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Feb. 17, 2012
Jewish Vilna preserved in words
The translator of four Chaim Grade works shares some memories of the Yiddish writer.
CURT LEVIANT
In 2010, Jews who love books marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Chaim Grade, one of the major figures in modern Yiddish literature. This year marks the 30th since his premature death at 72, in 1982.
Grade was born in Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, in 1910, into a poor family whose father was a Hebrew teacher and a maskil (scholar), and his mother, after she was widowed, sold apples in the marketplace to support her son. From his childhood on, Grade was inspired to follow the paths of Jewish and general learning. He was educated in various yeshivot, but, as he himself states and describes in thinly disguised autobiographical fiction, he was not a keen talmudic scholar.
In 1941, Grade fled the oncoming Germans and made his way to the Soviet Union, where he stayed until after the end of the Second World War. After returning briefly to his destroyed Vilna, he spent two years in Paris, active in reconstituting the cultural life of the vast colony of Yiddish-speaking refugees. He came to the United States in 1948 and lived in the Bronx until he died.
Grade differed from most other Yiddish writers in that he had been a yeshivah bocher for most of his youth. There may have been others like him who wrote in Yiddish, but he was the only one who depicted rabbis and yeshivah life not as hagiography – but spoke honestly and was a faithful and objective pointillist about all its bumps and warts. It should be said that he was immediately expelled from the yeshivah when a teacher caught him writing secular poetry.
His first book of poems, Yo (Yes) was published in 1936 and, from that time on, the young Grade became a major voice in Yiddish belles lettres. Although he was a private student of the revered Avraham Karelitz – the Chazon Ish – Grade considered himself a secular Jew, not a shomer mitzvot; yet, some tradition adhered to him, witness the seders he organized in his home, his attendance at High Holiday services and his warm relationship with the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
During the last decade of his life, I had the good fortune to translate three of his novels and a Holocaust memoir and, by so doing, developed a close friendship with him. I remember visiting him once before Pesach in the Bronx and he showed me a box of shemura matzah.
“The Lubavitcher Rebbe sent his personal sheliach [messenger] to bring me these matzahs,” Grade said proudly, adding that this was an annual tradition.
Another time, he told me he could study a blatt (page of) Gemara bareheaded. “But when I look into Rashi,” he said, “and I’m not wearing a yarmulke, hebyt mir on der kop tzu brenen, I feel my head burning.”
It was through one of his books that I got to know Grade.
When his novel, The Well, Grade’s first book to appear in English translation, was published, the New York Times Book Review asked me to write an essay about it. A couple of weeks after it appeared, I got a letter from him asking me if I’d like to translate his novel The Agunah. Of course, Grade realized that I knew Yiddish, for the Book Review credit line stated that I had translated two collections of Sholom Aleichem stories. But it wasn’t only my knowledge of Yiddish that prompted Grade to contact me. He was confident that I knew another language crucial for an accurate translation, especially a Grade work. That language is Yiddish plus the suffix keit; i.e. Yiddishkeit, a language I also call Jewish, which a translator must also be expert in, besides knowing Hebrew and Yiddish. When Grade read my review of The Well, he saw that I quoted from the Midrash and knew Jewish folklore and Jewish symbols. He felt secure that I wouldn’t stumble when I encountered the rabbinics-laden, mostly Hebrew, dialogue of the rabbis in his novels.
After The Agunah – it was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Elie Wiesel, who called Grade “the greatest living Yiddish writer” – Grade asked me to translate his two-volume The Yeshiva, one of the crowning glories of 20th-century Yiddish fiction.
Grade told me he loved the Russian masters, which is evident in the grand sweep of The Yeshiva. As Sholom Aleichem re-created the life of East European Jewry in all its nuances, in a broad geographic spectrum, so Grade took the entire spectrum of Jewish Vilna and preserved it for posterity. In his 10 volumes of poetry and six of prose, Grade the literary archivist brought back to life what the Germans and their enthusiastic Lithuanian helpers physically destroyed.
In his prose, Grade has explored the tensions of religiosity in the face of both secular seductions and personal and national adversity, displaying his concern for Jews in their individual human struggles, and also probing his own personal world as an extension of Vilna. Although steeped in the 20th century – in both outlook and literary technique – Grade holds all of Jewish traditional values and lore in his pen.
In his wanderings through the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America, Israel, Australia and South Africa, Grade established a reputation as a dynamic speaker, and became a one-man ambassador at large for Yiddish. He confided to me one day, “Coort, you know what? I’m a better speaker than a writer.”
Sometimes writers are called upon to single-handedly counterpoint, indeed counteract, the events of history. The writer’s creative imagination has to undo, metaphorically speaking, what history has done. If history assumes the guise of a murderer, the writer must revivify the dead. Especially for the Jewish writer, the pen against the sword. Occasionally, a writer even begins the process in tranquility, and then is driven by thrust of history to become such a foil. That was Chaim Grade’s mission – and his grand achievement.
Among Curt Leviant’s 25 books is his seventh novel, the comic A Novel of Klass, which depicts a Vilna-born Yiddish painter, who was once a yeshivah student, and his struggle to gain recognition in New York’s art world.
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