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.