Years ago, I binged on the works on Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Chaim Grade. I was excited to have the chance to read an English translation of Grade’s family saga.

As I read, it was hard not to think often about how these characters and their village would be wiped out in only a few years after the story’s setting, and this world lost. While this lends the reading a deep sadness, it doesn’t make the scenes, the story, and the characters any less vivid. I was especially taken with the way Grade assigns thoughts and feelings to the trees. It made me think of those trees today in the places where there were once shtetls. Do the trees remember the life around them that is now long gone?

Along with the beauty of Grade’s descriptions, there is harshness. Grade doesn’t hesitate to depict human pettiness and conflict within the family and the shtetl. And although he very much wanted to memorialize what he called the “great generation” he knew as a yeshiva boy in Vilna, a large portion of the book details the characters’ disagreements about how a Jew should live, and the conflicts between traditional and modern living. Toward the end of the book, there are chapters nearly entirely taken up with argumentation from Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen’s son, Naftali Hertz, and his younger daughter’s fiancé, Khlavneh (who some believe is a stand-in for Grade himself). These lengthy disquisitions make for challenging reading, and for me they just aren’t as interesting as the depictions of the characters’ lives.

Grade first published this in serial form in Yiddish newspapers and intended to adapt it into a novel to be published in two volumes. His work on the second volume was never completed, and it took years for others to transform the serialized writings into novel form. Even then, the book ends without a real completion point. The result is a flawed novel, one that I didn’t enjoy as much as, say, Grade’s Rabbis and Wives, or The Agunah, but one still worth reading.

3.5 stars, rounded to 4.

I was intrigued to find a Yiddish author whom I was not familiar with and if Eli Wiesel was a fan, then I figured it was worth trying. I loved the writing style and how it helped me form pictures in my head of both the village and the characters. Apparently this book comes from a serialized novel that was printed in the Yiddish paper. And, it reads like that. I confess that I have not finished it. I felt like it could have ended after the first few hundred pages and been enough. Or that it could be published in a few volumes.
It's fun to read because it is kind of like The Real Rabbis of ___ Town. You get a lot of juicy details and Grade keeps bringing in characters and new foibles.
The Yiddish words were either familiar to me or defined by context so if you're a Jewish reader, this will probably be fine for you. A non-Jewish reader, I'm not so sure. Unless they live in New York City, perhaps?

All in all, this is a fine addition to the genre of Yiddish storytelling. But, again, I would prefer it to be broken up into volumes.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. It's a keeper!

In Grade’s {Sons and Daughters} --composed in the 1960s and 1970s, but which languished due to his widow’s refusal to cooperate with publication as far back as 1982-- Ruth Waldman conveys in sprightly, yet never sentimental, translation Grade’s solid skills of structuring a long-form novel which capitalizes on its mechanism of parsing out an epic and recruiting its big ensemble.

At first, a reader may quail at the lack of a roster of those roaming hundreds of pages. (An e-galley has been consulted; its print version may be handier in assistance, as there will be a glossary of Yiddish and Hebrew terms, here partially completed.) Yet Grade latches on to a device which couples his brisk chapters in succession. He multiplies his cast, if in measured cadence. He’ll mention somebody’s relative and leave it at that. Eventually, a steady storyline cycles around through the omniscient creator to concatenate such-and-such; his or her role then joins this pageant. Therefore, one isn’t overwhelmed with confusion by such profusion.

Having access only to a proof, quoting directly can’t be done. Suffice to assure, Grade’s deft touches, such as his endearing anthropomorphic attribution of emotion and chatter to leaves, clouds, bookcases, candles and buildings now and then, only enhance the depth rendered the {Litvak} settlements, with their muddy lanes, humid brooks, brash markets and dimly lit small synagogues. Within unprepossessing surroundings, Grade conjures up masterful set-pieces.

Most action occurs in humdrum Morehdalye. Circa 1930, a congeries of siblings competes for their parents’ affections, denies the same, or flee abroad to a secular kibbutz, a Swiss library or Canada. They’ll disdain or sustain their inherited commitments. As shoe-salesman, skeptic, flirt, half-wit, poet, hunchback. Zionist, socialist, Bundist, Nietzschean, Bolshevik. None of these Jews stand as stock figures. If at a glance they risk reduction to sketchy stereotypes, according to gossipy suitors, cousins, foes and cuckolds, they reveal themselves real, sharp and rounded.

A moving encounter between a rabbi weary of Morehdalye’s in-fighting, his jaded congregants and their petty scrabble for success, with an aged, destitute counterpart surviving on his blunt faith enlightens the protagonist as to sincerity rather than sanctimony in common commitment to Torah. Grade filters this epiphany gradually and subtly. He avoids pitfalls of ginning up facile, caricatured burdens of Orthodox Judaism upon the poor. And any temptation of selling out this setting for Marxist rants about the oppressive system where generations scrabble in cycles of want under aristocracy dominated by Catholic nobility, now decimated by post-WWI realpolitik.

While social dynamics reverberate, they remain, as do the Gentiles themselves, in the shadows. Grade shows rather than tells of the divide that, as if ordained, certainly often dictated, all but {naturally} keeps these two factions segregated in their mundane routines. There’s a boycott, catcalls, if one soccer match between {goyim} and Jews; throughout, Grade sticks to his people.

Unfortunately, this impressive volume never reached full promise. A revised manuscript had been typeset, but Grade died before he could finish transforming its serial contents into a two-volume saga. For that, see {The Yeshiva}, (1977/8) which deserves reissue. It’s to be hoped that, given Grade’s wife’s passing away in 2010, Knopf may continue to offer English-language readers more of the literary legacy of an astute and canny articulator of two sides of his stark upbringing.

Despite his “quite probably the last great Yiddish novel” elegiac send-off with which Adam Kirsch introduces {Sons and Daughters}, Kirsch concludes by observing that while worldlier advocates of Yiddishkeit largely have either met with premature demise or have faded away, their traditional contingent today, in more than one urban diaspora, speaks in a venerable {mamaloshen} of their ancestors. Both Brothers Singer and Chaim Grade might applaud. Perhaps a future Nobel winner may emerge from those carrying on in a wry mother tongue spoken now, and over a millennium.

Grade early on left {shul} for the street. Whether inside or outside hallowed walls or dank cellars, his accomplishment endures. He summed himself up in a 1970 letter, as a {gravestone carver of my vanished world}. Yet, Grade engraves stolid sturdy plots elegantly, in this vivacious memorial.