On Armistice Day 1933, the anniversary of his daughter's suicide, David Toback, a kosher butcher living on New York's Lower East Side began to write in Yiddish his memories of coming of age and self-discovery in tsarist Russia a half century earlier. Forty years later, his notebooks were rediscovered by his granddaughter, Carole Malkin. Knowing neither him nor his language, she arranged to have the notebooks translated and then rewrote his story. This collaboration across decades and generations has resulted in a fascinating saga of restless wandering and growing self-consciousness, a picaresque but nonetheless true-life story that reads like the most skillful of fiction. David Toback's life was marked by his many journeys: from the brutality of backward Russian villages to the lush life of a Bessarabian tobacco plantation, from poverty to wealth, from orthodoxy to apostasy, from innocence to sensuality, from childhood to adulthood, from Europe to America. His life was rich and varied; he lived as a peasant, a Hasidic Jew, a forester, a talmudic scholar, a presser of pants, a scribe. Along the way, he encountered remarkable characters reminiscent of the fiction of Charles Dickens and I. B. Singer: Alter Richels, the gentle Hasidic master who recognizes young Toback's brilliance and sends him into the world with a letter; Mendel, the Jewish gangster, whose bigamous plans are thwarted by David's honesty and courage; Sasa, the beautiful and haughty anarchist whose kisses fail to lure David into a revolutionary cabal; Mechalke, the drunken and brutal Ukrainian horse thief who trusts David with his tales of outlawry; Malke and Moishe, David's in-laws, who torment him mercilessly from his wedding day on, until he makes a surprise killing in the cracker market; Gittel, beautiful, rich, and secretly with child, who tries to trick David into marrying her on their way to America. When Toback set sail from Antwerp, it was with the prize of his soul. He had been tried and tested; he was a moral person, steeled for the temptations, tragedies, and triumphs he was to encounter in the New World.
