When readers of Peter Manseau’s inventive debut novel “Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter” first encounter Malpesh, he’s in his 90s, wearing a tattered sweater and living in the same Baltimore apartment where he’s resided for 50 years. He has written his memoir in 22 accounting ledgers, and tells the young man who is to be his translator, “Here you will find the untold story of the greatest Yiddish poet in America.” He then admits that in order to be the greatest, “one needs only to be the last.”

The translation of Malpesh’s writing is interrupted by occasional chapters of translator’s notes, which reveal the 21-year-old’s story, and the unusual circumstances that bring the two literary characters together.

Seductive and playful, the novel, with many unforgettable scenes, is also a serious meditation on language, love, loyalty and memory. Manseau, who studies religion and teaches writing at Georgetown University, echoes the rhythms of Yiddish literature, adding his own modern and original knaytch, or twist. He takes every word seriously, and cares about commas and spaces as much as the novel’s typesetters do.

Manseau’s own story is compelling too: the son of a priest and estranged nun, he majored in religion in college and considered becoming a monk. His beautiful and affecting book “Vows” is a memoir about his family. After graduating from college, he worked at the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., for three years, sorting books. He got the job because he knew Hebrew from his religious studies, and he learned Yiddish on the job as he collected caches of Yiddish books from Yiddish speakers turning over their legacies. In those encounters, he met people like Malpesh, he tells The Jewish Week, in an interview earlier this fall in a Manhattan cafe.

While at the Center, he didn’t volunteer much about his background, and the people who handed over their treasured books “assumed I was nice Jewish young man. That was part of the ritual. I didn’t go out of my way to disabuse that notion. Some of my co-workers would say that I was ‘functionally Jewish.’”

The translator in the novel is Catholic also; he somehow lost his faith while studying religion and scriptural languages. Instead of attending a seminary as he had anticipated, he takes a job working at the Jewish Cultural Organization, sorting Yiddish books that have arrived in their warehouse from all over the world.

“I wanted the assumption that the unnamed translator is in fact Peter Manseau to plant a seed in the reader’s mind that since I exist then Malpesh must as well,” he says. “This strategy convinced me — I keep expecting Malpesh to show up at my window, tapping with his cane.”

Malpesh tells his young translator that “translation is an intimate act.” He says, “For a writer who has outlived his tongue, there is no other means of contact. Without a translator, who would unzip the words?”

Malpesh was the son of a man who worked at the local goose-down operation in Kishinev, invented a machine that revolutionized operations and was promoted to foreman. Thanks to his father, even the poorest of Jews in Kishinev could have a comfortable night’s sleep in goose bedding. Born during a pogrom, Malpesh never forgot the story of the butcher’s young daughter, Sasha Bimko, who was present at his birth when the house was violently stormed by locals. The young girl was said to hold them back. Her own father had been murdered, and she was left at the Malpesh home for safekeeping. Soon after, Sasha and her mother left for Odessa. She, or rather the memory of Sasha — and her image in a photograph — became his muse.

When Malpesh eventually escapes to Odessa, Sasha has left for Palestine. The widow Bimko lives above a tavern, and Malpesh befriends Minkovsky the tavern keeper, who also runs a printing press in his basement. Minkovsky understands how sentences are built, as though brick by brick, and that when a patron has too much to drink and stalls his speech, “that half-spoken sentence stands there like a half-built wall, not quite serving its purpose, but marking the spot where it will stand.”

Minkovsky ships Malpesh to America, with his trunk full of Yiddish letters. And once in New York, Malpesh struggles. Readers will enjoy the pleasures, not to be revealed here, of the unfolding tale.

“The novel is a work of translation, and it’s about translation,” he says. “I wanted to find a way to convey something of my own experience, my original encounter with Yiddish, and I wanted to dramatize the experience of learning a language to enter a culture you didn’t know,” he says.

Manseau had fun with the idea of being a non-Jewish writer writing an unabashedly Jewish book. He says, “I think of the book as an act of cultural appropriation. It’s a work of love. I wouldn’t write about his culture if I didn’t love it.”

In his work at the Center, Manseau got to know the work of several Yiddish poets, and felt much in common with those “who had deep religious backgrounds and pushed against it,” making that a theme of their writing. He learned a lot about the Yiddish world by reading Irving Howe’s classic, “World of Our Fathers,” which directed him to many Yiddish sources.

The message he’d like readers to come away with is that everyone has a great story to tell. He notes, “Sometimes we just need the right translator to let the world know.”