Our Imagined Jewish Story: A Jewish Odyssey in Czarist Russia

College Commons

Reverse-engineering his imagined past, Israeli author Yaniv Iczkovits follows his characters across the Pale of Settlement. The Slaughterman’s Daughter, finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. With her reputation as a vilde chaya (wild animal), Fanny Keismann isn’t like the other women in her shtetl in the Pale of Settlement—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. As a young girl, Fanny felt an inexorable pull toward her father’s profession of ritual slaughterer and, under his reluctant guidance, became a master with a knife. And though she long ago gave up that unsuitable profession—she’s now the wife of a cheesemaker and a mother of five—Fanny still keeps the knife tied to her right leg. Which might come in handy when, heedless of the dangers facing a Jewish woman traveling alone in czarist Russia, she 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. Yaniv Iczkovits spins a family drama into a far-reaching comedy of errors that will pit the czar’s army against the Russian secret police and threaten the very foundations of the Russian Empire. The Slaughterman’s Daughter is a rollicking and unforgettable work of fiction. Yaniv Iczkovits, born in 1975, is an award-winning author and screen writer. He has published four novels and one novella, and is now working on developing TV content based on his novels for Keshet and KI, Yes Studios, Endemol Shine and more. His books include Pulse (Hakibbutz HaMeuchad), which won Haaretz’s debut novel prize and was translated into Italian; Adam and Sophie (HaSifriya HaHadasha), which won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Writers; Laws of Succession, a novella published in the anthology “There’s a Story Behind the Money” (Achuzat Bayit). His third novel, The Slaughterman’s Daughter, was published by Keter in August 2015 and is translated into 15 languages worldwide. The book was awarded the Agnon Prize – in honor of Israel’s only Nobel Laureate for Literature – the first time the prize has been granted in ten years (2016). Iczkovits won the Ramat Gan Prize (2017) for literary excellence and the People of the Book Foundation Prize (2017), and the British Wingate prize (2021). The Economist and The Sunday Times chose the book as one of the best books published in Britain in 2020, and The New York Times and Kirkus chose the book as one of the best books to look forward to in 2021 in the U.S. In January 2022 the book was announced as a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. In August 2020 Iczkovits published his recent book, Nobody Leaves Palo Alto (Keter) which immediately became a no.1 best seller in Israel and won critical acclaim. Iczkovits studied at the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students at Tel Aviv University, and during his Master's degree he spent a year at Oxford University as a Chevening scholar from the British Council. His doctoral dissertation dealt with Ludwig Wittgenstein's thought and analyzed the interplay between ethics and language. He taught for eight years at the University of Tel Aviv, and After receiving his Ph.D., he went on to pursue postdoctoral research at Columbia University in New York, where he adapted his doctoral dissertation into the book Wittgenstein's Ethical Thought (Palgrave Macmillan 2012). He currently lives in Tel Aviv with his wife and three daughters. (Photo by: Eric Sultan)