A “lost” novel by one of the last great Yiddish language writers, Chaim Grade, has been discovered in his papers in the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. And now, in what has been described as a literary publishing sensation, Sons and Daughters is to be published for the first time in English.
Sons and Daughters, translated by Rose Waldman, is a sprawling family saga about the Katzenellenbogens, living in Poland in the 1930s and facing all kinds of new challenges. Polish gangs are beginning to boycott Jewish merchants and the modern, secular world is pressing in on the shtetl from all sides. This clash between the freethinking secular life and a life bound by religious duty — and the comforts offered by each — stands at the centre of the novel.
Chaim Grade died in 1982 and bequeathed his literary archive to YIVO, which is celebrating its centenary this year.
YIVO spent 13 years working on Grade’s papers, a massive task of reconstruction, organisation, preservation, and digitisation. Sons and Daughters was published in serial form in the 1960s and 70s in New York-based Yiddish newspapers, but it was never published in its entirety, and fell from sight after the author’s death.
In 2016, while translating the novel, Waldman discovered that it had never been completed. One can only imagine the frustration of his readers who were denied a conclusion to the story.
But seven years later, after YIVO finished digitising all Grade’s material, Waldman discovered two pages showing Grade’s attempt to outline the ending. These pages have been included with a translator’s note at the end of the book.
Now the book is to be published at the end of March by the prestigious American publishing house, Alfred Knopf, part of the Penguin Random House group. Grade, by those familiar with his work, is spoken of as a masterful writer, “better than Isaac Bashevis Singer”, according to some.
Jonathan Brent, chief executive of YIVO, said it was “particularly fitting” that Grade’s last work was being published during YIVO’s centennial year.
He added: “The English language publication of Sons and Daughters, by Chaim Grade is a literary event of the highest magnitude in any language. Thirteen years of painstaking reconstruction of Grade’s literary estate by YIVO archivists have made this possible. Sons and Daughters shines with Grade’s immense literary talent and represents the culmination of his thinking about Jewish life, community, and tradition.”
In its publishers’ summation of the novel, Penguin Random House reports: “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.
“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 …with characters that rival the homespun philosophers and lovable rogues of Sholem Aleichem and I. B. Singer—from the brooding Zalia Ziskind, paralysed 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”.
All that’s required now is for Hollywood to come knocking.
