Sons and Daughters - by Chaim Grade (Hardcover)

About the Book

""It is me the prophet laments when he cries out, 'My enemies are the people in my own home.'" The Rabbi ignored his borscht and instead chewed on a crust of bread dipped in salt. "My greatest enemies are my own family." Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen's world, the world of his forefathers, is crumbling before his eyes. And in his own home! His eldest, Bentzion, is off in Bialystok, studying to be a businessman; his daughter Bluma Rivtcha is in Vilna, at nursing school. For her older sister, Tilza, he at least managed to find a suitable young rabbi, but he can tell things are off between them. Naftali Hertz? Forget it; he's been lost to a philosophy degree in Switzerland (and maybe even a goyish wife?). And now the rabbi's youngest, Refael'ke, wants to run off to the Holy Land with the godless Zionists. Originally serialized in the 1960s and 70s, in New York-based Yiddish newspapers, Chaim Grade's Sons and Daughters is a precious glimpse of a way of life that is no longer-the rich, Yiddish culture of Poland and Lithuania that the Holocaust would eradicate. We meet the Katzenellenbogens in the tiny village of Morehdalye, in the 1930s, when gangs of Poles are beginning to boycott Jewish merchants and the modern, secular world is pressing in on the shtetl from all sides. It's this clash, between the freethinking secular life and a life bound by religious duty-and the comforts offered by each-that stands at the center of Sons and Daughters. With characters that rival the homespun philosophers and loveable rouges of Sholem Aleichem and I. B. Singer-from the brooding Zalia Ziskind, paralyzed by the suffering of others, to the Dostoevskian demon Shabse Shepsel-Grade's masterful novel brims with humanity and with heartbreaking affection for a world, once full of life in all its glorious complexity, that would in just a few years vanish forever"--

Book Synopsis

From "one of the great--if not the greatest--contemporary Yiddish novelists" (Elie Wiesel), the long-awaited English translation of a work, Tolstoyan in scope, that chronicles the last, tumultuous decade of a world succumbing to the march of modernity

"It is me the prophet laments when he cries out, 'My enemies are the people in my own home.'" The Rabbi ignored his borscht and instead chewed on a crust of bread dipped in salt. "My greatest enemies are my own family."

Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen's world, the world of his forefathers, is crumbling before his eyes. And in his own home! His eldest, Bentzion, is off in Bialystok, studying to be a businessman; his daughter Bluma Rivtcha is in Vilna, at nursing school. For her older sister, Tilza, he at least managed to find a suitable young rabbi, but he can tell things are off between them. Naftali Hertz? Forget it; he's been lost to a philosophy degree in Switzerland (and maybe even a goyish wife?). And now the rabbi's youngest, Refael'ke, wants to run off to the Holy Land with the Zionists.

Originally serialized in the 1960s and 1970s in New York-based Yiddish newspapers, Chaim Grade's Sons and Daughters is a precious glimpse of a way of life that is no longer--the rich Yiddish culture of Poland and Lithuania that the Holocaust would eradicate. We meet the Katzenellenbogens in the tiny village of Morehdalye, in the 1930s, when gangs of Poles are beginning to boycott Jewish merchants and the modern, secular world is pressing in on the shtetl from all sides. It's this clash, between the freethinking secular life and a life bound by religious duty--and the comforts offered by each--that stands at the center of Sons and Daughters.

With characters that rival the homespun philosophers and lovable rouges of Sholem Aleichem and I. B. Singer--from the brooding Zalia Ziskind, paralyzed by the suffering of others, to the Dostoyevskian demon Shabse Shepsel--Grade's masterful novel brims with humanity and heartbreaking affection for a world, once full of life in all its glorious complexity, that would in just a few years vanish forever.

Review Quotes

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR SONS AND DAUGHTERS

"An epic, an elegy, as unfinished as the Jews, and one of the world's great books." --Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus

"When millions of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews perished in the Holocaust, their stories, culture and way of life were wiped out with them. One survivor, the novelist Chaim Grade, made it his life's mission to keep their memory alive. . . . Now that [Sons and Daughters] is available in this superb translation by Rose Waldman, it can appeal to a new and universal audience. For those who would like a vivid picture of pre-war Jewish life in Europe; who appreciate a brilliant recreation of generational conflict in Jewish families, or who may be struggling with their own questions of faith, Grade's novel may truly resonate. Though the Holocaust itself is never mentioned in the book, it is felt on every page. In some sense, Sons and Daughters can be considered a Holocaust memorial, as the events it describes foreshadow the upcoming annihilation of Polish Jewry. It is this tragic awareness that animates Grade's questioning and demand for answers from the rabbinic establishment, from the Torah, and from God himself." --Yossi Newfield, Forward

"A great Yiddish novelist's grimly foreboding and fiercely alive final work. . . . In sustaining his densely detailed, closed-in, slowly advancing narrative over 700 pages, Grade embraces modernism on an epic scale . . . This long-awaited novel is a monumental achievement." --Kirkus (starred review)

"An enormous achievement. . . . Grade, who died in 1982, never alludes to the Holocaust, but its weight informs his elegiac portrait of a bygone life, in which each chapter feels like a fully realized story and the many characters are depicted in compassionate detail." --Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

About the Author

CHAIM GRADE (1910-1982) is "one of the 20th century's pre-eminent writers of Yiddish fiction" (The New York Times). Born in Vilna (now Vilnius), Lithuania, Grade fled to New York in 1948, after losing his first wife and his mother to the Holocaust. With his second wife, Inna, he lived in the Bronx for the remainder of his life. Grade is the author of numerous works of poetry and prose, including the novels The Yeshiva, The Agunah, Rabbis and Wives, and My Mother's Sabbath Days, and his beloved philosophical dialogue, My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner.

ROSE WALDMAN is the translator of S. An-sky's Pioneers: The First Breach and I. L. Peretz's Married. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Yiddish Book Center.