(JTA) — Sixty years after he first began serializing it in the Yiddish press, and 42 years after publisher Alfred A. Knopf acquired the book, “Sons and Daughters” — the last novel by the late, great Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade — is landing in bookstores this week.
To call it “long-awaited” is an understatement.
How the novel came to be published in English translation is a story of family intrigue, literary detective work and dogged creativity on the part of its translator and editors.
The result, a sprawling 600-plus-page book about a rabbi in 1930s Lithuania and the different paths taken by his children, is “quite probably the last great Yiddish novel,” the critic Adam Kirsch writes in an introduction. Dwight Garner, in a New York Times review, calls it “a melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny.”
“We could not have let this die. It had to be out there,” said the book’s translator, Rose Waldman, in an interview. “It had to be available to the English speaker.”
Waldman was hired in 2015 to translate a manuscript that had already taken a circuitous route from Grade’s typewriter to the cluttered rooms of his Bronx apartment to the limbo of probate law. Grade, who died in 1982 at 74, was highly regarded — although never as widely known to English readers as rival Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. What was perhaps his best-known book — “Rabbis and Wives,” drawing on his memories of the pious, Jewish, vanished Vilna of his youth — appeared in English only the year he died. A memoir, “My Mother’s Sabbath Days,” was published four years later.
In 1983, Knopf signed a contract with Grade’s widow, Inna Hecker Grade, for what was then called “The Rabbi’s House.” Inna, notoriously protective of her husband’s legacy, worked with a translator and editors on a few chapters of the book but then retreated into obstinate silence. Until her death in 2010, she rebuffed publishers and scholars who sought access to Grade’s manuscripts, correspondence and works in progress.
The Grades left no heirs, and in 2013 the Bronx public administrator named the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel as executors of the Grade estate, and YIVO inherited his papers. The ensuing treasure hunt led to the discovery, in 2014, of a 148-page Yiddish galley that Waldman assumed was the finished novel later to be called “Sons and Daughters.” Instead, as she realized after a year’s work on the translation, the novel was incomplete. According to material uncovered by Yehuda Zirkind, a graduate student at Tel Aviv University, she had been working on what Grade had planned as the first volume of a two-volume work.
Piecing together the second volume involved a dive into the YIVO archive, where Waldman found more chapters that Grade had serialized in the Yiddish newspapers Tag-Morgn Zhurnal and Forverts between 1965 and 1976. Waldman got to work translating these installments and knit them together into the just-published opus.
The unfinished work
A happy ending? Not quite – in fact, “Sons and Daughters” had no ending at all. Grade had left the saga unfinished at his death. Eight years after first seeing the original manuscript, Waldman was poring through YIVO’s digitized archive when she found a typed outline by Grade sketching his ideas for a conclusion. She includes those pages in a translator’s note.
Finished or not, “Sons and Daughters” is a vivid, Tolstoyan examination of what Kirsch calls “a family struggling with the meaning of Jewishness in the twentieth century.” The pious small-town rabbi, Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen, is tormented by his children’s choices: One son has fled to Switzerland where he studies secular philosophy and marries a Christian woman; another son yearns to join the Zionist, secular “halutzim” settling the land of Israel. His daughters too seem to have inhaled the fumes of modernity, and struggle under the expectations of arranged marriages and circumscribed lives as the wives of rabbis.
Grade (pronounced GRAH-duh), whose mother and first wife were killed by the Nazis, fled his native Vilna in 1941 and eventually made it to Moscow, where he met Inna. The two arrived in New York in 1948. Although Grade had left Orthodoxy to pursue a literary career, he couldn’t help but circle back to a world that was obliterated during the Holocaust. In recreating that world — and showing how it was under pressure from modernity and antisemitism even before the rise of Nazism — Grade was determined to, as he wrote a friend, “immortalize the great generation that I knew.”
On Wednesday I Zoomed with Waldman and the book’s editor, Todd Portnowitz. We spoke about the challenges of translating an admired stylist, how Grade’s memories shaped his writing, and why the story of a Jewish family fractured by faith and possibility still resonates today.
The interview was edited for length and clarity.
I want to ask about translating a writer of Grade’s stature, but first, Rose, I want to ask how you came to be a Yiddish translator in the first place.
Rose Waldman: I’m a native Yiddish speaker, because I was born Hasidic. Yiddish is my first language. I started doing translating in grad school, and I loved it, and I just got into it.
Translating the work of Chaim Grade was kind of a dream. When they offered this to me, I couldn’t believe it. I had actually been running after Jonathan Brent [the executive director of the YIVO Institute], asking, “What’s happening with the estate?” And then, out of the blue, they just offered this to me. I feel very privileged.
Are there particular challenges in trying to capture Grade’s voice?
Waldman: This is not just with Grade, but with every Yiddish writer, the loshn-koydesh, the Hebrew words, are used very often interchangeably. And then how do you show that in English? Grade was very learned. He had the yeshiva background, and he uses a lot of these words and Biblical verses. I tried to retain the flavor and, in some cases, we ended up using the Hebrew words, transliterated.
But I will say that Grade’s Yiddish is very familiar to me. He has what we would call in our community a haimish Yiddish, homie or like one of us. Even if he was not Hasidic — he was a Litvak — his Yiddish felt very, very comfortable to me.
The book had to be pieced together, in a sense, from the original manuscript, serialized chapters in the Yiddish press, perhaps from Grade’s notes. Todd, what’s the challenge in editing a book like this and making sure it’s coherent and has its own integrity?
Todd Portnowitz: You know, many editors touched this over the years. Ash Green bought it back in the ’80s. It migrated over to Altie Karper, who was running Schocken, and then came to me in about 2022, when Rose had already produced a full translation. They reached out to me because I had done lots of translation work. I don’t know Yiddish, but they thought maybe I can take a look at this draft with Rose and just polish it up.
For people who aren’t familiar with what an editor does, can you explain the process and your working relationship with Rose and the text?
Portnowitz: Rose and I kept in close touch over the last two years, working on the pages together. I approached it the way I’d approach what I call the third draft of a translation. You’ve got that first draft where you’re sticking with the original and just kind of getting it on the page. The second draft is where you’re reworking the language, but keeping the original present so that you can make sure everything’s accurate. And then the third draft is where you cut the umbilical cord with the original text and make sure it really works in English. I just gave Rose as many suggestions as possible about how to turn sentences around, to keep it flowing.
It was really just a pleasure to become part of the Grade story. I went in as a novice and came out really embracing him, his literature, his whole project.
Waldman: I will say that without Todd’s editing, there is no way it would have looked close to this. It became so much more smooth and so much more beautiful.
Why is Grade important? Why would you suggest a reader in 2025 read this book written in the 1960s and ’70s about the world of the 1930s?
Waldman: All the stuff that he writes about is still really relevant today — specifically, of course, for the religious Jewish community, because they’re struggling with the exact same issues that the characters and his stories are struggling with. But it’s also all about family, and when your kids go off in different directions, or when things happen that you didn’t expect, and then just the typical universal issues: sicknesses and sibling rivalry and the uncle you don’t like.
Of course, the antisemitism trope is still relevant. You think, okay, so that was the 1930s and we’re living in a whole different world. We’re not really.
Portnowitz: Strip away Lithuania, Judaism at that time, take away all the context, and you’d still have a book about human relations, interpersonal relations, children going in their own directions, trying to make a buck and trying to find spiritual answers. I think they’re all kind of looking for fulfillment in their own way.
Zionism is also a big part of the book. The youngest son wants to go to Palestine. And the way it was looked at during that time before the war was very different than it is now. You know, the father is dismayed that his son is going to go there.
Waldman: I think he’s also very good at reading people and finding little things that make some people tick. His descriptions of people can be really funny. You look at it and you think, “Oh, I know someone like that.”
How do you think the Holocaust shapes Grade’s approach to the material? Again, he’s writing 30 years after the fact, when he knows the ultimate fate of these communities, even though that is not mentioned in the book. Does that awareness emerge in the writing?
Waldman: When I started translating it, I was sure that this novel ends with the Holocaust and with the characters being led off to Auschwitz. Of course, it doesn’t end that way. But the more I got into it, the more I realized that Grade was never — although I can’t know for sure — going to mention the Holocaust. But the knowledge of what is to come is very much there. It has real weight in the book.
“Sons and Daughters” is about a world that was lost completely. Many of the post-Holocaust books are about the Holocaust, how people died, and the miracles of those who survived. “Sons and Daughters” is about how they lived, not how the Jews died. No one does it as beautifully as Grade. And I think for that alone, it’s worth reading.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
