If Tolstoy had written about the hardscrabble, scholarly Jewish communities of Poland and Lithuania in the early 1930s instead of the convulsions that gripped feudal Russia in the nineteenth century, he might have been Chaim Grade. Like Tolstoy, Grade had a monumental imagination; his novels are teeming with fully realized characters—stringent rebbes, unscrupulous merchants, restive young men and romantic young women pushed into unhappy arranged marriages—as well as seething conflicts, particularly the tension between secular life and religious tradition. Grade captured the raging complexities of the Eastern European shtetl, a world soon to be blotted out. In 1974 Elie Wiesel called him “one of the great—if not the greatest—of living Yiddish novelists.”
But why, you may find yourself asking, have I never heard of him—unlike, say, Sholem Aleichem, Y.L. Peretz, or Isaac Bashevis Singer—until this year, that is, when a cascade of pieces about his unfinished and posthumously published final novel, Sons and Daughters, appeared? This brings us to the vagaries of literary reputation—of renown versus relative obscurity—which are hard to grab hold of. Sometimes renown seems to be a matter of sheer giftedness, at others one of simple commercial appeal. In so-called ethnic writing, which is inherently less tailored to a general readership, the recognizable names are often writers who seek to make the alien a charming variant of the familiar. They successfully package, that is, what might otherwise be viewed as an impermeably strange or insular world into an accessible (albeit exotic) one.
In this sense Singer’s fiction, with its salacious undertone and bizarre or mystical situations—involving Mitteleuropean imps, false Messiahs, and young girls longing to be yeshiva bochurim—seems grotesquely charming rather than unsettlingly Other. In the latter half of the twentieth century it could nestle alongside the adamantly secular, suburban-cocktail-party fiction of The New Yorker, while the work of a writer like Grade languished in the outer boroughs.
Grade did, in fact, spend a large part of his adult life in the Bronx, in a cluttered, un-air-conditioned five-room apartment in a housing cooperative at 100 Van Cortlandt Park South with his wife, Inna, and his vast collection of books in at least six languages. According to Jonathan Brent, the executive director and CEO of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, who visited the couple’s apartment after Inna’s death in 2010, the writer’s library included an annotated and underlined copy of Finnegans Wake and well-thumbed volumes of Proust and Mann in the original French and German. His foremost literary passion was Dostoevsky. (“I need these books like a hole in the head,” Grade told an interviewer for Present Tense in 1978. “It is bad to love so much books,” he went on in his broken English. “I write only 10 percent of the time and read 90 percent.”) Inna—who was pilloried for her proprietary approach to her husband’s work after he died and for her constant hectoring of writers and journalists to take greater note of it—saved the typewriter with Hebrew lettering, with a piece of yellow typing paper stuck in the platen, that Grade was writing on when he died of a sudden heart attack in 1982 at seventy-two. It is stored in YIVO’s archives, where I went to gaze at it, with all the reverence due a sacred relic.
Although Grade arrived in the United States in 1948, nearly forty and having survived the war, in some sense he never left his Eastern European roots behind. He wrote with a consuming nostalgia for a time and place: the ultra-Orthodox community of Vilna, Lithuania, which was on the verge of disappearing even as he grew to adulthood. Grade eventually produced a number of books that pay homage with pointillist specificity to the pre-Nazi world of the shtetls. He described the clothes that were worn (shtreimels, or hats, and fur coats for the men, and long black dresses paired with sheitels, or wigs, for the married women), the Shabbos meals that were served (rich soups, tzimmes, kugel, roast chicken, and compote for dessert), and the arguments that swirled around competing rabbinic pedigrees, differing Talmudic interpretations, and townsfolk who wanted to desecrate the Shabbos in some manner or other. “I know these people and these are the people I love,” he once observed. “They live a genuine life…. I know how deep they feel.”
The writer Curt Leviant, who translated three of Grade’s most important books—and to whom Grade, a completely assimilated Jew, mentioned that the Lubavitcher Rebbe sent him shmura matzo (handmade rather than machine-baked) every Passover—observed in a 2011 essay in the Jewish Review of Books that “Grade’s artistic achievement was always rooted in his Jewish knowledge, his Yiddishkeyt.”
Born in Vilna in 1910, Grade was the oldest child from the second marriage of Shloyme-Mordkhe Grade; his two younger sisters died in childhood. His father was an impoverished Hebrew teacher and a maskil—someone versed in Jewish learning who is also a follower of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, a movement that began in the eighteenth century and sought to bring worldly culture to observant Jews. Shloyme-Mordkhe died while Chaim was still young, and although he had wanted his son to learn a trade, Vela, Chaim’s pious mother, who was a rabbi’s daughter half her husband’s age and who worked as a fruit and vegetable peddler, insisted that he go to a yeshiva to become a religious scholar. Grade lived with Vela in a cellar apartment that was divided by a curtain into two spaces—a blacksmith’s workshop and, in the darker back part, their home.
From 1924 to 1926, during his adolescence, he studied at Novardok, a musar yeshiva in Białystok that was characterized by a particularly rigid and ascetic form of religious education emphasizing moral virtues and a self-abnegating approach to existence. (Musar yeshivas were created in the mid-nineteenth century to offset the focus on theological inquiry and textual analysis that defined the Lithuanian yeshivas.) Grade’s experience eventually colored the elaborate arguments about Judaism in his writing, including a long poem about yeshiva life called Musernikes (1939), in which he wrote that “whoever has learned Musar can have no enjoyment in life.” He went on to study under Rabbi Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz, known as the Chazon Ish, a renowned and beloved sage of charedi (ultra-Orthodox) theology and jurisprudence, until his teacher left for Palestine in 1933. They remained in touch until the Chazon Ish’s death in Bnei Brak in 1953.
With the Chazon Ish’s departure, Grade’s equivocal feelings about the charedi world asserted themselves. He turned to Yung Vilne, Vilna’s bustling literary set—leftist, Zionist, and secular—to define himself. He became a well-received poet, publishing his first collection, Yo (Yes), which included poems about his mother, in 1936, and was called by critics the Yiddish Bialik, after Chaim Nachman Bialik, who was known as the pioneer of modern Hebrew poetry. Grade married Frume-Libe Klepfish (a name worthy of one of his novels), a rabbi’s daughter who had attended nursing school, in 1937. He survived World War II by moving around and crossing borders on his Soviet passport, which both his wife and his mother lacked; when he returned home in August 1945, he discovered that the two, who he hoped would be safe in Vilna, had been murdered by the Nazis.
In December of that year he married Inna Hecker, a beauty who was fifteen years younger and whose emotional intensity matched Grade’s own, leading to an enmeshed and volatile relationship of the love-hate variety. Harold Rabinowitz, a friend and translator of Grade’s, described them as an “incongruous couple. He was a short, bald, squat chain-smoker, and she looked like a movie star.” They lived first in Łódź and then in Paris; Grade found the latter depressing and wrote a friend that “the Jewish way of life here is like the praying of a harried shopkeeper but without shabbes.” In the fall of 1948, after the Congress for Jewish Culture in New York invited Grade to speak at a conference, the couple settled in the Bronx, where he continued to write in Yiddish.
Although Grade considered himself primarily a poet—he published five collections between 1945 and 1950—after emigrating he turned mostly to prose. His first prose work, a remarkable argument with himself in the form of a dialogue called “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” was published in 1951 in a Labor Zionist magazine and two years later in Commentary in an abridged English translation by Milton Himmelfarb. (In 1991 it was made into a film called The Quarrel.) Several years ago the text was retranslated with an excellent introduction by the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse, which is how I first came upon it. In her introduction Wisse writes that Grade told her “he was never at peace: when he studied Talmud, he felt he should be reading Dostoevsky; and when reading Dostoevsky, he thought he should be studying Talmud.”
I read the story with a sense that I had finally discovered a writer and thinker who could clarify my lifelong (and guilt-ridden) ambivalence about ritually observant Jewish life and help elucidate its persistent hold on those, like me, who had parted ways with it long ago yet continued to be aware of daily markers, such as the start of Shabbos on Friday nights, and to look for a shul that might speak to their sensibility. To this day I remain nostalgic for the Friday evenings of my childhood—their quietly festive quality, attested to by a spotless white tablecloth set with gleaming silver candlesticks and a menu that invariably included chopped liver and chicken soup. There was something about the way they rounded out the workweek, cordoning off the morning shul-going and prescribed restfulness of the day that followed, which included long naps after lunch, and gave a calendrical sense of order to what might otherwise have been a random jumble of days.
“My Quarrel” is an electrifying piece of writing, one that uses Grade’s skills at lernen—a dialectical method taught in many yeshivas in which students walk around while debating interpretations of rabbinic sources—to argue the rationales for nonobservant versus Halachic, or traditional, Judaism. These are presented by two Holocaust survivors who, after nearly a decade apart, happen to meet again one summer morning in 1948 on the Paris Métro. Chaim Vilner, the narrator, is an autobiographical stand-in who conveys Grade’s own enlightened views, and Hersh Rasseyner is his former yeshiva classmate who still holds tight to his dogmatic beliefs against those of the “school of…pork-eaters.” (Scholarly sleuthing has revealed that Vilner’s debating partner was also based on a real-life figure.)
Both characters have lost their families in the war, although “Chaim,” like Grade himself, escaped into the Soviet Union, while Hersh was in a concentration camp. In language that showcases the author’s descriptive gifts (“Short Frenchwomen, as though in a faint, hung on the mouths of their dark-haired lovers”) while retaining a highly cerebral aspect, Grade depicts the two friends battling their way across a landscape of simmering Jewish issues, whether it be a belief in God and the validity of the Torah’s injunctions, the meaning of faith in the aftermath of Hitler, or the possibility of reconciling the ancient, revealed truth of the Torah with the lure of the modern world.
As the two men walk the streets of Paris at dusk, they give as good as they get, occasionally expressing admiration for each other but mostly aiming well-placed jibes. Despite the pugilistic nature of their conversation, neither of them wants it to end, and it continues to rage into the evening:
The street lamps, now lit, cast a matte green glow over the neighborhood. A thin drizzle began to fall. Shiny black autos slid quietly over the asphalt. Lighted windows were reflected on the wet pavement.
The two adversaries leave off in a truce of sorts, after Chaim points out to Hersh that they are more alike in the very fact of their Jewishness than not:
The enemies of Israel know very well that we’re all the same…. And we’re the same not only for the enemies of Israel, but for the Master of the World as well…. The same! In the world to come your soul will not be wearing a yarmulke, a beard, or earlocks. Your soul will arrive there as naked as mine.
The underlying premise of this story established the scaffolding of Grade’s more fully fictionalized and extended work to come, which hinges on the generational tension between adamantly Orthodox parents and their straying offspring. These include The Agunah (published in English in 1974), the title of which is the Hebrew word for a woman whose husband goes missing or refuses to give her a get (divorce) and who thus cannot remarry according to Jewish law; The Yeshiva (1976–1977), a closely focused two-volume novel; and Rabbis and Wives (1982), which Inna cotranslated and which was later reissued as The Sacred and the Profane, a briskly written and often humorous portrait in three novellas of the tight-knit world of the shtetl and the rebbes who held authority over its daily workings while having less control over their spouses and children. Rabbis and Wives, which was published in English the year Grade died, was probably his best-known work until the appearance of Sons and Daughters. An English translation of his memoir, My Mother’s Sabbath Days (1986), a poignant tribute and his most accessible book, was published four years later.
It is likely that Sons and Daughters would never have seen the light of print if not for the persevering efforts of a number of people, primarily Altie Karper, the former head of Schocken Books. Inna was the angry keeper of Grade’s flame, believing that his genius had been overlooked while Singer, whom she referred to as a “blasphemous buffoon,” had been wrongly celebrated. (During my own years in book publishing, I was one of many people to receive a call out of the blue from Inna, half importuning and half commanding me to do something on behalf of her husband.) As a result of Inna’s fury and her refusal to allow access to Grade’s papers, more than twenty-eight years passed between the publication of Rabbis and Wives and Sons and Daughters.
Although Sons and Daughters was originally acquired by Knopf in 1983 (when it was titled The Rabbi’s House), the project remained dormant because of Inna’s refusal to proceed with the translation. After she died in 2010, without heirs or a formal will, Grade’s estate became ensnared in wrangling over rights. The rights were eventually awarded to YIVO and the National Library of Israel. YIVO was authorized to truck the contents of Inna’s Bronx apartment—about 20,000 books, plus dozens of boxes of papers, manuscripts, documents, letters, and other material—to its offices, where the staff started combing through all the material and found the typeset Yiddish galleys for a book titled Bais harav. When Karper read the first few paragraphs she realized that this was, in fact, the very novel that Knopf originally had under contract.
Around the time Rose Waldman finished her deft translation of the book, which ran to 450 pages, a scholar at Tel Aviv University showed her a letter revealing that Grade had planned for the novel to be two volumes. She later found that additional text had appeared in the Yiddish serialization of the novel, which ran in Der Tog-Morgn Zhurnal and then in the Forward in the 1960s and 1970s. Waldman obtained scans of these newspapers from the YIVO archives, which resulted in two hundred more pages. “The reader can now better figure out where Grade is going with the narrative,” Karper told me, “even though it does not conclusively end.” The novel was now called Sons and Daughters, after Karper discovered a 1978 interview in which Grade said he had originally intended to call it that.
Sons and Daughters is set in the fictional Polish shtetl of Morehdalye, which boasts dirt roads and decrepit houses with rag-filled windows. Focusing on two rabbinic families, the Epsteins and the Katzenellenbogens, Grade portrays the psychological slippage from one generation to the next as various children from both families defy the strict laws that governed their upbringings and embrace secularism or modified versions of religious life.
The novel begins in medias res, suddenly introducing a gaggle of characters and the conflict at its center:
As they took a stroll—Bluma Rivtcha, the rabbi’s daughter, and Zindel Kadish, her prospective fiancé—the eyes of the townspeople followed them indulgently, lovingly. Everyone knew how much suffering the rabbi’s other children had caused him, and so they wished him joy from his younger daughter, at least.
Bluma, as befits the daughter of Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen, the revered spiritual head of Morehdalye, dresses modestly, in “long-sleeved blouses, long skirts, and stockings,” and eventually goes to a nursing school in Vilna. Twenty-three-year-old Zindel, dark-eyed and with a “saccharine smile,” attends a Warsaw yeshiva, and during the summer he studies Talmud and Jewish law with Bluma’s father. Sholem Shachne is too busy arguing with his son-in-law, Yaakov Asher Kahane, who is unhappily married to his moody, daydreaming daughter Tilza, and worrying about his two older sons—a doctor of philosophy in Switzerland and a garment salesman in Białystok—to notice that Zindel is romancing Bluma. Grade, detailing Bluma’s persistent doubts about her suitor, segues into one of his many—arguably too many—ornate invocations of nature:
The setting sun grew larger, then sank into distant plains. Clouds with charred purple edges floated by. In the water a pale gold ribbon of light sparkled, drawing one’s heart toward distant lands…. In the space where the fields ended and the dark forest began, thin birch trees with silver barks glistened. On their branches, countless dainty leaves glittered in the waning light.
Meanwhile the rabbi is also concerned about his youngest son, Refael’ke, who wishes to immigrate to Palestine, which is anathema to the boy’s father and grandfather. (“If you don’t believe in God and the Torah,” the rabbi’s father-in-law, Rabbi Eli-Leizer Epstein, rails, “what do you need the land of Israel for?”) Ignoring the cold borscht his wife, Henna’le, has served for lunch, Sholem Shachne announces, “My greatest enemies are my own family.”
The novel progresses episodically, and sometimes confusingly, with a mazelike array of newly introduced characters. (The list of names at the front of the book helps the reader to keep track, but I still had trouble.) These include Tzesneh Ginsburg, whose father sells watches and rings to wealthy Poles, and who has studied foreign languages at the University of Warsaw. She is sexually attracted to Zindel (“He was a ripe piece of fruit, with sweet sauce poured over delicious flesh but still untouched”) and offers to give him English lessons. There is also Shabse-Shepsel, the demonic son of Eli-Leizer, who reigns over the neighboring village of Zembin. Rabbi Epstein, whose family troubles are the other fulcrum of the plot, is fond of his grandson Refael’ke, despite Refael’ke’s Zionist leanings and wish to escape both the stranglehold of Orthodoxy and the claustrophobic life of the shtetl.
Shabse-Shepsel is undoubtedly one of the more intriguing figures, a scheming and faux-pious creature who would fit perfectly into a Singer short story. Late in the novel Grade introduces us to Bluma Rivtcha’s eventual fiancé, a contentious Vilna poet named Khlavneh Yeshurin (generally taken to be modeled on the young Grade), who claims that the future of Judaism is less about obedience to the 613 commandments than about devotion to “the poetry and philosophy of Shabbos.”
Sons and Daughters takes its time meandering toward a stop rather than a conclusion, acquainting us along the way with the “delicate fingers” and “weak teeth” of the shtetl’s scholars as well as their hateful and angry thoughts. Although all this description has real immediacy, it gradually becomes too much of a muchness. I found myself becoming restless with the novel’s reiterated themes—the failure of traditional Judaism to keep its young, the looming presence of the Holocaust as it manifests itself in anti-Jewish clashes with local Poles—and its insistence on pinning down every Yahrzeit candle and head covering.
It seems to me, despite the universal critical acclaim that has greeted the novel’s publication, that it is not quite the masterpiece it has been said to be. I would go even further and suggest that this is not the novel Grade would have sent out into the world. According to Allan Nadler, a Yiddishist and Jewish scholar who was close to Grade and knew his literary process, Grade was meticulous in editing his own writings, even personal letters, and held his translators to almost impossibly high standards. He would edit his work almost to the “point of self-exhaustion,” Nadler wrote me.
And he never allowed anyone to even glimpse at his work before he was satisfied that it was “perfect” and completed…. I cannot say I know [that Sons and Daughters] was unedited. But…this book is almost tiresome to read. Hence my very strong sense that he hadn’t even begun to edit.
Sons and Daughters is hefty and absorbing, bringing the reader into the lives of its characters, describing the wallpaper on their walls as well as their furtive motives. It begins, however, to sag under its own descriptive burden. Grade’s basic skill is never in doubt: he can write in many registers, from the comic to the elegiac, and his facility with dialogue, wherein his female characters don’t end up sounding exactly like the male ones, or the young like the elderly, surpasses that of Saul Bellow or Philip Roth. Grade’s sheer delight in language is evident throughout. Words tumble out after words, and his images speckle the pages: “Little Mottel…was a quiet baby who gazed about himself belligerently, as if it were beneath his dignity to cry or babble.” Or a few sentences before: “His mother finally understood why her Zelme’le had married into this family. He was attracted to this sort of house the way an owl is to dark corners.”
True, sometimes his similes and metaphors seem far-fetched—“Her translucent ears shone rosily like saplings”—but the reader is willing to go along with them for the sake of the many others that are ingeniously apt. Perhaps Grade’s greatest gift is his capacity to relay in dialogue or expository prose complex, abstract ideas about Jewishness, the paradoxical behavior of God, depression, and Nietzsche.
Sons and Daughters, Grade’s most ambitious work, is suffused with the look and feel of the tragically vanished world he labored to render. Its many disparate parts never, to my mind, fully cohere, but for all that, it is a towering achievement by a writer whose view of people, social history, and the ways one generation elides the hopes and perspectives of the previous one is to be wondered at. If it is not the place the novice reader of Chaim Grade should begin—Rabbis and Wives would make more sense—it is the place the writer was aspiring to reach, a lost continent of bickering spirituality and its ultimate confoundment.
English (US) · 