempo. Mr. Iczkovits slowly elaborates his scenes, indulging in every tangent and scrap of context, as though there weren't countless forms of instant entertainment vying for the reader's attention. I appreciated the pace . . . Today it would be a quick drive to Minsk; once upon a time the trip was the stuff of epics.

USA: Pantheon Books/Knopf/Doubleday Publishing Group/ (February 2021) UK: MacLehose Press (March 2020) Canada:House of Anansi(March 2020) Czech: Mlada Fronta France: Gallimard,pre-empt(March 2021) Poland: Poznanskie (in auction, 2021) Holland: De Geus (Published) Italy: Neri Pozza (Published) Israel:Keter

Yaniv Iczkovits has published three novels to date: Pulse, Adam and Sophie, and A Prayer After Midnight. With each novel, he has created an original, unique, well-crafted literary world, with narrative drive that becomes increasingly sophisticated and ambitious from book to book. In A Prayer After Midnight Iczkovits presents an original take on the historical novel which recreates with a shrewd but affectionate look back at a lost world Jewish life in the Russian empire at the end of the nineteenth century. The story's plot, characters, narrative style and the narrator's perspective are characterized by historical realism but also an element of fantasy. It is also worth noting the novel's brilliant insights, its winning humor, and especially the highly effective and readable blend of our vibrant, supple modern Hebrew and a distant, forgotten way of life. This is a novel of unquestionable uniqueness.

An adventure story with few like it in modern Hebrew literature.simply an outstanding novel.

A Sunday Times Must Read Pick 2020: Set in tsarist Russia, this off-beat, picaresque novel follows Fanny Keismann, who is trying to find her missing brother-in- law. An intoxicating mix of real history, fable and the author's imagination.

Iczkovits explores the richness, complexity, and constant peril of Jewish life under the Russian Empire. [Fanny and Zizek] are convincingly drawn, particularly in their occasional doubts and irrationality, and as their stories unfold we observe that although lives are often shaped by history and circumstance, character and resolve can resist and transcend the status quo . . . It's a genuine pleasure to see all of the different strands of the story come together in the final act. If the Coen brothers ever ventured beyond the United States for their films, they would find ample material in this novel . . . An ultimately hopeful search for small comforts and a modicum of justice in an absurd and immoral world."

What may appear as a small family story breaks out in every possible direction in its virtuosity.

The novel tells the story with an extraordinary ironic verve and brilliant style.

The literary mastery of Iczkovits is seen in its entirety.

As witty as it is wise, Iczkovits' novel is a profoundly moving caper through the Russian empire.

Iczkovits is one of the important emerging figures of Israeli literature.