Inna and Chaim Garde in their Bronx apartment in 1974, By Jack Manning
Inna Grade, the wife of Chaim Grade, passed away on May 2nd. There are many manuscripts by the second greatest Jewish writer ever (second to Der Nister only) that were never published because of Inna’s paranoid insistence that no one could properly translate of do justice to her husband’s genius. NYT is on the case – In Yiddish Author’s Papers, Potential Gold. This is an emotional moment, I need to gather my thoughts about this.
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The saga of Chaim Grade is a very complex story.
Indeed his late wife;s goal was to universalize Grade , in her crazed mind Grade was not just a Yiddish writer writing on Jewish themes , buta universal writer whom an Albanian immigrant in the Bronx would find interestin as muchas I find books on Nigeria interesting.(No doubt good literature has universal interest)
In the process she destroyed his reputation in the period since his death, besides robbing him of a funeral.
Now the fact that her jewishness is in doubt as long asserted by Curt Leviant and this writer for a long time his public knowledge.
BUt lets get back to Grade, Yiddish literary criticism has been dead for at leats 50 years, (yes at one point it was a living field) and after the war there were so few serious Yiddish writers alive that who is to rate these writers. Shall the critics be people who never read Grade in the original Yiddish ? how about others whose only other exposure to Yiddish literature is I.B. Singer – whom they too did not read in yiddish, (as Bialik said reading translation is like kising a girl through a veil !!).
The only people who can rate Grade are those literary people who have read the corpus of Yiddish literature the Zaide mendele, Sholem Aleichem, Peretz , sholem Asch, YM Weisenberg, the 2 Singer brithers , DER Nister and the other Soviet writers like Bergelson, Kulback and many others. How couldan American critic say that lets say Roth is the greatest American writer if he only read Roth, Potok and lets say Sholom Auslander.So how many such people are there perhaps David Hirsche katz in Vilna ?
I loved Grade BECAUSE he built a literary monument to Lithuanian Jewry and developed wonderful characters in the process. But IB Singer was a wonderful story teller as well, . Der Nister was a powerful writer as was I.J. Singer. Who is to say who was the best or the 2nd best or the 3drd best and does it matter ?
American critics all satte that to read Grade in Yiddish you needed a talmudic or rabbinic background well I have read his whole publisjhed corpus in Yiddish and let me state that a 12 year old Cheder kind in East Europe had the so called rabbinic knowledhge that you needed to read Grade. Grade did not write rabbinic expositions he wrote for the folk , but a folk who at 1 point in history did study Chumash and rashi. Tiodays secualr Jews are less than ignorant in Judaism because they think they know Judaism because they raed several books by Buber, Heschel, Kushner,Weisel, and some Israeli writers in translation, etc etc. So when Grade uses the word navke mina to the American Jew thats a rabbinic term !
Reb Zalman, everything I know about this subject I learned from you. But even in translation Grade wrote a defining prose. The books are meant to be read not “researched”.