Chaim Grade’s last novel finally published, translated

When I think of great Yiddish literature, I think mostly about the short fiction of I.L.Peretz, S. Ansky and I.B. Singer, and not about epic novels. Yiddish literature flowered in Eastern Europe between 1864 and Sept. 1, 1939, when Eastern Europe was overrun by the Third Reich.

Yiddish writers flourished in Russia-Poland (before 1918), Poland (the same geography but after 1918, when Poland became an independent nation), Lithuania, Belarus (then known as Byelorussia), and Ukraine, in the cities of Warsaw, Vilna, Bialystock, Minsk, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krakow, Lublin, Lvov and Kyiv.

Some Yiddish writers – Sholem Aleichem, Anna Margolin, Abraham Cahan and Jacob Gladstein – lived in New York, which then became home to many of the surviving remnants of Yiddish literature – I.B. Singer, I.J. Singer and Chaim Grade, among others, who came to the US after the Holocaust. They survived until 1992, when I.B. Singer, the last of this group, died in Florida. Others, lesser known in the US – Avrom Sutzkever, Barahman Lev, Abraham Kapinowicz – made Aliyah.

Yiddish fiction in the US was often first published in the Yiddish newspapers of New York as short stories or serialized novels. Its audiences were the Yiddish-speaking immigrants who worked in the sweatshops and for the furriers, diamond cutters and installment brokers of the old Lower East Side. They eventually worked their way up and out, first to the Bronx and Brooklyn, and then to Westchester, Long Island and New Jersey. Their descendants spread across the country and around the world – eaving the Yiddish of their grandparents and parents behind.

‘Sons and Daughters’ by Chaim Grade. Alfred A. Knopf, 2025

Chaim Grade (1910-1982) was born in poverty in Vilna, educated at the musar Novaredok Yeshiva and at other musar yeshivot in Bialystok, Bielsk-Podlaski and Olkenik. He then studied for seven years with Rab Avrohom Yeshaya Karelitz, the Hazon Ish, a noted scholar and later one of the leaders of the Haredi Community in Israel. Grade began to write secular poetry and left yeshiva life for a life of literature. He married in 1937. He, his wife and mother remained in Vilna, which was occupied by the Soviet Union. After the German invasion of Poland, he fled eastward when the Germans invaded Lithuania in 1941, leaving his wife and mother behind, believing that the Germans were only interested in rounding up Jewish men. Grade survived the war in Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Moscow, and learned only later about the murder of his wife and mother, and about the liquidation of both the Vilna Ghetto which had occurred in September of 1943, and the Jewish population of Lithuania itself. He remarried in 1945 in Paris, to a woman 15 years his junior, Inna Grade, who had a Jewish doctor-father but spoke no Yiddish. They lived first in Lodz, in Poland, and then France, where Grade worked briefly as a rabbi in Heronville.

Grade and his wife came to the US on tourist visas in 1948. He lived the rest of his life in the Amalgamated Houses, a union-run housing development in the Bronx. He wrote in Yiddish, publishing poems, stories and serialized novels in Yiddish newspapers, and books brought out by Yiddish publishers. Some of his books were translated into English and achieved modest success. One, “Rabbis and Wives” (1974), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His marriage was tempestuous and marked by the infidelities of both partners but also by a deep, complex and lasting attachment.

Grade’s last novel, “Sons and Daughters”, had a complex and difficult road to publication. Originally published in serialized form in the Yiddish newspapers Tog-Morgn Zhurnal and the Forvertz (known in English as the Jewish Daily Forward), Grade had not yet finished “Sons and Daughters” at the time of his death in 1982. His widow Inna, who was also his literary executor, did not allow Yiddish scholars or potential translators access to his papers, which included the typeset Yiddish galley proofs of “Sons and Daughters.” Inna Grade died in 2010. Even so, it took 15 years before the novel could be compiled from Grades’ papers and translated. It finally appeared in March of 2025.

All that said, “Sons and Daughters” is an epic, if unfinished, novel about Jewish life in the modern and postmodern era. Although set in northern Poland, close to both Lithuania and Belarus/Byelorussia (near Vilna and Minsk), it is about the lives and families of Orthodox communities in the 1930s. It struggles with the intergenerational meaning and value of Judaism, of observance, of Zionism, of family and community in a world that was at once loving and threatened. It tells of struggles that are recognizable in the post Oct. 7 world of today, when families are divided by these issues and our politics. Many contemporary Jews will recognize feeling torn apart and left behind by events, new ideas and beliefs, and wrestle with the meaning of the values which shaped us.

In the novel, Bluma Rivtcha Katzenellenbogan, daughter of Rabbi Sholem Schane Katzenellenbogan, the rabbi of Morehdalye and his wife Hanna’le, herself the daughter of the Rabbi of Zembin, breaks off her relationship with Zindel Kadish. He is the grandson of the dayan, or judge, in the religious court of Morehdalye. Zindel tells her of his desire to become a rabbi in Canada, where his divorced parents now live, a place where people think rabbis have no beards. Bluma Rivtcha has different aspirations: she wants to move to Vilna for nursing school.

Bluma Rivtcha functions as our introduction to a group of interlocked rabbinic families and their struggles. A son moves to Switzerland, earns a doctorate in philosophy, marries a Swiss gentile woman with whom he has a child – and keeps all this hidden from his family. Although he visits them, this keeps him distant from the observant life he pines for. A daughter marries a rabbi in another community in an arranged marriage but wishes she had married for love. The crazed narcissistic uncle wrecks businesses and yearns for his rabbinical father’s attention, if not his job, as a town rabbi. Then there is the Yiddish poet who becomes Bluma Rivthcha’s new fiancé. We hear too about the son of a brilliant Talmud scholar who becomes a revolutionary and is jailed. A grandson in another family becomes a Zionist and moves to a kibbutz in Palestine, which the rabbinic families see as a place where men and women live together and no one keeps Kosher.

And so we learn about the inner workings of the rabbinic families in the Misnagid Orthodox communities of northeast Poland, Lithuania and Belarus in the 1930s. It was a time when the community struggles to make sense of the Haskalah (enlightenment) that swept eastern Europe after about 1870, disrupting the traditional life of the shtetl. The impact of emigration to the US and Canada and other countries in the new world is also addressed. We understand the way Zionism affected those communities, which believed that any talk of a Jewish state before the Messiah comes was apocryphal. It was a period that saw the emergence of Marxism, which had many Jewish adherents, but was believed to be a Jewish conspiracy in Poland. It is seen side by side with Polish nationalism which became more and more antisemitic. This culminated in Polish boycotts of Jewish merchants and a number of pogroms.

In addition, we learn about the lost world of Eastern Europe in the 1930s, a world that has been shrouded by the tragic mist of the Holocaust. Few of us know about, and far fewer remember, a world in which two communities, Jewish and Polish, lived side by side in uneasy symbiosis. In Poland, Jewish law governed Jewish communities, which often had their own courts, schools and traditions. Jews were often dirt poor but still earned more on average than their Polish neighbors. Some were rabbis and grain merchants but others were saloon keepers, cobblers, tailors, storekeepers and the administrators of estates. Poles were both nobles and the children and grandchildren of serfs and lived alongside a small but secure German population of bankers and bureaucrats. This was a Poland that had been partitioned three times, that only won its independence in 1918 and struggled to make sense of its identity, split as it was between Polish, Jewish and German populations.

Is “Sons and Daughters” a good book? Is it a great book, or even, as some have claimed, one of the world’s greatest books? Remember it was unfinished: the novel we have was constructed after Grade’s death from the Yiddish galleys and his notes.

I’d rank “Sons and Daughters” as a great Yiddish novel, and among the best Yiddish novels yet written. It is the story of a people and a culture, in all its messy complexity. It’s a snapshot of the moral and ethical crosswinds buffeting human beings who tried as best they could to find a place for themselves in a changing world. I can’t know how it reads to people from other cultures. This is the story of my people and my culture, the story of how we lived in Europe, of the life my family left behind when they emigrated 10 to 30 years before – and which was then destroyed forever. I can’t know that part of my and our past. But “Sons and Daughters” let me see into that world for the first time. Chaim Grade helps his readers experience the inner lives of others across the arc of history, which is what great novels do.

Michael Fine’s books, short stories and commentary are available at www.michaelfinemd.com. You can sign up there to receive his short stories and commentary without charge by email monthly.