SONS AND DAUGHTERS, by Chaim Grade; translated by Rose Waldman
There’s a new old writer headed for the front tables of bookstores. The Lithuania-born Chaim Grade, who died in 1982, was one of the heavies of Yiddish literature in the 20th century. While never as well-known as Isaac Bashevis Singer or Sholem Aleichem, who also wrote in Yiddish, Grade (pronounced GRAH-duh) found an audience. His novel “Rabbis and Wives” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1983, the year it was claimed by “The Color Purple.”
Grade’s new book, to English-language readers, is “Sons and Daughters,” a sprawling and incident-packed novel, set during the 1930s in Poland and Lithuania, that is largely about rabbis and their wayward, modernity-seeking children. From the parent’s sickened perspective, their offspring are like eggs that have rolled off the countertop and broken. This book’s title could easily have been appended with a question mark.
Its path to publication was winding and uncertain. Grade wrote “Sons and Daughters” over a period of about 10 years in the 1960s and ’70s in the Bronx, where he moved after losing much of his family, including his first wife, in the Holocaust. The novel ran in serial form in two New York-based Yiddish newspapers. It was scheduled to be translated and published until Grade’s second wife, with whom he had an explosive relationship, denied access to the manuscript after his death.
It was only after her death, in 2010, that the project was renewed. The crossbow was drawn back long ago, in other words, but only now is the arrow released.
“Sons and Daughters” matters because it’s such an intimate and detailed portrait of Orthodox Jewish life in the old country between the wars. Antisemitism is on the rise. Israel is only a heady daydream. (“A new fad — a Jewish country!” one character says.) These Jews argue, and argue, about what is worth upholding and defending.
Chaim’s novel wouldn’t be worth talking about, though, if it weren’t alive. And it undoubtedly is. His fretful characters vibrate as if they were drawn by Roz Chast. Nearly everyone is about to smack someone. “Sons and Daughters” is a melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny.
It’s a great beard novel. The emphatic facial hair possessed by Grade’s rabbis and Torah scholars curls luxuriously around the margins of nearly every page. Here is a typical sentence: “Eli-Leizer’s mustache was still moist from the meal, and some dairy farfel noodles stuck to his beard.” And: “Avraham Alter Katzenellenbogen’s beard hung stiffly from his chin to his waist, as if it were made of porcelain like a seder plate.”
Who can trust these new, clean-shaven, Americanized rabbis? The greats of the Torah had beards so bushy they could hold water.
“Sons and Daughters” is also a great food novel. There are ardent disquisitions, for example, on the infinite variety of latke preparations, which take note of those “few crazies” who like them “filled with liver, like Russian pie.” The food talk can grow erotic and merry. About one merchant, we read: “The town still remembered his wife as a young woman, her face perpetually flushed, looking as if she spent her days in front of an oven with veal simmering and a sweet browned babka rising.”
Male as well as female beauty, and the lack of it, is appraised in this novel. Grade is in league with Philip Roth, who wrote that the body’s surface is “as serious a thing as there is in life.”
Grade has enough charm, as a writer, to turn poverty inside out and make it the subject of humane comedy. I’ve rarely read so happy a description of a decrepit house:
When you walked up the steps of the long, narrow veranda, the floor planks creaked and sighed “Time for some home improvement.” And when the front door was opened, its hinges squeaked, as if in reply to the planks, “It’s falling apart outside because it’s falling apart inside.”
Among this novel’s primary characters are the rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen and his five children: Bentzion, Bluma Rivtcha, Tilza, Naftali Hertz and Refael’ke. They are sprigs of rabbinical royalty, but they are shredded and scattered. One’s gone off to Bialystok to study business; another is in Vilnius at nursing school. Another wants to leave for the territory that will become Israel.
The rabbi’s wife, Henna’le, complains that, if he’d only been more flexible, his children would not have run away. He wonders: “Were they disobeying him because he’d slapped them too frequently, or because he hadn’t slapped them enough?” He has compiled a mighty dossier of his children’s offenses, but he still longs for them all to come home to Morehdalye, their tiny Lithuanian village.
Naftali Hertz, the eldest son, emerges as an especially significant character. He fled to Switzerland, where he works in a library and has an unfinished manuscript about Spinoza. He returns home with a secret: He married a goyish wife and has an uncircumcised son. He unspools lie after lie about his situation, but his family is almost onto him. Every step he takes is into a cowpat of one sort or another.
This is probably the place to point out this novel’s drawbacks, which to me are minor but might mean more to you. “Sons and Daughters” is so tightly written that the action moves at a crawl. If it were a car, only first gear would work. And perhaps I’ve buried the lede, but Grade died before this novel’s completion. While there is no proper ending, you can see where he was heading, and we get a glimpse of his written intentions in an afterword. In my opinion, tidy endings are vastly overrated anyway.
Grade’s female characters are wonderfully realized. But I wish that he had fully picked up on the point that Kafka made in his diaries, that it is disruptive to Jewish life that women are excluded from reading the Talmud, so with men they have little to talk about.
Grade has so many gifts as a writer. Like a rabbi, he is a distributor of beneficence. He understands how a transient character can help define a major one. He has folk wit as well as intellect. (Is it OK, this novel asks, to schmooze while davening?)He has instinctive access to his characters’ impulses and appetites. Nobility and banality mingle. He can write about a hairy little soul with as much sensitivity as a great one. He is a custodian of traditions, yet in close, chafing contact with this flippant world.
I don’t read Yiddish, but Rose Waldman’s translation of “Sons and Daughters” seems miraculous to me. The language is crisp and clean; it is also bright, like a painting that has been restored. The sentences stack up deliriously. Here is one: “In the beis medrash that evening, Banet Michelson grew tired of stashing his sneer in one corner of his mouth, so he pushed it to the other.”
A doctor is said to speak “succulent Yiddish.” This is what, in approximation, that must sound like.
I’ve left a lot out. Among the topics in this book are Zionism in Palestine, the ideas of Nietzsche and Marx, the allure of the “treyf country” that is America, matchmaking, the selling of kosher and non-kosher clothing, the cramming of too many people into one house, what the trees are trying to tell us and the beauty of a good poppy-seed hamantaschen. There is a character who cannot throw newspapers away because that would dismiss the tragedies in them.
There is a fine line between hilarity and pain here. Growing boycotts of Jewish businesses are one of the many indications that a darker time is being ushered in.
“Judaism isn’t the sort of business you could be rid of,” Naftali Hertz learns. His father, the rabbi, advises, “Never underestimate a Jewish soul!” He adds, in a cry that lingers over this charming and creaturely novel: “Oy, God Almighty!”
SONS AND DAUGHTERS | By Chaim Grade | Translated by Rose Waldman | Knopf | 678 pp. | $35