Written in New York, and originally published in serialised form between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, Chaim Grade’s epic Yiddish-language novel about the life of a rabbinical family in 1930s Poland has never been produced in book form, until now. In part this is due to the barriers erected by Grade’s widow Inna, who denied access to her husband’s work and regularly decried the efforts of his translators. Inna’s death in 2010 changed that. Sons and Daughters, in Rose Waldman’s excellent translation, is one of the fruits of an evolving Grade renaissance.
Two sons of the long-suffering rabbi Sholem Shachne have emigrated to Switzerland and America, another is a destructive meshuggenah; his youngest plans to make aliyah. Reform Judaism, communism, secular Yiddish culture, Nietzsche and, most sinisterly, Polish antisemitism, all contribute to the sense of a world in collapse.
Yet none of the novel’s large cast of characters senses the impending coup de grâce understood by Grade and his readers.
Grade once claimed that he wrote “from the perspective of a current yeshivah boy, not a former one”, even though, having been brought up in a religious Vilna family, he had cast aside religion.
What emerges in this novel is a deeply affectionate and detailed portrait of a pious community in turmoil: “All the congregants sighed along, sang along, swayed along, as when the wind rocks the thick branches of trees all the way up to their crowns, till the entire forest is roiling and its array of leaves murmur with the muteness of the twisted bark and the buried, centuries-old roots.” Inna dismissed the Nobel prize-winning Yiddish novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer and his readers in harsh terms: “I profoundly despise all those who eat the bread in which the blasphemous buffoon has urinated,” she said. But Singer’s closer connection to modernity won an audience more easily than Grade’s nostalgic recreations. Grade’s elegant, evocative writing also pales next to the grittier prose of Bashevis’s older brother IJ Singer or the descriptive genius of Chava Rosenfarb. Grade’s descriptions of women, either battle-axes or sex objects, are particularly weak: “She had small, taut breasts; strong, masculine arms; and svelte legs with such rounded knees they aroused all men.”
Yet Grade, a product of his time, bears eloquent witness to a lost world that comes to life in the closely observed, and assimilated, language and rituals of his dramatis personae. In this he is more successful than the Nobel Prize-winning Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk, who in her 2014 The Books of Jacob – a comparably large scale attempt to reproduce the eastern European Jewish world of the 17th century – was buried under the rubble of her research.
The final part of Sons and Daughters is dominated by an ardent debate on the nature of Judaism between Khlavneh Yeshurin – fiancé of Rabbi Shachner’s daughter Bluma Rivtcha, a Yiddish poet clearly based on Grade himself – and Naftali Hertz, the rabbi’s oldest son, who has abandoned the life of the yeshivah to study philosophy in Switzerland where, unknown to his family, he has married a gentile and dedicated his intellectual life to one of Judaism’s greatest apostates, Spinoza.
Hertz despises Khlavneh for writing in the jargon of Yiddish, yet he himself yearns nostalgically for the Torah-bound community he has rejected.
Grade, via his alter ego, exposes Herz for the hypocrite he is, understanding that, more than Torah laws and rules, “it’s the songs and the pouring out of the heart that have kept Jews together, and still do”.
Sons and Daughters by Chaim Grade, translated by Rose Waldman
Alfred A Knopf
