\n<\/p>\n
Altie Karper had been waiting for the call for years.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Grade was less well known than the Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, but was held in greater esteem in some literary quarters. He\u2019d written the novel in question through the 1960s and 1970s, and published it in installments in New York\u2019s Yiddish newspapers. But he died in 1982 without publishing a final Yiddish version.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The galleys, if they existed, were somewhere in there.<\/p>\n
Finally, in 2014, Karper received a call from Jonathan Brent, the executive director of the YIVO Institute. It was the<\/em> call.<\/p>\n \u201cWe found it!\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In the small world of Yiddish literature, the discovery of the pages had the startling impact of a lost Hemingway manuscript suddenly turning up.<\/p>\n \u201cI nearly passed out,\u201d said Karper, who retired in December as the editorial director of Schocken Books, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday. \u201cThis was the Holy Grail.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In March, the 649-page novel, \u201cSons and Daughters,\u201d painstakingly translated by Rose Waldman over a period of eight interrupted years, and edited for another two, will be published by Knopf.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Karper hailed the book as a masterpiece. In the book\u2019s introduction, the literary critic Adam Kirsch said \u201cSons and Daughters\u201d was \u201cprobably the last great Yiddish novel.\u201d Giving it more of a contemporary spin, Brent said the novel, set in the turbulent period between the two world wars, distills \u201cconflicts that still bedevil the Jewish people today.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 entrepreneurial success, sexual fulfillment, Zionist pioneering in Palestine and cultural freedom in the United States.<\/p>\n While the rabbi\u2019s heartbreak may sound familiar to lovers of the humorous Sholem Aleichem stories that were turned into the popular musical \u201cFiddler on the Roof,\u201d the tone of \u201cSons and Daughters\u201d is less folksy, and the stakes seem higher.<\/p>\n \u201cSholem Aleichem writes about that world like Mark Twain,\u201d Karper said. \u201cChaim Grade writes about it like Dostoyevsky. And hanging over the novel is the knowledge that in 10 years, these people will all be gone.\u201d<\/p>\n Todd Portnowitz, who took over the book\u2019s editing from Karper, reached for another Russian colossus to describe the Grade novel, calling it \u201cTolstoyan in scope,\u201d because it depicts so many layers \u2014 religious, economic, romantic and cultural \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The writing is often straightforward and unadorned but there are evocative touches on every page and many comic moments. Portnowitz was particularly taken with \u201cthe childlike innocence of Grade\u2019s natural descriptions \u2014 of the Narew river, the snow, the dark, the trees. I\u2019d add that I think part of that innocence is that he\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Grade (pronounced GRAHD-uh) describes one rabbi this way: \u201cA tall, slim man, dour and cold, he smelled of the dust of crumbling texts in a vacant synagogue.\u201d A seedy men\u2019s clothing shop in Bialystok, he writes, sold \u201coff-the-rack clothing in cheap fabrics, sewn by third-rate tailors,\u201d its salesmen instructed that, if a jacket doesn\u2019t fit a customer, \u201cyou grab him a jacket two sizes smaller, yanking and pulling in such an artful way that the armpits don\u2019t feel too tight and the sleeves don\u2019t look too short.\u201d<\/p>\n Throughout, the reader senses the wry affection Grade felt for his lost world, its rogues as well as its personages. Waldman, the translator, 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 a counterpoint to the Hasidic schools, with their emphasis on spirited engagement with the Torah.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cThe Agunah,\u201d \u201cThe Yeshiva\u201d and \u201cRabbis and Wives,\u201d as well as a collection of three novellas and a posthumously published memoir, \u201cMy Mother\u2019s Sabbath Days.\u201d Elie Wiesel praised him as \u201cone of the great \u2014 if not the greatest \u2014 of living Yiddish novelists.\u201d<\/p>\n After his death in 1982, publishers and scholars who wanted to track down Grade\u2019s manuscripts and correspondence were almost always turned away by Inna. (In a letter, Grade once told her, \u201cconsciously or unconsciously your goal in life is to torture and scare me.\u201d) Grade\u2019s reputation began to fade.<\/p>\n Despite the fact that \u201cSons and Daughters\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s request. Waldman, who grew up speaking Yiddish in her Satmar Hasidic community in Brooklyn\u2019s Williamsburg and had translated works by S. Ansky and I.L. Peretz, was chosen to do the translation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But the saga was not over yet. In 2016, Karper received a call from Waldman. \u201cI have good news and bad news,\u201d the translator said. \u201cThe good news is I finished the translation. The bad news is that novel doesn\u2019t end. It just stops.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But then in 2023, after YIVO had digitized the entire trove of Grade\u2019s apartment, Waldman stumbled across two pages that seemed to be an effort by Grade to map out the novel\u2019s ending. She included those pages in a translator\u2019s note at the book\u2019s end.<\/p>\n \u201cSo here it is,\u201d Waldman says in the note. \u201cNot an actual ending but a glimpse of what we might have gotten had Grade completed \u2018Sons and Daughters.\u2019 It will have to suffice.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n