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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Virtually. My name is Alex Weiser. I'm the Director of Public Programs of yivo. Today we are joining for an event called the Legacy of Chaim Grata. This is in collaboration with the National Library of Israel, celebrating the work of Chaim Grata and the joint digitization of grata's papers by YIVO in collaboration with the National Library of Israel. And all those papers are accessible digitally anywhere in the world. We started this series with a Yiddish language talk about Grotto over the summer with Professor Miriam Trim. This is our English language panel for which we're really pleased to have Justin Kammy, Kurt Levant and Ruth Weiss with us today. Ofer Deans was supposed to be with us, but unfortunately he is ill, so we wish him a refreshlemah and we will continue. And I'm going to hand it over to Justin to get started in a moment. But first, just a very brief word about Yivo. For those that don't know, YIVA is a very special place for the celebration and cultivation of Jewish history and Jewish culture. We have an archive and a Library with over 23 million documents, over 400,000 books which are used by researchers around the world. And we do a variety of public programs like this in Yiddish language education and other Jewish history and culture education and exhibitions to bring the world of these collections to life. So if you're new to yivo, we hope you'll continue to join and join us and to learn with us. And without further ado, I want to hand things over to Justin Kami. Justin Kami is Professor of Jewish Studies and World Literature at Smith College. He's an alum of YIVO's own Uriel Weinreich Yiddish Summer Program and a past recipient of YIVO's Dina Abramovich emerging Scholar Fellowship. And he also serves as on site summer Director of the Naomi Prior Kadar International Yiddish Summer Program at Tel Aviv University. Cammie's a leading expert on the interwar Yiddish literary group Jung Vilna and his translation of Avram Sutzkebers from the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg won the 2022 Levant Prize in Yiddish Studies from the Modern Language Association. So, Justin, thank you so much for joining us and for moderating today's talk. And thank you so much to Ruth and Kurt.
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Thank you very much, Alex, for having me back at yivo. It's always a real honor to work with you. Good day to everyone in the United States. Good evening to everyone in Europe. And South Africa and Israel. Welcome to our webinar on the legacy of Chaim Grade. I'm speaking to you today from Dusseldorf, Germany, and it's really a pleasure for me to be here today with our two distinguished panelists. Ruth Weiss is the Martin Peretz Professor Emerita of Yiddish Literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard and Senior Fellow at the Tikvah Fund. Her books include the Modern Jewish Canon,
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A Little Love in Big Manhattan, no Joke, Making Modern, Making Jewish Humor if I Am Not For Myself, the Liberal
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Betrayal of the Jews, Jews and Power,
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and most recently, Free as a Jew. In 2007, she was awarded the National
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Medal for the Humanities.
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Kurt Levian has translated and edited 16 volumes of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, four of which were by Chaim Krade, including
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the monumental two volume novel translated into English as the Yeshiva. He's also an acclaimed translator of Sholem
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Aleichem, the most recent of which is Mushkeleh the Thief, an almost forgotten short novel that Kurt rediscovered.
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And he's also a novelist himself.
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Before we turn to the panelists, a
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few thoughts that have been on my mind in recent weeks.
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It's worth remembering that Chaim Grade's beginnings were as a writer of poetry rather than of prose. His first volume of poetry in fact resisted the naysaying of his extreme religious education with a single word, yes yo. His first volume aimed to shatter the shoals existential anxiety and restore self confidence. Language itself became the symbolic means to an end. And I quote just from one from
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that poem that he wrote really in his youth.
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Jos is der entver von meinjugend wen sibadar von egen hoyte reuss joch dos maint mein Greu is mein Trugent, mein Fatum is der milk beg zu mein gruis. So he's writing. Yes, this is the answer of my youth when it needs to escape from its own skin. Yes, this means that my destiny is my virtue, my fate is the milky way to my greatness. Soon after publication of this yea saying poem, Gradet turned attention to a new poetic cycle called Gewein van de, the Cry of Generations that he sent to the editors of Zammelbicher, New York in 1936. The poem is a nightmare in which the speaker is haunted by visions of his forefathers, each of whom express disappointment at what he has become. His great grandfather asks, did I die as a martyr on the bonfire for this so that my great grandson would not be willing to give his life for anything? His father warns, if your birth remains a Mere accident, then it is murder. Each section concludes with one of his ancestors confessing a refrain of disappointment. This is not what I had intended. And the speaker of the poem is tormented by the accusation that he's not living up to his commitments, that he's not fulfilling his duty. Whether it be the religious sacrifice of his great grandfather, the military sacrifice in service of securing freedom for Europe in the case of his grandfather, or the political sacrifice and service of the Jewish people in the case of his father. His inability to embrace any cause signaled a paralysis and the humiliating emasculation of a generation that found itself alienated from religious inheritance, betrayed by the false promise of Western liberalism and confused by the divisive politics of the Jewish street. Grade was inspired to write the poem after hearing about a pogrom in the shtetlipcitic in eastern Central Poland. When peasants attacked, the Jews were prepared and they fought back. But during Grade's visit to Bialystok and its surrounding towns that summer, he heard
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a lot about that pogrom, and it
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penetrated his creative psyche. And he wrote in this poem, the walls, the pains, the pillows sprayed with blood and marrow testify to the fact that we are easy picking and our blood is easily washed away. I raise myself on my elbows from the mattress, and like a dying man who wishes to confess my feverish eyes declare. Our enemies dare complain that we struck back at them. Struck back. A shudder ran through the dead community, and only my father stood proudly, an angry joy raging in his eyes. So Grada in many ways speaks to our moment as well. Indeed, several years later, when he addressed Vilna Jews on the role of the poet and the sense of poetry, in the winter of 1939, he argued, in an era of decline, the Jewish writer must raise his voice in a song of faith. That is what we learn from the prophets who in times of satiety warned of danger and in times of destruction, spoke of resurrection. And he ended, we must seek out spiritual confidence, spiritual confidence in our own history, strength in our heroic example of goodness and courage in this time of catastrophe. So welcome, Ruth, and welcome, Kurt. And I think we'll begin our discussion now. So I want to really start with a very general question and ask in your opinions, what is Grada's most important work? And perhaps related to that, what is his greatest contribution to either Yiddish literature, perhaps more broadly Jewish literature, or even world literature?
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Maybe we'll start with Ruth on that.
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Well, Justin, thank you for starting us off as you did, in the most bracing way. I'm reluctant to Talk about the greatest, because I think that, you know, in terms of scope, I guess the yeshiva is the greatest undertaking of his. But I would like to talk about the work that keeps speaking to me the most and is, in a way, the most surprising to me, and that is the Mam Shabbosim, the Mother Sabbath days. And this is really quite astonishing in terms of Grada's amazing achievement. What's surprising about him, I think, is that he creates the forms that he needs at any particular time. He is so original, and we can come to that. I mean, after the war, when he needs a certain form, he writes my Quarrel with Hersh Rasener, which is a completely different kind of essayistic novel that nobody even knows what to call it. Well, Dermama's Shaposim is a little bit like that. Apparently he wrote parts two and three first. And this is a kind of autobiography to go into what followed. What Justin has just said. In other words, what happened during the war was that he himself was able to escape because he had been a member. He had a membership in the Soviet Writers Association. He was able to go to the Soviet Union. He was treated very well. And this engendered a kind of guilt of survival for him. And he wrote part two, which is what happened to him during the war there. Then he wrote part three, which became very famous in its own way. The Seven Little Alleyways, a kind of phantasmagoric return to Vilna. But Dermamesh Shabbos is, I would say, the most the fullest portrait of a Jewish woman that we have in Yiddish literature and maybe in modern Jewish literature at all. And what he does there is to describe his life with his mother in his teenage years, when he was in Vilna. And it gives us the image of. It gives us the personality of a religious Jewish woman. Now, why is this so intriguing? Because, you see, usually what we have, if you want to talk about Jewish religion, it's represented through the males. And that's, of course, what he does in the yeshivan and other works. But here you see what a Jewish religious personality was embodied in this amazing woman, Vela, his mother, who sells apples in their courtyard, but who is such a learned woman and I think a refined personality, a kind of Edelkeit, a kind of Jewish refinement, which was the Jewish ideal. But here he shows what it means to have this embodied in a woman, in his mother. And I can't tell you how often I return to it. And, you know, this is a woman who, for Example, on Yom Kippur, when she knows that one of her neighbors has left it, her cat, at home without food, urges the woman to go back to feed the cat because the cat should not be fasting on Yom Kippur. And this is a woman.
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That's one of the mitzvahs, by the way. You're supposed to feed your animals before you feed yourself.
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Exactly. So she's the one who teaches her. She reads from the religious text to the other women and so on and so forth. So this is the thing. But then, just to end this and without going into any other work, the night that she is sick and kind of hallucinating and she remembers a child who died, she becomes very guilt ridden that she once took some food from her very selfish sister to bring home to her son who was starving, and she can't give forgive herself for her guilt that she has. So this is what she's confessing to her son and the Chaim Grade character, because here he does not hide the fact that he's writing about himself. He says, I. I can't stand it. Stop it. I can't stand this excessive goodness, you know, the explosiveness of that moment. And you just see it. Someone who's taken goodness and self sacrifice and giving and guilt and all these qualities combine to such a level that, anyway, this portrait of Vela and this autobiography actually is a wonder. And so I start with that.
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Well, thank you for that. What about you, Kurt? What do you think is his most important?
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First of all, to hear the title. Mamesh Shabbosim already shows you where Kaimglade zeroes in. I've read a lot of Sholem Aleichem's work, and I don't think there is one instance in the complete Corpus of the 28 volumes of Sholem Aleichem where a Shabbos is described. He loves Shonm, Aleichem loves Pesach. He writes about Pesach, Purim, Chanuke, Shvuis, but Shabbos to a degree that probably reflects Sholem Aleichem's secularism vis a vis Chaim Grade's religiosity. I remember once coming to visit him up at the Bronx a couple of weeks before Pesach. And he shows me a big square white box. He says, the vaiso says, you know what this is? Well, I recognized it. I says, yes, I know, it's Shmuramatz. And he says, the resemblance. Do you know who sent it to me? I said, no, I don't know. He says, The Rebbe, every year the Labaviche Rebbe would send him a big box of shmore matzah. I said, chayyim. By then we had gotten to know each other. First it was Mr. Grade, and as a joke, sometimes I called him Mr. Grade because that's the way people who didn't know him called him Grade. Then it was, I said, chaim Zu province has seyda Chaim. You make a Seydeh Vosmeish Ben Nagoy angry is you think about goid. Of course I make a seyta, which was another little revelation to me. There was this little hidden substratum of Yiddishkeit, the religiosity of it, by the way, the same thing for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur. He would go to Shulem and Rosh Hashan, Yom Kippur, which also surprised me. So anyway, there's this big distinction between Chaim Grad and Mamis Chabosim. He's the only writer I know, except for I've known in Hebrew, who purveys this total immersion into Yiddish. And we see it in the Yeshiva. Probably the only writer who has been able to penetrate that yeshiva world, because he himself was a yeshiva bacha as a youngster up through his, I think through the mid teen, through his mid teens. And it remained in him and in his writing with purposeful, hundred percent accurate depiction of the yeshiva world. In fact, many times the rabbis in the yeshiva world are speaking almost 100% Hebrew. There may be a little connective, a little verb maybe in or seinen, but you could actually form, and I have this somewhere, six or seven sentences in a row with barely a Yiddish word in it. And of course it's Yiddish because they're speaking language, they're speaking a learned Yiddish. So I would say the Shiva in my estimation is his work, because it's also a work that nobody else could have written. Beautiful.
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Well, maybe that would be a good segue into a different work that each of you has thoughts about. And that's my quarrel with Hirsch Rasener, which connects to his studies of Musser as a youth, and then the ways in which he rewrites his Musser experience in three different modes. Before the war in poetic form, then shortly after the war in the form of a philosophical essay. And then, as you mentioned, Kurt in a two volume novel, but each coming back to sort of those lessons. And Ruth, you recently republished my quarrel with Hirsha Sener in a new translation and a new critical explanation.
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And I'm wondering where you see why, you know, at this point you thought
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it important to revisit that work and to bring it to a new audience in the way you did.
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Well, I don't know. I think that. Firstly, I think that as a teacher, both of you as teachers, it's one of the most teachable works that one could possibly find. It involves everyone immediately in a philosophical discussion, but in a very practical discussion apropos of what Kurt was saying. Partly this is true, but of course, my quarrel with Hersh Rasener is the most forthright confession, if you will, or explication by Chaim Grade of what he was actually experiencing, which is a total tear. My call with Herr Schwarzenegger is a kind of autobiography because, as everyone can understand if you really get into it, he is both voices. Let me just say what this is. It begins back in his school days, when he has just left the yeshiva, broken with the yeshiva, and broken with it ferociously, to leave that world, to come back to Vilna, to be a poet among the poets of Jung Vilna, whom Justin has written about. So he has left the religious world to become a secular. So he meets this former Yeshiva Bocher, who was his closest friend, and they clash. Because the yeshiva boy thinks that he has completely rejected everything which is valuable, and he worries about his soul. What is going to happen to you? Very angry. And then the Chaim Vilner, as he calls himself, as he was called the yeshiva, is equally furious. You're just hiding, you're just running back to the yeshiva and so on. So they are very angry with one another. Then they meet again in 1939, which is a very different time. It's already the time when the Soviets have gotten Vilna and they're both in Vilna and they're both frightened because under the Soviets, you couldn't say anything, you couldn't speak. And each of them was in a fragile situation. And then it's the yeshiva boy who has the upper hand. And he says to him, is this what you wanted? Is this the secular world that you were joining? Because, in fact, GRADA had been very close to the leftist circles in vilna in the 1930s. That's one of the things he got to know from the inside. And so the Grada figure, Chaim Vilner, is very shaken now. He's put on the defensive.
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Really.
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Is this what secularism brought us? And then my. One of the. As I wrote in the introduction, one of the most stunning sentences in modern Yiddish literature says, nine years later, that's it. That's the Shoah. Nine years later, they meet again in Paris. And that's when they really pick up this dialogue, this argument that is the most intense argument between what the religious life yields and what the secular life demands. And the two of them go at it. And it is. It is such an important. I mean, it's. It's such a crucial text because this is something that many of us experience in one form or another. But there you get it spelled out for you in the most brilliant kind of rhetorical interchange by book, both of them. So it's a marvelous, marvelous world. But why I like that part so much is because we always think or they thought at that point. And many people said, oh, the Shoah was the breaking point. Where was God? Where was God? Where was the voice of God? This changed everything and so forth. And. And. And it was. Of course, it felt as if this had changed the world dramatically. But the work itself completely allied those nine years. You know, we were quarreling before the war, and we meet in Paris, in the metro after the war. What happens? Do they spend one minute talking about what happened? Nothing. Do they spend one minute reminiscing about their former lives? So when they made a movie of it, the movie makers had to put in all that because they felt naturally, if two guys meet after the war, they would have asked each other, what happened to your father, what happened to your mother? But this is not what Chaim Grade gives us. He gives us the opposite. All it did was intensify the same crucial argument that they had had before. So there you get the intensified. Of course, the Shoah did something. It meant that each of them was more confirmed in what he was before. In other words, the Hirshva Sener, the religious personality, says, I certainly couldn't do without religion. There's nothing else that brought me through. If I did not believe in some perfect justice after this, I couldn't. I couldn't continue. Whereas the secular writer says, come on, you know, listen, this is not who we are. We can't pretend, you know, look around you. This is the real world we're living in. You have to understand what modernity has brought. So each of them is more confirmed. It is so. Such a powerful acknowledgment. Chaim Grade, I must say, you know, he had all kinds of qualities. Maybe we talk about them later. He never lied. I don't. Wouldn't you agree, Kurt? I mean, there's nothing in his writing that shows you him trying to, you know, Please an editor or please a public or anything, or revise anything under the Soviets or under anyone. He never lied. And. And this is a work of inner truth. Both voices within himself coming to full expression.
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Wonderful.
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Well Kurt, you had, you said earlier
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in our pre conversation that you actually have some inside information from Chaim Garaidev story that you might share first.
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Yeah, let me make a comment. As a novelist myself, I know also that silence is writing as well. I mean we know this from reading the Torah or even from reading Rashi and Rambam. The commentators sometimes when they don't make a comment that is also a telling comment, it's almost as if to say, I'm afraid to handle this. I'd rather Skip from verse 12 to 14 without making any comments on Yud Gimel on verse 13. But. And in the end of the story where Chaim says, says to Hersh, come, let us embrace. I always think of that as the next to the last line of the story. The last line is unsaid. I'm waiting, as maybe Chaim was waiting for Hirsch to embrace him as well. But that last line is not there. There's only silence. We don't know if Hirsch embraces him. Perhaps he does not embrace him. Now, as to inside information, okay, so I'm visiting Chaim up at the Bronx and I say to him, I said, isn't it amazing, I said that you encountered Hirsch at three different times. I said, even twice would be amazing. He goes like this. He said, disparaging. I met him once standing at. I forgot where it was. Maybe the forward, some sort of a building in New York City. How long did you speak with him? Five minutes. And all those words, all those remarks he says to me, I put into his mouth, I put into his mouth the words, the thoughts that he should have said had he had the ability to articulate them. So this five minute, six minute encounter with H was what he expanded into this three time meeting. So here you have some inside information. By the way, I never heard his last name pronounced. In my mind it was always Raseiner. How do we judge that it's Raseiner and not Raseiner. Is there a town by the name of Rasein somewhere in Eastern Europe? Because usually when you have something like Berliner from Berlin, hamburger from Hamburg, Warchaver from Warsaw, anyway, that's the inside story, I think, gives you a little bit of an outsider inside view on how Chaim was able to extrapolate out of this brief meeting an entire Weltan Shauung of a religious personality and a secular personality. And this, as we know by now, this secular personality was not really so secular. Oh, here's another anecdote. Naim told me that he says, I'm able to read. Like, to study. He could study Gemara. Bareheaded, he says, when I go to read Rashi, he says, if I don't put a yarmulk on my head, my head starts to burn. The yeshiva world was embedded in him even decades later. So when it came to read Rashi's commentary in the Gemara, he had to put a yarmulke on his head. Yeah, it's lovely.
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Well, maybe we can continue with you, Kurt, in that vein, because you've translated four of his important works, and I'm wondering what some of the translation problems might be specific to grade. What are some of the challenges for a translator?
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I'm going to take your question and sidestep it and twist it around, and I'm going to say that in order to translate grade, you have to know three languages. Yiddish, Hebrew, and here comes the third language, Yiddishkeit. And when I say Yiddishkeit, it has nothing to do with the language of Yiddish, but has to do with the full spectrum of Judaism. Liturgy, holidays, the calendar, customs, texts. And luckily, because of my parents, I have that. So I'm able to handle Chaim Grade's texts just like I could handle Agnon's texts in Hebrew, because Agnon is also thoroughly drenched with Yiddishkeit and with learning. The problem is, though, with translators. And here's a famous little story. So a professor of Jewish studies somewhere in the Midwest was translating, and when it came to the ceremony, Rosh Hashanah ceremony of tashlich, he annotates it for the uneducated reader that for tashlich, the ceremony where Jews throw little bits of bread into the water as a symbolic factor of purification, this professor of Jewish studies in the Midwest somewhere writes that for tashlich, Jews take pieces of koshala, pesach, matzah, bitz, and they throw it into the water. Professor, this professor somehow in one instance, is able to combine wishing Jews, Aziz and Pesach, and a gut yo. He wishes people a happy Pesach and a sweet new year with one great misstep.
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Thank you, Kurt.
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Ruth, maybe to the same question, you've translated several of Grada's works. Is there. Is there a specific challenge to him that you didn't encounter in other translation product projects? Or is there a specific problem in sort of how people who don't come from that world, how much they can get out of Grada, whether in Yiddish or in English or any other language for that matter.
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Well, there's so many. I mean, I suppose that Sholem Aleichem, in his own way, presents greater problems because the nuance of humor is in a way, much more difficult than the nuance of learnedness that you get in Kade. In Kade, translating it well is difficult because all the concepts are self understood in his writing. So he will just use a phrase or relate to it, and behind it lies a whole text, behind it lies a whole concept. And all you have to do is you just have a couple of words with hits to register it. But you understand the register as I feel it is usually not that difficult. The difficulty is really the intellectual difficulty of registering all that is contained in one of his sentences, all that is contained in one of his quotations. Because Kurt is right. There's so much Hebraic quotation. It's all coming from somewhere. It's much more like the problems of translating Mendele Moychar Svorim, who also wrote with a very, very Hebraic style. And then you have to, you know, unpack it. So there is that difficulty. But I would say that, you know, he. He would never have. He was never satisfied. The biggest compliment I got from him was my first work in Yiddish literature was to be hired to translate his novella Debunim. And it wasn't something that I was enamored of. It was given to me. That was the text that was chosen and given to me. So I translated it and he said to me, oh, his friend really said this was great. I did 70%, 75% of a job. And that was as good as could be done for Chaim Grade. So this I would add to what Kurt said before. He was a little bit of a self dramatizer too. It's not for nothing that he could write novels. I mean, some of the anecdotes that he's telling us is really the way he wanted to present himself, you know, is this, you know, in a certain way to certain people. And he would, you know, finesse it, I would guess a little bit. I will tell you where the problems of translation become almost insurmountable with grade. And that is in the poetry. The poetry is really very, very difficult. And in the poetry he takes up subjects even that he doesn't so much handle in the prose. You see, I think that Kurt is right in the fact that he made himself into a historian of that world. That he knew that he himself, and only he possessed. He could see that among Yiddish writers, modern Yiddish writers, and even modern Jewish historians, there was no one who had so much in him of that world. And I think that he felt obliged after the. The. After the war to become a prose writer. Because he felt somehow that what he had to say in his poetry could not contain everything that he wanted to convey of all that he knew of that past. And you know, that Sha Lieberman, one of the great scholars of the Jewish Theological Seminary, made sure that he became a fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. I think that he's the only writer, the only novelist who was ever inducted into that august body. I mean, this was a community of scholars who in those days found took themselves very seriously, was Salo Baron. It was people, you know, you had to have published and you had to know German. You had. I don't know what the qualifications were. Well, they made Grade a member because of his learnedness and also because of his historicity. They knew that what he was doing was bringing into it more. If you take the poetry, though, I will give me just one example here. You know, let's not overlook the poetry, because he was primarily, and I would say he was maybe not ultimately, but he considered himself a poet. And I think that he took his poetry much more seriously than his prose to the very, very end. So in here, in De Goldene, this wonderful publication he wrote after the war, he wrote Ich weinoif eich mit allerf base. This is a poem that is about the Soviet Yiddish writers whom he encountered after the war in the Soviet Union and who were killed by Stalin immediately afterwards. And that's something also that Grade felt obliged to bear witness to. So he writes this long poem in memory of them, and in Yiddish it is called I cry for you with all the letters of the aleph bet. And the poem ends with that. That he's left with the. Like a body that's drowned, and all that's left of it is the shirt. That's how he sees this whole body of Yiddish writers drowned. And all that he's left with is the shirt of the olive bait of the language. Okay, so he. He writes here in the first stanza, the Rieber hobbir stendig nochgesucht of eich ashus nietmach mis ayer toit hobbir of eich ifunen schusim by eirlepnoch in land fun rachvist diken rus habird ge wust as in their tearful hearts. Zeitir anusim, skusim anusim. Do you see what he's doing here? These Soviet Yiddish writers wrote panaceas, wrote, wrote wonderful things to Stalin. Then they were murdered. What are you going to write about them? You know, are you going to, are you going to be able to justify them? What are you going to do with those, you know, with all that they believed in, with all that they committed themselves to the Soviet reality? And, and then he says, am I just going to, you know, am I just going to let it go because you were killed in this way? Just because you were martyred, am I going to forgive you? So that's how the poem wrestles with this. Now, Cynthia Ozick, bless her, one of the great translators, she undertook to translate this poem. She does a fantastic job of it. But for those who would have access to that original, you see, what she can do is to say, you know, here. And so I tell your merits have always looked to you, to your defense, not to justify, for pity of your deaths, but for what you were when all the space of Russia sustained you still. And still you lived your deathly lie. Moranos, your deepest self denies your face. So she gets the idea that they are moranos anusing but, and she does as well, I'm sure that no one could translate better than she could in this particular way. But he catches the voice of Bergelson, of Kvitko, of Markish, of really of every one of these poets whom he evokes in this poem, in this praise of, sort of qualified praise, of desperate praise of these Soviet Yiddish writers. But look at how she has to translate the title. She can't translate it with all the letters of the alephate. What would that mean? So it's called elegy for the Soviet Yiddish writers, which is wonderful. It is an elegy for the Soviet Yiddish writers. Not mit allerfket, not. You see, there is, in the, the poetry, I think, is, is a challenge that let's hope that people keep trying to, to take it on.
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C
So one of the questions that was beautiful, but one of the questions that I, I, I have that's related to that is how Grade managed to adapt, or perhaps refused to adapt to America differently than other Yiddish writers. Of course, he came to America much later and only after the korben. But how did he think of himself as a Yiddish writer in America? Was it different than others? Did he hold a unique position? Of course, he's oftentimes compared to Bashevis as the Great post war writer of Yiddish prose. And there was a lot of competition there among adherents or people who favored one over the other. But did he ever really accommodate himself to America either as a writer or even as an intellectual?
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E
You want me to give?
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C
Yeah, Neville Al Kirk.
- [40:42]
E
Sure, sure. Well, of course he did. I mean, he was supremely intelligent and you know that he made his living largely as a lecturer, not just as a writer. So he had a whole lot of lectures that he would give and he would go to the Jewish communities. And he was rather different from the other Yiddish writers because when they went to these other communities, they would read from their works. When he went, he gave lectures about Rembrandt, he gave lectures about literature, he gave literature about the folklore of Eastern Europe. He worked out these lectures. And as a matter of fact, they might be. See, many of them are in the archive of the Yivo now, and someone will eventually publish some of them because they're very learned and very interesting. So, yes, he made his accommodation to the Yiddish that was still a large Yiddish speaking constituency in the United States. And gradually, by 1952, of course, he was discovered. And in the same way that Bashevis Singer was discovered, Grade was discovered. And my quarrel with Herr Schwarzener was published in Commentary magazine. So he began to be known. And the reason that we were both commissioned to translate his works is by that time, you know, people began to understand that one could bring him into English successfully on the other.
- [42:05]
A
I think the fact that that story was included as the last story story in Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg's classic anthology, 1953 treasury of Yiddish Stories, that was another boost.
- [42:23]
E
Absolutely.
- [42:24]
A
I think he may. He may. Yeah. He was probably then he was the Youngest writer in 53. He was born in 1910, so he was the youngest writer in that collection. Ruth, you mentioned before that he thought of himself as a better poet than a novelist. I didn't know that, but he told me. He says Kurt, you know, that's the way he pronounced my name, Kurt, with the growl Groot. I am a better speaker than a writer, he thought himself. And he, by the way, he didn't only speak in the United States, he was in Mexico, he was in South America, he was traveling around.
- [43:04]
E
Yeah, but isn't this, it is interesting though, that he took very great pride actually in the lectures that he. That he gave. And so there was, as far as Bashevis is concerned, though, you. You must read some of the. You must read some of the correspondence because he referred to Bashevis as A pornographer? Yeah, he writes.
- [43:26]
A
Was it he or Ina.
- [43:27]
E
No, no, no. He writes to. I have the letter. He writes. Yes, he writes to Ravitch. He writes to Belich Ravitch, Montreal, and he says that pornographer, you know, and he's very upset because they both. At that point, they're both writing for the forwards and because of. Because Bashevis was there since the nineteen. Late nineteen thirties and he had only come in the late nineteen forties and only became. Began to work for the. For herds in the 1950s. He got half as much pay as this was a pomp, apparently, the way the union worked there. He only got half as much per word or per story as Bashevis was getting. And he thought he was worth twice as much, of course, as Bashevis was getting. And this goes really to the great, great difference between them.
- [44:24]
A
Didn't he switch to. To Morgan Journal afterwards?
- [44:27]
E
No, Morgan Journal. First in Rome Journal, first in Morgan Journal, and then he switched the forward. And he said, by the way, he was grateful for it because he writes in some of the letters. I don't know how true this is, Kurt, but he says that he would never have finished the novels if it were not for that same Dostoevsky and pressure to publish something every week. The idea that he had to produce something week by week or else not get paid, you see, was what get. Kept the novels going. And he said that the last novel he never finished because he was not doing it for that. For the. For weekly publication. So isn't that. It is curious about how writers rise to the challenge. And if they make the most of the challenge, they become geniuses. And if they just feel that they're doing it dragging their feet, and because they have to, then, you know, then they fail. But you can use an obligation or you can use a constraint in order to release something in yourself, which is, I think, part of what gr, Part of what Grade did. On the point of Bashevis, though, you see, GR was a real moralist. I think that what Kurt was getting at, the Yiddishkeit and the deep, what was deeply rooted in him, he had a tremendous sense of moral rectitude and of judgment according to that moral rectitude. That is the primary difference, I would say, between him and Bashevis, because Bashevis saw that same break and experienced that same break between tradition and modernity very deeply. But the way Bashevis felt it was his parents were the perfect embodiments of Jewish morality. And then there was the break and there was his Brother and his sister and himself and modernity. And he felt that one sin begets another, either or totally Manichean. Never saw the possibility of a synthesis of. Or of a. There was no even. There's no point talking about the morality after that. Might as well mock it, might as well laugh at it. And that's why Bashevis was such a. He caught the American spirit in that way. He had, you know, he.
- [47:00]
A
He.
- [47:00]
E
He played the comedian. He. He played it for comedy. He loved to be on stage in that way and to set up these situations that. Where it was like, damn you all grade, you know, was anything but. I may I just add one anecdote here. I was, because of this. I was looking through some old correspondence. He wrote a marvelous letter to my mother, which was very, very moving. He had been to see my parents in Montreal, of course, because he was from Vilna. Our parents were from Vilna. Vilna's look up Vilna. And they, you know, encourage one another, contribute to one another's work and so forth. So he had come to visit my mother. And apparently on a visit to my mother, she had said to him, you know what I want from you, Chaim? I want you to smile. I want you to smile. Tells you something about his personality. And he said, so then my older brother died. He died in November. And at Pesach, Iimgrada writes my mother a letter. I'm sorry that I haven't written you before this, but it's Eref Pesach. And now I am writing you. And I tell you the truth, I cannot imagine what it is like to have lost your son and so forth. And he says to him, the end of the letter, but now, Masha, you see how hard it is to smile on command.
- [48:27]
A
That leads me to a remark that Chaim Grade told me. And he said it in English because there's no equivalent in Yiddish. He said, I am not a happy man. And he said it with all seriousness. I see everybody smiling. I am not a happy man. Go translate that into Yiddish. Listen, I have an anecdote regarding translation. When first I translated the Zimgesak, Seven Little Lanes, then I translated the Aguna, which everybody loved. Great critical acclaim. Elie Wieser wrote a beautiful review. The New York Times Book Review. So I was all set for the yeshiva, but he says to me, koop, you'll have to forgive me, but I have to make a little test. You have to translate the first couple of pages. I said, okay. I said, but why? He said, because the first person I gave it to years ago when it came to the phrase the belief emunah, Shin lamed mem. Do you see it? You see it?
- [49:35]
D
Yes.
- [49:36]
A
The man translated it as the faith of Solomon. Because shin lamed mem, hey, could be love, mother, king Solomon. It could also be shlemah, full or perfect. So it was faith of Solomon instead of perfect faith. I said, fine, I'll translate the first few pages. So I translated that first page. And in my typed version, I also wrote faith of Solomon. And in a little envelope, I put in the correct translation, the correct page. And on the envelope I wrote to him, I said, chaim, do not open this envelope until we speak. Once you get my translation, fine. I call him up. I said, no, Chaim. I says, do you like my translators? He says, yeah, kot, very nice. I like it. He says, but you didn't translate emunah shlema properly. You wrote faith of Solomon. I said, chaim, did you open up the little envelope? He said, got angry. What's my name? You told me not to open up the envelope until we speak. And now I said, okay, now open it up. Okay, look, he starts laughing. He says to me, do guniff. You rat. You put one over on me. And so that was the sort of relationship that we had. One more little story.
- [51:13]
C
Great.
- [51:13]
E
Got him to smile.
- [51:14]
A
Came, huh? And you say to Ruth, you got him to smile.
- [51:18]
E
You got him to smile, got him to laugh.
- [51:20]
A
Yes. Yeah, we left. We left a lot. We left. He used to come over to. I took a two and a half hour journey from the Bronx to come here to New Jersey when my parents were visiting. Because he loved my parents. He loved when they were there. We had a great time together. Anyway, we had, when it came to the volume two, the yeshiva, he says to me, he says, kurt, you know this is a one volume work. I said, no, it's not. I said, it's a two volume work. He's underwriter. I'm telling you to do William Ferc. I said, you want to make a bet? He says, yes, we'll make a bet. He loved Crown Royal whiskey. I said, well, bet on a bottle of Crown Royal whiskey, I'll prove to you that you show that it's two novels and you two volumes of one novel and you the reverse. He says, okay, Weismel. So I showed him in the Yiddish text, at the beginning of volume two, he gives a one page summary of what's happening in volume one. This doesn't appear in the English edition, but in Yiddish Ah, Duganif, he says to me, you're right, you won. I won a bottle of Crown Royal. And we've been drinking you very slowly over the years for various months.
- [52:42]
D
It's wonderful that we're able to get
- [52:43]
C
not only a sense of the importance of the works, but the personality of the human being in this discussion. And I'm looking at some of the questions here and keeping an eye on the clock, and a couple of things have come out. One was, if anything unpublished has appeared in the archive. And my understanding is that there's, as Ruth has mentioned, there's speeches, there's letters, there's correspondence, there's also clippings.
- [53:10]
D
And of course there are unpublished novels
- [53:13]
C
that exist in graders oeuvre. Not only Women of the Ghetto that was published in the Forwerth, but Beis Arov, the Rabbi's House, which I understand is in progress of being translated and which is an incomplete serialized novel. My question for you, Kurt, is has there been any interest in republishing the yeshiva? The last time I went online to Amazon, people were charging $500 or $1,000 for a copy of the translation. It's so rare at this point, but so critical.
- [53:48]
A
If they came to me, I would give it to them for $495.
- [53:54]
C
A bargain at this point.
- [53:56]
A
A bargain.
- [53:57]
C
It would be great.
- [53:58]
A
Well, there was a small publisher after Bob's Merrill published volumes one and two, the Yeshiva. And then Semihatlas, there was a small Jewish publisher who put out both volumes in one volume into one work. But since then I haven't heard anything more.
- [54:17]
E
First, may I make a pitch for the latest translation of Mind Quarrel with Hersh Rasener that is available. And I think that people should get it as a Hanukkah gift for people. It's a very, you know, it's a wonderful book, but. But the answer is that Shocken Random House, whatever it's called now they have the rights to it. And they're supposed to be putting out all of Chaim Grade's work again. And why they're dragging their feet on this, I don't know. So I think that if anyone wants to put pressure on them to get this out, it's very selfish because of course there are people who would want to read this. And I think that if the publisher has the rights to it, it's their duty now to produce these works.
- [55:10]
A
There is. I always thought that Chaim Grade's life with his wife would make a great novel. And a few years ago I read a fascinating novel Called A Novel of Klaas, K L a s s Klass Grave Klaas. And it beautiful. I forgot who the writer was, but it beautifully depicts this humorous relationship between the two of them and how Isaac Klaas wife Griselda, who is Ina, always manages somehow to get in the way and ruin the exhibits that this Yiddish painter, Isaac Klaas, puts out. So look for that novel called A Novel of K L a s s Amalif Klaas.
- [55:58]
E
By the way, we said that we wouldn't talk about the wife, but if anybody wants to know what she was like, I think that the. The image of the Rebbetson in his novel, the Rebbetson, his wife is about as close to the personality of the woman to whom he was married as you're likely to ever see.
- [56:20]
C
And in the archive itself, of course, this isn't only the papers of Chaim Grade, but also there's quite a bit of Ina Eka Grade's papers there. So anyone who's interested can go to that. There are a couple of things that we haven't touched on that came from the audience.
- [56:34]
D
One, a couple of people are asking
- [56:36]
C
about the sort of position of diagunar in his literary oeuvre. And then another, few commentators asked about why his epic poem the Musser Students hasn't yet been translated. I'm wondering whether you have.
- [56:55]
E
I have an answer to both of those.
- [56:58]
A
Okay.
- [56:59]
E
Okay. Well, Irving Howe and Honesh Meruk and I put out the Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse. And guess what? We were supposed to have 40 poets in it. And one of them was going to be Chaim Grade. And we had decided that we were going to include a large segment of the Musernikis as the segment from Chaim Grade. But in terms of what Kurt was saying before Grade died, between the time that we had commissioned this and the time that the book was to come out, and Irving Howe got a telegram from Enadra saying, under no circumstances were you to publish my husband's work, period. And that was the end. So we have 39 poets in the Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse. And that is one of the reasons that Musa Nikis was not translated when it was to be undertaken to be. But somebody will do it, and hopefully we'll do that soon. And the other question. Tell me the Aguna. About the aguna. Well, I said that the first work that I was asked to do was the Debrunum. And of course, Chaim Grade had wanted the first of his works to be translated to be the Aguna because he knew the Aguna was really a novel that would sell and might even be made into a film. But Yankov Gladstein, the great poet Jacob Glotstein, had written such a devastating review of the Aguna, which he called Schund, which he called cheap literature, that it was stooping. Yes. That he scared off the people who were investing the money into translating this, and they decided on the much tamer, the. Well. But then, obviously, when G.R. found his, you know, got into the game on his own, he's the one who got it, you know, who found a translator for it and then a publisher for it. So isn't. Isn't that fascinating that he could have made his debut in English with the Aguna, which is obviously a readable, wonderful, fascinating novel about the. The same kind of quarrel that you see in my quarrel with Hersh Rasener between leniency and
- [59:39]
A
richer.
- [59:40]
E
Yeah, stricture.
- [59:43]
A
Yeah, strictness, Exactly.
- [59:46]
E
Yes. The classic. A novel between the. In judgment, who is going to be lenient and who's going to be firm in the judgment, and that's what the novel turns on and what so much of Jewish jurisprudence turns on. Very glad you have.
- [60:06]
A
Yeah.
- [60:06]
C
I can't thank you both enough for joining us, for having Yivo bring us together. I first read grade as a student, Gilbert, with you, Ruth, and I think I first read Karada at McGill through translation, through you, Kurt. So the ability of me to be with both of you and for you to share your impressions of not only his importance of a writer, but a sense of who he was as a human being, of his personality, is enriching. And the fact that his papers are now in a safe place, joined by two wonderful scholarly institutions, the National Library of Israel and the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, means that students and scholars will be able to continue to research grade, hopefully to come out with new additions and new insights into his work, and that will be able to continue this conversation well into the future. So, really, thank you on behalf of the audience for your time with us.
- [61:02]
E
Thank you, Justin. Thank you, Yivo. Thank you,
- [61:11]
B
Sa.