The Best Novel of the Year Was Written in Yiddish — Seven Decades Ago

Isaac Bashevis Singer reckoned in his Nobel Prize banquet speech that Yiddish, the lingua franca of Eastern European Jewish civilization, had become, after Auschwitz, the language of ghosts. Chaim Grade’s novel “Sons and Daughters” shows it to be also the language of Lazarus. Translated by Rose Waldman, the epic, a rambunctious requiem, is set in the early 1930s but sprawls across borders and generations to arrive as a literary landmark in 2025.Grade was born in 1910 at Vilnius, sometimes called the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” for the vitality of its Jewish life. Born into an observant home, he spent his early years at yeshivot — he studied with no less an authority than the Chazon Ish — but the Muse of secular poetry beckoned. By 1934 he had joined an avant-garde cadre of young poets known as Yung Vilne, or “Young Vilna.” The Holocaust would claim the lives of his mother and wife. Grade survived the Nazi onslaught in the wilderness of the Eurasian Steppe, aided by a Soviet passport and membership in the Union of Soviet Writers. He would marry his second wife, Inna Hacker, at Moscow in 1945, and they moved to New York in 1948. Their marriage was a fraught affair, and while they spoke Russian to each other, the only language in which Grade wrote was Yiddish. Grade’s full archive only opened when Inna died in 2010.“Sons and Daughters,” which the critic Adam Kirsch in an introduction calls “the last great Yiddish novel,” was written in the 1960s and 1970s in serial form for two Yiddish newspapers based at New York — the Tog-Morgn Zhurnal and the Forvets. Even at more than 700 pages, ‘Sons and Daughters” is unfinished. Mr. Kirsch reckons that “Grade was to the Lithuanian rabbinic establishment what Anthony Trollope was to the Church of England.”The novel centers on the Katznellenbogen clan, whose patriarch, Shalom-Shachne, is the rabbi of the poor shtetl of Morehdalye. The plot, such as it is — this is a book packed with incidents where it seems like nothing really happens — turns on conflicts between Rabbi Katznellenbogen and his extended family, each of whom feel modernity’s pull from different directions. One son is pulled toward philosophy, another to Zion, a third to Red Moscow. Much of the pleasure of “Sons and Daughters” comes from characters sketched briefly but indelibly. There is a hunchback prodigy who becomes so consumed by sadness that his genius deserts him. An austere scholar loves his wife in “his pious way, the same way he washes his hands before he eats bread.” A young man who has married a non-Jewish woman falls upon her “with the thirst of the desert wanderers upon the daughters of Moab.” Any echoes of the writer Shalom Aleichem’s stories of Tevye the dairyman and his daughters are superficial. Grade’s take is all his own. He loves and bristles at the world of Orthodoxy as only a former yeshiva boy could. Rabbi Shalom Shachne wonders of his children, “Were they disobeying him because he’d slapped them too frequently, or because he hadn’t slapped them enough?” Another character exclaims: “A new fad — a Jewish country.” Grade possesses an unteachable touch for language. A man has the “face of a soused herring.” A woman projects such sadness that it is as if “the seven days of shiva had dressed themselves up.” A rabbi holds a “consultation with the ringlets of his gray beard.” A young wife despairs that what she lacks in her remote husband is “the Song of Songs.” An innkeeper’s visage is “wrinkled like the fruit from last year’s Sukkos.”If Marcel Proust chronicled Paris’s demi-monde, Grade is a loving — if always clear-eyed — observer of the galaxy of Eastern European Jewry on the eve of extinction. A scholar is so brilliant that it is “as if the Torah of Sinai had again been given, this time into his hands.” A wayward son strokes his head “as if to send his father regards from his yarmulke too.” A beard hangs so stiffly that it appears to be “made of porcelain like a seder plate.”The Sun spoke to a scholar of Yiddish literature, Ruth Wisse, who reckons that Grade’s “amazing portraiture” is put in the service of a historical project — to render a murdered world. She lauds the care he lavishes on the life of women, an imaginative achievement for a writer who spent his early years in the single-sex austerity of houses of study. Professor Wisse, though, offers a scoop — that her favorite works of Grade, his “furious” post-war poems, await translation.

The Best Novel of the Year Was Written in Yiddish — Seven Decades Ago

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