"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."-- Provided by publisher.
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