Chaim Grade (;

Grade's next work was the semi-biographical epic poem Musernikes about his life in the Novaredok yeshivas, published in 1939. He returned later to the mussar theme in his postwar prose. Grade's friend and translator, Harold Rabinowitz, described them as an "incongruous couple. He was a short, bald, squat chain-smoker, and she looked like a movie star". but learned to read it later, The translator Curt Leviant jokingly noted that "Inna had the wisdom of Tsar Nicholas and the knowledge of Moshe Rabbeinu—she knew Hebrew like the Tsar and read Yiddish like Moshe Rabbeinu." because he thought that most translators didn't understand the Orthodoxy and would translate his Yiddish wrong. He (likely prompted by his wife) tested Curt Leviant before he approved him to be the translator of The Yeshiva.

According to David Fishman, who knew Grade well, he could recite full passages from Gemara in 1970s. He had a low opinion of religious Jews of America and Israel, and thought that American Zionists were "manipulative politicians" that couldn't be compared with idealists of his youth. Grade's main regret was that he didn't move to Israel instead of America; he did it because he didn't want to confront his old teacher, Chazon Ish, and to disappoint him that he had become a secular man. Among Grade's friends in Israel was the third President of Israel, Zalman Shazar.

While less famous than Isaac Bashevis Singer, Grade is considered a great Yiddish prose writer. Singer was called a "master of PR", while Grade was "incompetent at PR". He was praised by Elie Wiesel as "one of the great—if not the greatest—of living Yiddish novelists."

Inna Grade hated Singer and his books, calling him a "'blasphemous buffoon' who had distorted the picture of Eastern European Jewish life with 'acts of perverted sex' and unsavory characters wrestling with demons." and a "fervor tantamount to obstructionism". Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse wrote that Inna "did everything she could to make sure his reputation would die [because] she was competitive with him". She was also called an "eccentric and emotionally troubled widow", "a Caustic Woman Known as the ‘Black Witch’", an "angry widow", and upon her death "a sigh of relief, unkind and hard-edged, coursed through some corners of the Yiddish literary world". Leviant called her Grade's "yetzer horeh (evil inclination)".

Works

Grade is mostly known as a prose writer, but "he considered himself first and foremost a poet". Among other themes, he wrote poems about "the American landscape and the Land of Israel". My Quarrel is the only Grade's work set after the Holocaust; all his novels are set in pre-war Lithuania, and never mention the war or the destruction of Jewish life. He never mentioned New York in his stories.

Der Mames Shabosim ("My Mother's Sabbath Days"), Grade's first novel, was also published in 1951; it is "a vivid and affectionate portrait of the poor Jews from Grade's childhood courtyard". Grade himself described his work as of a "gravestone carver of my vanished world".

Grade's most acclaimed novels, The Agunah (1961, tr. 1974) and The Yeshiva (2 vol., 1967–68, tr. 1976–7), deal with the philosophical and ethical dilemmas of Jewish life in prewar Lithuania. These two works were translated into English by Curt Leviant. Leviant thought that to translate Grade, a translator should know "not only Yiddish and English, but also Hebrew and Jewish"; under "Jewish", he meant knowledge of the Jewish life cycle through birth, bar mitzvah, wedding, and death, and "the basic texts of Yiddishkeit".

Grade's Yiddish prose was described as "linguistic ethnography", as he wrote in vernacular Yiddish of Vilna heavily influenced by his studies in mussar yeshivas.

The last novel

Sons and Daughters is the last Grade's novel, first published in English translation in 2025; Kirsch called it "the last great Yiddish novel". Grade died in 1982 before completing a final version of the novel. The novel remained unpublished for over four decades due to complications involving Grade's widow, who held his papers but refused to allow translation while she was alive. Following her death in 2010, the manuscript was discovered in 2014 among 20,000 books and papers from the Grades' Bronx apartment that were transferred to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel.

The novel, set in the interwar period in Lithuania, tells the story of Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen and his five children who are "drifting away" from Orthodox Jewish traditions toward secular life, Zionism, and emigration to America. Grade's work has been compared to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy in its scope and depth, depicting the complex religious, economic, and cultural landscape of pre-Holocaust Jewish Eastern Europe. Translated by Rose Waldman over eight years, the novel was published in English by Knopf in March 2025, with additional material discovered in 2023 that offered a glimpse of Grade's intended conclusion to the work he had abandoned in 1976. Lily Meyer, in her review for The Nation, writes that "This is not a novel you read for the plot but for a world to sink into, a sprawling yarn that unspools in hugely entertaining detail, encompassing all the ingredients of life—sex, money, domesticity, religion—that we want in a realist novel."

One of the novel's characters is Khlavneh Vilner, a semi-fictional self-portrait of Grade.

Literary estate

thumb|Several buildings in the Amalgamated Coop. Grades lived on a second floor of one of the buildings for many years.

Grade's papers were numerous and consumed much space of their apartment in the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Northwest Bronx. By the end of August 2010, the papers had been transferred to YIVO's offices for sorting.

In 2013 the Public Administrator of Bronx County awarded the YIVO Institute and the National Library of Israel (NLI) rights to the estate. The whole Grade's archive is stored at YIVO in New York City. YIVO and the NLI have digitized the entire archive and made it accessible online.

The Grade archive was called "probably the single most important literary acquisition in YIVO's postwar history".

  • 1970: the Itzik Manger Prize for contributions to Yiddish letters
  • 1978: National Jewish Book Award for The Yeshiva