Between the synagogue and the streets

On page 613 of this newly translated novel by acclaimed Yiddish writer Chaim Grade, a poet named Khlavneh says to the family of his fiancée, “And who said I abandoned Jewishness? I left the synagogue and went to the Jews in the street.”

Sons and Daughters was serialized in two New York–based Yiddish newspapers in the 1960s and ’70s. After Grade died in 1982, his widow, Inna Hecker, refused to allow the serialization to be translated and published as a novel. She died without a will in 2010, and only after Grade’s literary estate was transferred to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel could his final work be translated into English.

Grade himself, like his character Khlavneh, left the Lithuanian yeshiva where he spent eight years of his life (more than any other modern Jewish writer, according to Yiddish literature professor David Fishman). Certainly the tension between the expectations of the rabbis and the world of the Jew in the street is at the heart of all of Grade’s writing. Beyond that, tragically, is the fact that the European world of the yeshiva which Grade exited ceased to exist on that continent once the Second World War began.