Review of Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters, transl. Rose Waldman

Grade’s Polish Memorial: “The Last Great Yiddish Novel”?

A wonderful translation of an excellent if unfinished work.

Let us begin with what’s usually relegated to the final paragraphs, because for me this is the main event. With Sons and Daughters, Rose Waldman has managed to square the circle, crafting a translation of a big, fat, Yiddish novel that reads smoothly and without hiccup in English, but with all the heymishe verbiage and concepts you would expect.

Why is the translation so good? One could dilate on the personal qualities and qualifications of the translator (a Hasid with an MFA, who has translated two novels before, by Ansky and Peretz); or emphasize her collaboration with a skilled editor. But the lesson I wish to take away is, at least for this reader and sometime translator, the victory of practice over theory for a readable translation. Her approach to every common crux of Yiddish translation appears to have been “whatever works” – and it did. Jewish terms? Sometimes in English (benediction), sometimes not (aliya). Loshn-kodesh? Sometimes transliterated (in Polish Ashkenazish, nice), sometimes translated. Rabbinic references? Sometimes footnotes, sometimes not. (There’s a glossary in the back.)

To crib an idiom from the novel, the translation worked out, like a good cholent and a lucky omen. The renderings of Grade’s lyrical descriptions of everyday natural wonders are particularly tender and beautiful, granting relief and contrast with frequent Gemara references, sardonic put-downs, and erotic trysts.

Waldman’s achievement is important for its own sake, because translation is an under-regarded creative act in its own right, and her dexterous navigation of the constant questions of Yiddish translation is an example to follow. But it’s also a shepherding of an important work of Yiddish fiction into the Jewish-English literary world, accompanied by the expected, common tropes of the audience’s reception – vanished world, beards-and-peyes, and, like clockwork, the “last”: “last great Yiddish novel,” to use the words of Adam Kirsch in his introduction.

It might very well be last, or the last of a kind of monumental, realist novelistic genre. But to call it *the* last raises questions for two reasons. The first is that, at the very least, if we are giving awards for Last Yiddish Novel, there is some stiff competition. Besides Grade, there’s work by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Chava Rosenfarb (whose three-volume masterwork, of monster length, The Tree of Life is both available in translation and actually finished, unlike Grade’s unfinished “Sons and Daughters”), Eli Shechtman, and other masters (Mendel Mann comes to mind) from the 60s and 70s.

Another question: What is it about Yiddish novels, and about this novel in particular, which led Kirsch to make this claim? It’s not just a kvetch on my part. This claim helps illuminate the very real (and great) strengths of the work, but also necessitates an honest look at the weaknesses, or at least the peculiarities that need some to crown it with greatness (rather than just calling it a well written, well translated, and page-turning novel).

The obvious reason for this claim is that Grade’s novel is memorializing a world that was exterminated in the Holocaust. Except that itself isn’t quite right, as Kirsch details accurately in the introduction. Grade’s calling as a writer is pithily expressed by Justin Cammy in his article on Grade in the YIVO Encyclopedia: “Through depictions of religious scholars caught up in their own vanities and ambitions, folk superstition, earthy, practical women, eager merchants, and fiery revolutionaries, Grade emerged as the most important prose elegist of Vilna Jewry, one who reveled in mining its social complexities.” As a writer, we might dub him with the same moniker he carried as a yeshiva-bokher: Chaim Vilner – he is Vilna’s.

Thus it comes as a surprise, at least to this reader, that the novel is set not in Vilna, or Lithuania, but in Poland of the 1930s, some of it in fictionalized small towns, some in the large cities of Jewish Poland. I don’t know why this is the case, and this is not addressed either in Kirsch’s introduction or the translator’s afterword.

Rather than speculate on the reasons, I will merely record the observation that translating Grade’s usual mise-en-scene from Vilna to Poland does not mean a shift in his philosophical preoccupations. The fate of Orthodoxy in the modern world, the plight of the rabbi whose children leave frumkeit, the puzzling choice of a “jargon poet” to write poetry, rather than study Torah; and to do so in Yiddish – all these are discussed, and re-discussed. But in the Polish setting, it’s less historical-autobiographical and more narrative-philosophical, less ethnographic and more serial.

In his introduction, Kirsch expresses gratitude “that [Yiddish] survives, in all its human complexity and passion, in the pages of this book.” That’s a lot to load onto a novel. Rather than Grade’s work being what it is (an expert portrayal of family drama; a depiction of religious struggles, compromises, heroic virtue, and hypocrisy; a brooding on oncoming catastrophe), we are asked to see all of Yiddish civilization in Sons and Daughters.

Yes, there is so much here, but it’s at a particular angle that it would be inaccurate and peremptory to take as a 360-degree view. To mention a few alternative vistas: the daughters of the Sons and Daughters are clearly second fiddle to their husbands, fathers, brothers, and brothers-in-law. The female characters are certainly well rounded and full people, but in a male setting. To expect feminism from Grade is unfair, but, again, this is why we should not take a novel as a universal memorial. We can compare Isaac Bashevis Singer and Grade in this regard. While the two writers are often taken as opposite poles of the Yiddish novelist sphere — the one mystical, demonic and bawdy; the other, well, Litvish in its internal debates — Grade’s novel is also full of sex, both explicit and implicit, and visions of death. Women are objects in both.

In his other works, too, Grade engages in diverse depictions of the strata, both economic and social, of Eastern European Jewish society. We see that here in Sons and Daughters, but less so, because, grosso modo, this is a rabbinic tale. (There are welcome departures. Naftali Hertz, a rabbi’s child who turns apikoros in Switzerland, brings a breath of fresh air into the narrative with his mountainside revelations and jealous reveries, far from the sometimes-suffocating Polish Jewish dining rooms and beit-din-chambers. You will learn more than you thought possible about Italian wallpaper design.)

As a depiction of interwar Orthodoxy and its struggles with modernity, Sons and Daughters is rendered in loving detail, every Talmudic reference in place and every Shabbos meal arrayed on the best china. Despite Kirsch’s nostalgia, however, it is not the “alive and thriving” ultra-Orthodox Judaism of the US that is depicted here, and Lakewood kolel yungeleit (let alone Brooklyn Hasidim!) are neither “studying the same texts, saying the same prayers, [or] even wearing the same kinds of clothing” as the novel’s characters. Let the Polish Jews of Grade’s novel have their milieu, and enjoy it for what it is. But a full memorialization, to the extent such a thing is possible, requires a rounded appreciation of Grade’s work, and that of his contemporaries, both before and after the war.

A great novel is also called that for its length. Not just of high quality, Sons and Daughters is also more than 600 pages long. It doesn’t flag, and there is precious little filler. However, since half of the novel was written as newspaper columns for various publications in the 60s and 70s, it might not be surprising that the plot is – episodic. I will not spoil the reader’s fun by revealing the contents of what Waldman discovered in Grade’s outline of the novel’s planned end. Whether this ending is a satisfying conclusion to the twists and turns of the narrative is for other readers to judge.

What will stay with me is the figure of Zalia Ziskind, an ascetic, who is addicted to reading news fillers in Polish Jewish newspapers about unusual tragedies. Doom-scrolling in a paper age, he asks why God would bring such suffering to the world. No one has an answer for him, not the poet, not the rabbis, not the sons or the daughters. What remains are the Swiss Alps, on one end of the continent, and the forested Polish hills on the other — and this novel to bridge the two, thanks to Grade and Waldman.