Discovery of lost pages brings to light ‘the Last Great Yiddish Novel’

Altie Karper had been waiting for the call for years.

An editor at a Knopf imprint, she had long wanted to publish an English translation of the last novel by Chaim Grade, one of the leading Yiddish authors of the 20th century.

Grade was less well known than Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, but was held in greater esteem in some literary quarters. He’d written the novel in question through the 1960s and 1970s, and published it in installments in New York’s Yiddish newspapers. But he died in 1982 without publishing a final Yiddish version.

The following year, his mercurial widow, Inna Hecker Grade, signed a contract with Knopf to publish an English-language translation. To do that, Knopf needed the original pages in Yiddish, with Grade’s changes and corrections. But Inna, who held his papers, put up roadblocks. She offered to translate, but then went silent, rebuffing entreaties from two editors over the years and refusing to consent to another translator. Karper took over the project in 2007, with no success.

And then, in 2010, Inna died without any children or a will, leaving behind a morass of 20,000 books, manuscripts, files and correspondence in their cluttered Bronx apartment. The Bronx public administrator turned the papers over to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel.

The galleys, if they existed, were somewhere in there.

Finally, in 2014, Karper received a call from Jonathan Brent, the executive director of the YIVO Institute. It was the call.

“We found it!” he said.

In the small world of Yiddish literature, the discovery of the pages had the startling impact of a lost Hemingway manuscript suddenly turning up.

“I nearly passed out,” said Karper, who retired in December as the editorial director of Schocken Books, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday. “This was the Holy Grail.”

In March, the 649-page novel, Sons and Daughters, painstakingly translated by Rose Waldman over a period of eight interrupted years, and edited for another two, will be published by Knopf.

Karper hailed the book as a masterpiece. In the book’s introduction, literary critic Adam Kirsch said Sons and Daughters was “probably the last great Yiddish novel.” Giving it more of a contemporary spin, Brent said the novel, set in the turbulent period between the two world wars, distills “conflicts that still bedevil the Jewish people today.”

The novel tells the story of Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen, the Orthodox rabbi of the imagined Lithuanian shtetl of Morehdalye, whose three sons and two daughters are drifting away from the Jewish traditions he venerates. His children are variously drawn to the unfettered temptations of a more secular life — entrepreneurial success, sexual fulfillment, Zionist pioneering in Palestine and cultural freedom in the United States.

While the rabbi’s heartbreak may sound familiar to lovers of the humorous Sholem Aleichem stories that were turned into the popular musical Fiddler on the Roof, the tone of Sons and Daughters is less folksy, and the stakes seem higher.

“Sholem Aleichem writes about that world like Mark Twain,” Karper said. “Chaim Grade writes about it like Dostoyevsky. And hanging over the novel is the knowledge that in 10 years, these people will all be gone.”

Todd Portnowitz, who took over the book’s editing from Karper, reached for another Russian colossus to describe the Grade novel, calling it “Tolstoyan in scope,” because it depicts so many layers — religious, economic, romantic and cultural — of that bygone world. The novel portrays the hubris-tinged rivalries among rabbis, the enmity between different types of Orthodoxy, the momentous concerns around life cycle events like engagement and marriage and the backdrop of food markets, clothing shops and ramshackle wooden synagogues.

The writing is often straightforward and unadorned but there are evocative touches on every page and many comic moments. Portnowitz was particularly taken with “the childlike innocence of Grade’s natural descriptions — of the Narew river, the snow, the dark, the trees. I’d add that I think part of that innocence is that he’s seeing these landscapes, from his home in the Bronx, through the gauze of memory, through the eyes of his younger self, with a kind of nostalgic glow.”

Grade describes one rabbi this way: “A tall, slim man, dour and cold, he smelled of the dust of crumbling texts in a vacant synagogue.” A seedy men’s clothing shop in Bialystok, he writes, sold “off-the-rack clothing in cheap fabrics, sewn by third-rate tailors,” its salesmen instructed that, if a jacket doesn’t fit a customer, “you grab him a jacket two sizes smaller, yanking and pulling in such an artful way that the armpits don’t feel too tight and the sleeves don’t look too short.”

Throughout, the reader senses the wry affection Grade felt for his lost world, its rogues as well as its personages. Waldman recalled that Grade once said that, although he was not a religious man, he felt he had been saved from the Holocaust to write about this world.

Almost as atypical as the novel is the saga of its author and how his novel came to be published more than 40 years after his death. Born in 1910, Grade grew up in Vilna, Lithuania (Vilnius in Lithuanian), then a hub of Jewish intellectual and cultural life. He attended yeshivas that were known for their emphasis on rigorous ethical conduct — a counterpoint to the Hasidic schools, with their emphasis on spirited engagement with the Torah.

As a teenager, he began writing poetry and was a founder of Yung Vilne, a circle of avant-garde poets and artists. When the Germans attacked Soviet-occupied Lithuania, he fled eastward. His wife and mother lingered behind, assuming, as many did then, that the German invaders would not harm women. They did not survive.

In Russia, Grade married Inna, and they emigrated to the United States in 1948. Settling into an apartment near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, Grade turned out a half-dozen novels that vividly depicted life in Eastern Europe, including The Agunah, The Yeshiva and Rabbis and Wives, as well as a collection of three novellas and a posthumously published memoir, My Mother’s Sabbath Days. Elie Wiesel praised him as “one of the great — if not the greatest — of living Yiddish novelists.”

After his death in 1982, publishers and scholars who wanted to track down Grade’s manuscripts and correspondence were almost always turned away by Inna. (In a letter, Grade once told her, “consciously or unconsciously your goal in life is to torture and scare me.”) Grade’s reputation began to fade.

Despite the fact that Sons and Daughters was never published as a book in Yiddish, interest in a translation remained. When Karper took over the project in 2007, she asked Brent to keep an eye out for the Yiddish galleys.

The galleys, stuffed into a plain manila envelope, were finally found in 2014 by Miriam Trinh, an Israeli scholar of Yiddish literature who was surveying the Grade archive at YIVO’s request. Waldman, who grew up speaking Yiddish in her Satmar Hasidic community in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and had translated works by S. Ansky and I.L. Peretz, was chosen to do the translation.

But the saga was not over yet. In 2016, Karper received a call from Waldman. “I have good news and bad news,” the translator said. “The good news is I finished the translation. The bad news is that novel doesn’t end. It just stops.”

Luckily, a graduate student at Tel Aviv University had collected correspondence from Grade that indicated the galleys were the first volume of a two-volume work. So Waldman was able to piece together that second volume from the rough weekly installments in the two Yiddish newspapers. Grade stopped writing the installments in 1976 and, for reasons that remained unclear, never resumed.

But then in 2023, after YIVO had digitized the entire trove of Grade’s apartment, Waldman stumbled across two pages that seemed to be an effort by Grade to map out the novel’s ending. She included those pages in a translator’s note at the book’s end.

“So here it is,” Waldman says in the note. “Not an actual ending but a glimpse of what we might have gotten had Grade completed ‘Sons and Daughters.’ It will have to suffice.”