For those who love Yiddish writers and literary intrigue, a JTA article this week told a remarkable story about the archives of the great writer Chaim Grade, which, thanks to the joint efforts of YIVO and Israel’s National Library, is now available in its entirety online. (According to the archives description, it contains items in many languages, including Turkmen, presumably from Grade’s experiences as a refugee from the Shoah.) Grade grew up in Vilna; his father was a maskil, “modern,” though he sent young Chaim to study in the yeshiva of the Chazon Ish, where he was exposed to Musar teachings that influenced his writings throughout his life. During that time, he started writing poetry, gaining recognition and eventually becoming part of the distinguished group of poets known as Yung-Vilne. (Another member was Avrom Sutzkever, who organized the rescue of the YIVO archives and much of the literary heritage of Vilna.) In 1941, Grade escaped Vilna alone by foot heading east as the Nazis closed in, leaving his wife and mother in the belief that the Nazis would not harm women; tragically, both were killed.
During his years in New York, 1947-82, Grade conducted a famous rivalry with the much better known Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. While some Yiddishists consider Grade to be the finer prose stylist, Singer received far greater renown, especially in translation, worldwide, and consequent royalties. Grade’s second wife, Inna Hecker Grade, was especially fierce in defending Grade against Singer, to the point of calling newspapers to complain when Singer received accolades and Grade was ignored. She translated several of his books and died 28 years after him, loyal to the end. Many of Grade’s Yiddish books are available for download here at the priceless online library of the National Yiddish Book Center. One of his most famous stories, “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” written a few years after the war, describes the challenges of having faith in God after the Shoah.
This article about Grade reminded me of the much smaller legacy of Yiddish writings that has fallen into my possession over the years. The bulk of them came to me decades ago. My mother had a close friend, Rose Goldberg, who had mentored her early in her career as a New York City schoolteacher. Rose’s father had been a Yiddish writer and translator named Hersh Rosenfeld; his most notable achievement was publishing a translation of the Finnish epic The Kalevala, for which he was honored by the Finnish government. (Here’s his 1960 funeral announcement, the only online trace I could find.) Searching his name in the Library of Congress, I found an edition that Rosenfeld had published in Vilna in 1929; the edition that I was gifted was published here in 1954 (image below). Rose also gave me a bookshelf of Yiddish books he owned, including loose pages of his English translations; and some English books, containing his Yiddish translations, including of famous Black poems of the Harlem Renaissance.
Rose was a friend of Gabriel Preil, perhaps the last major American Yiddish poet. She gave me one of his books, called simply Lider (poems); also, oddly, I have an envelope containing a magazine that he received in the mail, addressed to his apartment in Brooklyn.
My final Yiddish inheritance arrived last year, after the passing of a long-lost relative. Amongst several hundred photographs, I found one box with a bundle of letters and postcards, from the years before WW1. Some of the letters are in Polish, sent to and from Poland, but most are in Yiddish. The writing is florid, elegant but hard for me to decipher. (I can make my way through printed Yiddish text with frequent trips to the dictionary.) I believe that several are letters between my great-uncle in the Bronx and great-aunt in Philadelphia, before their marriage.
For perfectly understandable reasons, our schools today teach our students Hebrew, with very few still including a tam of Yiddish. (The hasidic community keeps Yiddish alive as a mama loshn, a language of everyday life, but with less interest in the language’s history and literature, primarily secular.) And yet, the history of Jews in the US and many other countries was written much more in Yiddish than in Hebrew. (Of course, some of that history was written in other languages too, including Ladino and German.) Those Yiddish speakers and writers left a legacy that is important for our students’ understanding of our place in our country’s history. Increasingly, that Yiddishe geshichte is lost to all but a few fabrente scholars and fans. Those interested in exploring, however, have plenty of places online to start, including Grade’s archive, the YIVO website and the National Yiddish Book Center’s library.
I enjoyed your lovely article!