Review: David Stromberg on Chaim Grade

Chaim Grade’s novel Sons and Daughters, which was published serially in the New York Yiddish press in the 1960s and 70s, appears in English in 2025

Every national literature has its protagonists—and Chaim Grade (1910‑1982), a central figure of modern Yiddish literature, is a lesser-known character in a drama seen by few modern readers. Rooted in a deeply religious, often insular society—its earliest modern forms consisting of tales told orally by Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav in the early nineteenth century—Yiddish literature, like much of the world then, grew out of a conflict between tradition and modernity. Driven by a mix of heresy, enlightenment, socialism, and nationalism, millions of Yiddish-speakers emigrated from Eastern Europe all over the globe. Many retained their language, and their stories reflected both the world from which they came and the experiences they had as immigrants. The Holocaust—which Grade escaped as a refugee in Soviet Central Asia as the Nazis systematically murdered about half of Europe’s Yiddish-speakers—forced Yiddish literature to look beyond the immigrant experience and to reckon with an attempted genocide, making it the literature of both a tradition abandoned from within and a culture destroyed from without.

Grade was born in Vilna. His father saw himself as an enlightener, but died when he was a child. He was raised in poverty by his mother and sent to a series of yeshivas from the age of thirteen. He left religion at twenty-two to become a Yiddish poet. When the Nazis invaded Lithuania in 1941, Grade escaped to Soviet Central Asia, leaving behind his mother and first wife, believing women would not be harmed. They both died in the Holocaust. In 1945, he made his way back to Lithuania, then to Poland and Paris, where he met and married his second wife, Inna Hecker, before immigrating to New York in 1948 and settling in the Bronx. For most of his career as a poet and novelist, he was suspended over the chasm of the Holocaust, which spread between interwar Eastern Europe and postwar America—and between his father’s enlightened leanings and the orthodox education he received. This suspension is the most powerful sensation of his last novel, Sons and Daughters, which appeared serially in Yiddish from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, remained unfinished at the time of his death, and has just been translated and published in English for the first time.