More than 40 years after the death of Chaim Grade – whom Elie Wiesel called “one of the great, if not the greatest, contemporary Yiddish novelists” – an English translation by Rose Waldman of Grade’s final, unfinished work has been published.
Born in Vilna, Lithuania, Grade resettled in New York after his wife and mother were murdered during the Holocaust. The author of The Yeshiva, The Agunah, and Rabbis and Wives, among other books, Grade wrote a series of stories in the 1960s and ’70s that appeared in Yiddish newspapers. He was converting them into a novel when he died in 1982.
“The writer inside of me,” he had confessed three years earlier, “is a thoroughly ancient Jew, while the man inside me wants to be thoroughly modern. This is my calamity, plain and simple, a struggle I cannot win.”
An unfinished masterpiece: The plot of Sons and Daughters by Chaim Grade
In his Sons and Daughters, Grade illuminates clashes between tradition and modernity in the shtetl culture of Poland and Lithuania in the 1930s through the experiences of two Orthodox rabbis, Sholem Schachne Katznellenbogen and Eli-Leizer Epstein, their wives, and their children.
Could it be, Sholem Schachne wonders, that children descended from workers “are not yet weary of their lineage, while my children, with generations and generations of scholarly ancestors, have already had their fill?” Eli-Leizer, his father-in-law, feels much the same way.
Penetrating, passionate, poignant, provocative, and funny, sympathetic to and critical of a world and a worldview about to be lost, a “talky” novel if ever there was one, Sons and Daughters is bursting at the seams with unforgettable characters, disquisitions, and disputations about Jewish laws, customs, and rituals; what Judaism allows and forbids; Spinoza, Nietzsche, secularism, assimilation, communism, and Zionism; the ties that bind all Jews; and whether Judaism “is the sort of business” from which a Jew can resign. What may be the last great Yiddish-language novel, Sons and Daughters is likely to be acclaimed a classic of modern literature.
We learn that enforcing Halacha – the rules, commandments, and practices that structure Jewish life – has become increasingly difficult for Katnellenbogen and Epstein. Once a pious town, Zembin was becoming a metropolis, “burning in the hellish fire of enlightenment, sin and indulgence,” according to Eli-Leizer.
On Friday evenings, the rabbi entered barber shops, and half-shaved Jewish customers fled before he could condemn them as Shabbos desecrators. When Eli-Leizer saw Jews scurrying to catch the bus headed to Bialystok carrying parcels and briefcases, he ordered his followers to surround the vehicle and link hands, while he stood in front of the engine.
“Call the police, do what you want, you can even run me over,” he told the driver. “As long as Jewish passengers board this bus on our sacred day of rest, I will not budge.” Eventually, the bus company opened a station just outside of town.
Challenges to the old ways kept on coming. Eli-Leizer declared a herem (“ban”) on Jews who attended the cinema on the Sabbath. When the cantor of a new beit midrash (“study hall”) composed his own tunes, formed a choir, wore a jacket with velvet lapels, and a top hat on the Sabbath and holidays, and congregants waited for hours to hear him sing, Eli-Leizer could only lament that they weren’t “davening [‘praying’] with fervor” or devoting their time to studying Torah.
“Rabbis don’t have the same authority they once did,” he acknowledged. “Nowadays, you sometimes have to feign deafness or blindness to avoid sparking a riot against the Torah.”
The rabbis also railed against Zionism. Sholem Schachne forbade Tilza, his eldest daughter, from exchanging a word with, let alone be courted by, Ezra Morgenstern, the new Hebrew teacher in Morehdalye’s Talmud Torah. Morgenstern, he sputtered, is “a degenerate,” who advises young men to go to Israel, live on a kibbutz, “where people don’t put on tefillin, don’t observe Shabbos or kosher or the laws of family purity – they don’t believe in God at all.”
Although he no longer ordered synagogues closed on Theodor Herzl’s “yahrzeit [‘anniversary of passing’] because he knew he wouldn’t be obeyed,” Eli-Leizer still claimed: “Nowhere in the holy texts does it imply that Jews must establish a country before the Messiah comes. In fact, many of our sages explicitly forbade it.”
That said, Refael’ke, the youngest son of Sholem Schachne and Hennal’e Katznellenbogen, and perhaps the most sympathetic character in Sons and Daughters, asks his father and grandfather, “Why must I hate the cities and towns of the Diaspora because I love the Land of Israel?” Like his forebears, Refael’ke declares, he “wanted to be a perfect Jew.” For this reason, he moved to Israel, to live on a kibbutz and help build the country.
Few non-Jews appear in Sons and Daughters. Nonetheless, Grade reminds his readers of the gathering storm. On market day, a group of young gentiles chase away Polish customers, begin threatening Jewish sellers, and a fight breaks out.
Thugs subsequently forbid Poles from doing business with Jews, while the Polish government raises taxes on Jews and forces them to close their shops on Sundays as well as Saturdays.
Asked why Morehdalye Jews have not mounted an organized resistance, Sholem Schachne replies: “The antisemites are waiting for Jews to fight back, so that they can justify pogroms.” His son, Refael’ke, the halutz, had fought back, but he had “completely abandoned the Torah by that time.”
Grade, alas, did not live long enough to write an ending to what he envisioned to be the first of two volumes. Might he, one wonders, have given the last word to Khlavneh Yeshurin, the fiancée of Bluma Rivtcha Katznellenbogen, who appears near the end of the novel?
“Songs and pouring out of the heart,” far more than laws, have kept Jews together, proclaims Khlavneh, a former musarnik [member of a Jewish spiritual and ethical movement], no longer devout. He adds to that “loyalty and goodness when taking part in another’s misfortune”; celebrating Passover as a holiday of freedom and spring; Shabbos itself, “the most beautiful poem, the one Jews cannot live without,” with its assertion “that people have a right to rest,” as well as “the hymns, the clothing and food, the fish and cholent, the afternoon nap, and the slow stroll with hands behind one’s back to Mincha prayers…”
The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin emeritus professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
- SONS AND DAUGHTERS: A NOVEL
- By Chaim Grade
- Alfred A. Knopf
- 678 pages; $35
