“Sons and Daughters” is quite probably the last great Yiddish novel. Chaim Grade, who was born in what is now Lithuania, in 1910, and spent the second half of his life in the Bronx, wrote it from the mid-nineteen-sixties through the mid-nineteen-seventies. It appeared in serial form in two New York-based Yiddish newspapers, first Tog-Morgn Zhurnal (Day-Morning Journal) and then Forverts (Forward). Even at the time, the audience for Yiddish fiction was disappearing: “It is lonely,” Grade once told an interviewer, “to have to publish a thousand copies of your own book, and if you sell five hundred of them, you are a best seller.”
Today those readers are all but gone, along with the writers who addressed them; Grade died in 1982. It’s not that no one speaks the language anymore. Yiddish, the mother tongue of Ashkenazi Jews in Europe for nearly a thousand years, is still spoken by about six hundred thousand ultra-Orthodox Jews mostly concentrated in America, Europe, and Israel. (In 1939, before the Holocaust and the passing of the American Jewish immigrant generation, there were about eleven million Yiddish speakers worldwide.) But, with some recent exceptions, these traditionalist Jews would not dream of using the language for literary fiction, which is a fundamentally modern and secular genre.
Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
The sharp opposition between Yiddish literature and Jewish tradition is, in fact, one of the major themes of “Sons and Daughters,” which will be published in English for the first time this month, by Knopf. Near the end of Grade’s story, which is set in what was then Poland in the early nineteen-thirties, the author introduces a character clearly based on himself as a young man—Khlavneh, a Yiddish poet from Vilna. When he visits the family of his future bride, Bluma Rivtcha, in Morehdalye, the village where most of the novel takes place, Khlavneh finds that his literary calling earns him two kinds of hostility.
His prospective father-in-law, Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen, is a rabbi who holds fast to traditional Jewish piety; for him a Yiddish poet means a freethinker, a secular Jew who has cast off Torah law. Bluma Rivtcha’s brother Naftali Hertz is another such modern Jew; he moved to Switzerland and married a Christian woman. Yet he, too, despises Khlavneh, not for being a writer but for having the bad taste to write in Yiddish “jargon.” “A jargon boy is a common person, an ignoramus, a boor,” Naftali Hertz thinks, furious at the idea of being related to one.
Inevitably, language lies at the heart of “Sons and Daughters,” a novel about a family struggling with the meaning of Jewishness in the twentieth century. The younger members of the Katzenellenbogen clan are certain that their forefathers’ way of life is no longer viable. In the highly nationalistic climate of interwar Poland, the Jews’ traditional survival strategies—avoiding politics, accepting blows without retaliation—have stopped working. Gangs of Poles boycott Morehdalye’s Jewish merchants, standing in front of their shops to prevent Christians from entering. A familiar poverty, whose textures Grade evokes on every page, threatens to yield to outright ruin.
Meanwhile, the Jews of Morehdalye are being touched by the same modern ideas and influences as the rest of the world. Bluma Rivtcha, who, in the book’s first section, seems destined for an arranged marriage to a rabbi, yearns for a career of her own. Her older sister, Tilza, who married a man her father chose, now regrets it and dreams of romantic love. Young men who, in earlier generations, would have become rabbis now hope to become professors or revolutionaries.
Grade shows that each of these possible Jewish futures speaks a different language. Naftali Hertz, the oldest Katzenellenbogen brother, ran away from his yeshiva and went to study at a secular university, in Switzerland; he now speaks German, the language of high culture. Refael’ke, the youngest brother, plans to be a Zionist pioneer in the land of Israel, where he will speak modern Hebrew. The budding revolutionary Marcus Luria throws his lot in with the Soviet Union, where Russian is the language of the future. And Shabse-Shepsel—the book’s most frightening character, a demonic clown who would fit in perfectly with Dostoyevsky’s Karamazovs—tries to establish a new life in America, where English reigns.
Amid all these competing tongues, Khlavneh’s—and Grade’s—loyalty to Yiddish also represents a particular vision of the Jewish future. Yiddish writers of his generation staked their work on the belief that the unique culture of Eastern European Jewry could, and deserved to, endure. It need not abolish itself in favor of any future. At the same time, it need not be enthralled to the past, whose decrepitude seems to have infected Morehdalye’s very plants: “Alongside the path, the willow trees drooped, their thick leafy tops sagging, barely stirring in the breeze, mumbling, as if in a trance, that they’d gotten lost somehow. How they yearned to be growing along the shore of a wide, happy river where cold, fresh water flowed.”
The alienation of children from the values and traditions of their parents is a central subject of modern Yiddish literature—most famously in Sholem Aleichem’s stories about the dairyman Tevye and his daughters. But a better reference point for understanding “Sons and Daughters” is Ivan Turgenev’s classic Russian novel “Fathers and Sons.” That book, about a middle-aged landowner whose son returns from college infected with the ideology of nihilism, was published in 1862, a century before Grade wrote his Jewish variation on the theme.
Indeed, “Sons and Daughters” could be considered triply belated. The struggles over religious belief and parental authority that preoccupy the young Katzenellenbogens in the nineteen-thirties would already have seemed passé to their Russian or French contemporaries. (Marcus Luria is obsessed with the amoral philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, but Naftali Hertz scornfully points out that he’s behind the times: German intellectuals had discarded Nietzsche before the First World War.) Grade, in turn, was writing about the nineteen-thirties from the perspective of the nineteen-sixties; and today’s reader encounters the story fifty years later still.
The long gap between writing and publication, which has given “Sons and Daughters” a quasi-mythical status among scholars of Yiddish literature, is owed, in part, to the fact that Grade died before he was able to turn the serialized narrative into what he’d intended to be a two-volume novel. The plotlines that remain unresolved at the conclusion of “Sons and Daughters” would almost certainly have been given a more satisfying dénouement in the second volume; as it is, the book stops without a resolution. After Grade’s death, his literary estate was controlled by his widow, Inna Hecker Grade, who resisted scholars’ and translators’ attempts to work on his papers. It was only after her death, in May of 2010, that Grade’s manuscripts—including galley proofs of a novel, typeset in Yiddish, that was clearly based on the serialized chapters in Tog-Morgn Zhurnal and Forverts—became accessible. Thus, the new book can finally appear in an excellent translation by Rose Waldman.
Today, of course, the problems of Jewish identity and destiny take very different forms than they did in the nineteen-thirties. This pathos of distance helps to give “Sons and Daughters” a meditative quality. Grade, a patient writer, lavishes description on trees and snow, beards and furniture; he is a connoisseur of light, whether it’s the glittering of sun on leaves and branches or the red glare of the electric lamp left on for Shabbat.
Equally distinctive is Grade’s tenderness toward religious tradition, which has few parallels in twentieth-century Jewish literature. Most of Grade’s fiction deals in one way or another with rabbis; at one stage, his title for this novel was “The Rabbi’s House.” The comparison sounds odd, but one might say that Grade was to the Lithuanian rabbinic establishment what Anthony Trollope was to the Church of England—a keen observer of the pride, envy, and careerism that kept clergymen hungering for advancement.
Yet he was never cynical about these all too human rabbis. In “Sons and Daughters,” the revolt of the younger generation against Judaism drives the plot, but Grade doesn’t forfeit his sympathy with the old men who are trying to keep Judaism alive. This is especially clear in the contrast between Marcus Luria and his father, the ascetic sage Zalia Ziskind. The son is a mere pawn of trendy ideologies, while the father is a true tzaddik—a man so conscious of the suffering of human beings, and even of animals, that he can think of nothing else.
The young Grade surely never expected that rabbis and beis medrashim (study houses) would become his great subject. He was once a yeshiva student himself, but in his early twenties he rebelled against religion. What made Grade return to the synagogue—in his fiction, if not in life—was the Holocaust, which virtually annihilated the religious culture in which he had grown up. The rebel against Jewish tradition was now almost the only one left to become its elegist—the “gravestone carver of my vanished world,” as he wrote in a letter, in 1970.
The Holocaust lies outside the scope of “Sons and Daughters,” which never alludes to the fate in store for all of its characters. But it is the novel’s inescapable background, as it was the central fact of the author’s life. Grade was born and raised in Vilna, a major Jewish center that was known as “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.” When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, in June, 1941, there were some seventy thousand Jews in Vilna; by the end of the war, only a few hundred were still alive. Most of the dead were shot and buried in mass graves in Ponary, a forest outside the city. Presumably among them were Grade’s first wife, Frume-Libe, and his mother, Vella.
Grade survived by fleeing east to the Soviet Union, where he spent the war as a refugee in Central Asia. In his memoir, “My Mother’s Sabbath Days,” he writes about returning to Vilna in 1945 and finding everyone he knew gone, the synagogues in ruins, the door to his childhood home covered in thick spiderwebs. By 1948, he had made his way to New York with Inna, his second wife. Only then did he begin to write the fiction for which he is best known today. (Before the war he had been celebrated as a poet, and he continued to write poetry to the end of his life, but little of it has been translated into English.)
Though he lived in America for thirty-four years, Grade never entered American literary life the way his great rival Isaac Bashevis Singer managed to do. Partly that is because Singer spoke English and Grade didn’t, making him a less effective advocate for his own work. But it has more to do with their different ways of conceiving their task as Yiddish writers after the Holocaust. For Singer, the Holocaust confirmed what had always been his basic intuition about the modern world—that it is demonic and grotesque. His lurid fables of sexual obsession and metaphysical bewilderment reflected modernity in ways American readers could intuitively grasp, even if they knew little or nothing about Judaism as a religion.
Grade, by contrast, felt responsible for preserving the memory of the Jewish tradition in which he had been raised. This was the austere, intellectually demanding faith of the Lithuanian misnagdim (the “opponents” of Hasidism), and especially of the Musar school, which taught the believer to scrutinize his own conscience ruthlessly. Grade’s portrait of this faith can be quite subversive in its own way: consider Tsemakh Atlas, the protagonist of his long novel, “The Yeshiva,” a rabbi whose religious strictness increases as his actual belief drains away. But Grade also wanted to show the beauty of this Judaism: its humility and moral delicacy, its hatred of cruelty, its ability to reach the sublime in the midst of material poverty and wretchedness.
In “Sons and Daughters,” traditional Judaism appears to be on the road to extinction, besieged on every side by the forces of modernity. The greatest irony for twenty-first-century readers is that, today, ultra-Orthodox Judaism is not just alive but thriving. In Israel and America, tens of thousands of Jewish men spend their lives studying the same texts, saying the same prayers, even wearing the same kinds of clothing as Sholem Shachne and Zalia Ziskind. Instead, what disappeared was Yiddish, along with the secular, Eastern European Jewish future in which Chaim Grade and so many others placed their hopes. We can be thankful that it survives, in all its human complexity and passion, in the pages of his book. ♦
This is drawn from the introduction to a new edition of “Sons and Daughters.”
