The Slaughterman's Daughter by Yaniv Iczkovitz is a Fun Romp in 19th-Century Russia


“Similar notices...keep coming from across the Pale of Settlement. Women who have been left behind, women chained to a husbandless marriage, miserable women, schlimazel women abandoned by their husbands with deceitful assurances and charades…[Mende] is not like them. She has not rushed off to publish advertisements, she has not complained to the leaders of the community, and she has not circulated description of Zvi-Meier Speismann, the man who tore her life to pieces” (6)


The charm of Yaniv Iczkovitz’s The Slaughterman’s Daughter is similar to the charm of Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows duology. The former is literary fiction written by an Israeli author and set in 19th-century Russia. The latter is American YA heist novel set in fantasy-Amsterdam. But both stories explore the dark side of their societies with wit and richly-developed characters. Both embrace the concept of “found family” among people who exist—deservedly or not—outside of the law.


Both have have badass women with knives.


Okay, that’s where the similarities between the two books end: Fanny Keismann does not have much in common with Inej Ghafa, Leigh Bardugo’s teenage assassin. Iczovitz’s title character is a twentysomething and a mother of five children—an ordinary woman to readers. Although her cosmopolitan knowledge of Polish and role as a female schochet separate her from her tight-knit Russian Jewish community, she’s long since put down the knife. She only embarks on her adventure when the disappearance of her sister’s no-good husband drivers her into the still-untamed Pale of Settlement.


“The world cannot be mended because rupture is what makes it go round. And there isn’t a single Jewish woman who is prepared to go out of her way to fix it. Not even her” (61)


Accompanying her is Zizek Breshov, a.k.a. Yoshke Berkovitz, a silent veteran with a mysterious past which is revealed in fragments over the course of the 500-page novel. The bond between these two outcasts is pretty sweet, especially after a bandit attack turns them into fugitives. As more characters join Fanny and Zizek, including a grizzled Okhrana inspector with a bum leg, the scope of the story widens to reveal the doomed plight of 19th-century Russian society.


Even when The Slaughterman’s Daughter gets into heavy subjects like war and anti-semitism, the tone remains engaging. For that, thank Orr Scharf, whose translation is so deft that I didn’t notice until halfway through the book that it was originally written in Hebrew. While the prose isn’t particularly lyrical, it’s deeply readable. Iczovitz and Scharff skillfully negotiate several different perspectives without once feeling jarring or slow.




Like Six of Crows and its sequel Crooked Kingdom, The Slaughterman’s Daughter won’t become one of my favorite books; the ending is a little messy and a few characters seem extraneous. But while I read it, I couldn’t put it down. What would happen next to Fanny and Zizek, I wondered. How could the characters reconcile the violence of their era with their different senses of justice? Who was Zizek, really?


I was hooked.



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