‘My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner’
By Chaim Grade, Translated by Ruth Wisse
Toby Press, 144 pages 

We live in a quarrelsome age, which makes the moment all the more appropriate for a new edition of “My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner,” a Yiddish classic by Chaim Grade. The book, which appeared in 1952, captures the Jewish 20th century in miniature, in all its wounds and words.

“My Quarrel” would be merely a mid-century curiosity did it not resonate so firmly in the present. It is about how ideology is broken and forged by personal experience, and it models a debate that is all the sharper for being conducted in a shared language. No social media spat, this is an argument between brothers who dream different dreams but the same blood.  

The slim masterpiece — you’ll want to keep a pen handy for underlining — is translated anew by Ruth Wisse, professor emeritus of Harvard, and published in a collaboration between the Tikvah Fund and Toby Press. Mrs. Wisse, who long graced Harvard’s halls and is a titan in the world of Yiddish letters, delivers an “Introduction” that is itself worth the price of admission.   

“My Quarrel” is a novel of ideas that is at the same time an autobiographical book lifted from Grade’s own life. That life began in Vilna in 1910, where Grade soon became a leading light in Yung Vilne, a tightly knitted constellation of Yiddish writers who came of age in the 1930s, before catastrophe struck. During the war, Grade fled to the Soviet interior, and then to Poland and Paris before finding refuge in New York, where Mrs. Wisse heard the great man lecture in 1960.

While Grade has not received the recognition of his near-contemporary Isaac Bashevis Singer, his status as one of Yiddish’s 20th century masters is secured by, in addition to “My Quarrel,” the novels “The Yeshiva” and “The Agunah,” a collection of stories, “My Mother’s Sabbath Days,” and a rich passel of poems.    

“My Quarrel” is a conversation told in eight chapters over nine years. The protagonists are the narrator, Chaim Vilner — a stand-in for the author  — and Rasseyener, modeled on someone Grade likewise drew from life, Gershon Liebman. The foreground action is their conversation. History, war, and cataclysm reside in the background. The true drama is in the conflict between faith and modernity, and the viability of belief after the gas chambers.

The book begins with a chance encounter in 1937, but its opening is saturated with backstory, as Vilner “returned to Bialystok, seven years after I had been a student in the Novardok Yeshiva of the Musraists.” Vilner has become a writer in and of the wider world. Rasseyner has remained a citizen of the kingdom of faith.     

Vilner and Rasseyener were students, and Novardok was devoted to the practice of Musar, a rigid and ascetic strand of Judaism predicated on extreme piety and discipline. Mrs. Wisse calls it “consciousness-raising” and “a program of moral instruction intended to cultivate an ethical personality.”

For adherents of Musar, emphasis was not so much on intellectual cartwheels as on a scrubbing of the ego and burnishing of the soul. Vilner captures the harrowing path, noting of his classmates: “For years, they had tried to tear the desire for pleasure out of their hearts, and now realized they had lost the war with themselves. They had not overcome the evil urge.”

There is little preamble to the battle of ideas that gives “My Quarrel” the throbbing pulse of a polemic. Rasseyner spits at his old friend, now a well-known author, that: “The main thing for you people is that your name should stand on the cover, at the very top.” He thunders: “Your writings will make no one better and will make you worse.” 

Vilner is hardly one to hold his fire, and strikes back at Rasseyner, saying, “You hang on to your fringes like a drowning man to a rope — but it doesn’t help you swim against the current.” It is not so much that Vilner is a heretic as that he swoons for the quotidian life outside the Talmud’s densely double-sided pages, yearning to take as his subject and muse “the market-women who work their fingers to the bone to give a poor man a piece of bread.” 

Rasseyner, on the contrary, scolds “the hungry for being present and all you can tell them is to repent.” He has no job of his own, and thus lives “on what those exhausted women labor to bring you and in return you promise them — the world to come.” The rift is between the author who celebrates the street and the saint, eyes lifted heavenward, who does not even see it.  

Vilner and Rasseyner reconvene in 1939, when war has already broken out and, “Hunger raged and every face was clouded with fear of the arrests carried out at night by NKVD agents, sent in from Minsk.” The old friends see each other on a bread line. Rasseyner blames the leftist Grade for the Soviet presence. Vilner responds with the plangent lament that “just because you consider me treyf doesn’t mean that they consider me kosher.”

The greater part of “My Quarrel” transpires in 1948, when Vilner and Rasseyner collide by happenstance on the Paris Métro. With breathtaking understatement, the conversation continues after, “Nine years passed, years of war and destruction during which I wandered across Russia, Poland, and Western Europe.”

Professor Wisse, marveling at the transition she considers “one of the most stunning in Jewish literature,” believes that it “confirms that the same issues facing Jews before the war still remained after it, intensified yet essentially unchanged by all that was destroyed.”

Unchanged, but haunted. Grade’s wife and mother were killed in the Holocaust, and in the book Rasseyner sustains similarly unbearable losses. The latter’s tone shifts in this final movement — he has seen, and lost, too much — but not his faith. Walking by the Hôtel de Ville, with its statues of great men, Rasseyener, accusing Vilner of violating the Second Commandment, demands to know, “Who are these idols?” 

Rasseyner reprimands Vilner for the writer’s faith in a Europe that betrayed them: “Is your heart so constipated that you cry with wonder over these plastered dummies when all that’s left of the Vilna Gaon’s study house are its charred walls?” If it is, Rasseyner thunders, “all your scribbling is an abomination, muktseh mahmes miyes — untouchable.” 

It falls to Vilner to defend civilization in the shadow of Auschwitz and Treblinka against Rasseyner’s still-harrowing indictment: “You thought the world was striving to become better, but you discovered that it was striving for our blood.” The fate of the Jews is to be “hated from the start because we came into the world saying that certain things are forbidden.”  

Vilner laments, “The same catastrophe befell us all, but whereas you have a ready answer, we have not yet silenced all our doubts, and who knows if we ever will.” Also unsilenced is the krig, not the Reich’s vanquished Blitzkrieg but the Jewish quarrel, between these two men, both right and both wrong, arguing until the end of time. 

Vilner, Rasseyner, Grade, and all the dead and the living angle for the last word, the ultimate syllable, that can only be pronounced, if at all, by the endlessly tarrying Messiah.