The World Of Chaim Grade
Shepard, Richard F.
THE WORLD OF CHAM GRADE RICHARD ? SHEPARD In 1967, Elie Wiesel, reviewing the English version of Chaim Grade's The Agunah, wrote, "The work of Chaim Grade, by its vision and scope, establishes him...
...I have no money problem, but I don't have the time...
...Every weekend I have a story in the Forward...
...I like to read," Grade says, emphasizing the obvious as he and his visitor thread their way through walls of books to the room that serves as his study...
...He was not abashed when I said that I would just like to chat and, serendipitiously, to see what would emerge...
...But those were the times then, and the times swept them along...
...My dream is not to write...
...On Erev Pesach, when he's visiting his parents, he wants to tell the truth, but his mother won't let him...
...It is called Beth Ha-Rav...
...We can just put things together...
...Although Judaism might be debated, embraced or rejected, it was a place of Jewish life and reflected all the streams of thought that flowed through its fast-pulsing body...
...It is overflowing with books, thousands of books in English, Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Russian, Polish, French, Italian, and Greek—books that brim with knowledge and philosophy and history, books of Chinese poetry (in German), of English history and Jewish thought, indeed thought of all kinds...
...But this is not disconcerting...
...He is always in demand as a lecturer—in Yiddish, of course...
...Now, it has become a business, writing about yourself and what you did...
...He is intense but pleasant, a courteous and considerate host...
...You know you will end up there by bus or train or plane...
...It is understood that it is not a matter of love...
...But it is like no other apartment in the neighborhood...
...A few find wives who survived, but every woman has a problem that the husband will never understand...
...For over 40 years, I wrote narrative poems as I wrote other poems...
...In these lines, simple yet eloquent, is the essential Grade, a summation...
...I wrote a 24 line poem on my 70th birthday that will be the last poem of my book of selected poems...
...To publish a book in Yiddish there are so many problems...
...There is somebody in you who is stronger than you...
...Nor in dent oylem haneshomes vet zein groys der treyer, Vos oikh di lets ter Vilner yortseit licht is shoyn farloshn...
...Before and after each of these poems, I write a lyrical introduction and postlogue...
...So did Tolstoy...
...Chaim Grade was the son of a Hebrew teacher and of a gentle hardworking mother whom he adored...
...Now, however, the problem is not to judge whether there is a God or whether there is no God...
...What will happen...
...The memorial candle will indeed never be extinguished because they have been written...
...It all revolves around the sons and daughters...
...But nobody, really believed that they had done what they wrote about...
...His city was Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, where Jewish-ness was never in question...
...I said that before the Holocaust, this problem was a personal crisis, but not a problem for the Jews...
...Surely, he is the most authentic...
...I asked him if he had read my book, The Yeshiva, about Zemach Atlas, a young rabbi who had lost his faith...
...What follows is the result of that talk, with only minimal course-setting by the interviewer...
...We are not gods, we are writers...
...A lot of things are not current...
...I want you to make me a baal tshuva.' "He visited me and told me that the Torah was good but that he no longer believed that there is a God...
...It is the same with a book...
...Everything I wrote in prose, I wrote first in poetry...
...Without anything ever being said, they eventually understand that he has a gentile wife...
...You can go blind if you look back on the way...
...You must remember I had been in the Yeshiva before that...
...They don't understand each other...
...My Mother's Sabbath Days, will soon be published by Knopf...
...It will be a philosophical dialogue...
...It creates terrible strains...
...For the book, I will write a long epilogue in which I will tell about the young man going home...
...They speak, funereally, of a past and of the death of memories...
...They don't know about his wife and son...
...I am sure that there is a Jewish God...
...These are all galleys of poetry...
...She brought Samuel to Saul...
...To finish it, I must go to live in Switzerland for two months...
...My first poem, 'My Mother,' I wrote when I was 23 or 24 years old...
...Before the Holocaust, he set himself to questioning, to tearing down convention...
...Grade speaks in English, sometimes calling upon Inna for translation of a word in Yiddish or Russian or German...
...Several books— including The Yeshiva, a two volume novel that is transcendental in its examination of the clash of certitude and faith with self-doubt and humanism—a number of poems and some short stories have already been published in English...
...This is what is important to me, not what is said in prayer...
...It is his hero who is saying and doing everything, even though he really has the writer's nature...
...They come from so many different places, from the Nazi death camps, the Russian concentration camps, from the forests, from the Aryan side where they hid...
...You don't look for the way, the way looks for you...
...Another man, a hero, is the 85 year old rabbi, an awesome old man, fanatically religious, a character from my first wife's family...
...To write about people, it means living there for a long time...
...he proposes to her...
...It is a Jewish environment, inhabited, perhaps like Vilna, by Jews of all persuasions...
...They look back and they don't like what they did...
...There are a lot of heroes in my books, a lot of writing about my family...
...I have more secrets in my prose than I have in my poetry...
...I don't like to write...
...I may have done certain things I have my heroes do, but I don't want to give the impression that I did it...
...In 1929,1 wrote an 80 page narrative poem, 'The Musarniker,' and later I wrote about the Musarniks in The Yeshiva...
...I can't throw out even a newspaper or a magazine...
...When the Nazis invaded, Chaim left his mother and his First wife, at their behest, and fled east into the Soviet regions, where he spent the war years...
...But what is important for the Jewish people is that there is a Jewish God...
...I like to show many pictures of my life...
...It was rumored that he had committed certain crimes that he described as crimes of his characters...
...There is no verlag...
...The good reader can recognize when a writer is writing about himself or when he is just taking a picture...
...they are before our eyes...
...But this is the novel...
...But he does more than that...
...But Grade, at 70, is now available to those who know only English...
...Once a woman told me that she recognized a character in one of my books as myself...
...The Witch of Endor could hear him but not see him...
...Little by little, they become suspicious...
...But she was right...
...What do you want, I asked him...
...I am now writing a novel, From Beneath the Ground, which runs every week serially in the Forward...
...Lecturing is a pursuit that has helped him earn a living most of his life, and public speaking has taken him from Los Angeles to Miami, from Buenos Aires to Johannesburg, and to Harvard...
...We have so few readers...
...But Dostoevsky's publisher could not understand it and eliminated that chapter from the novel...
...Myself, I have no money problem...
...Grade stands up and goes to his desk, where file folders bulge with galleys...
...I said, no, no, not at all...
...I say I lived there a long time...
...So he travels from his home in Switzerland to see them...
...If I didn't read, what would I do with my time...
...I wrote a poem about Switzerland, 'Geter von de Berg.' People ask me how long I lived there...
...Now all the children have gone away from Torah, a tragedy...
...A translation of yet another work...
...I will never do it...
...No press...
...Any misbegotten ideas of Grade as simple chronicler of Yiddish life in Eastern Europe, ideas that should have been dispelled by a reading of his work, are quickly dispersed in this deliciously bookish atmosphere, where books are on shelves, on tables, in drawers, on desks, on any flat surface where a book can fit...
...I'm a Yeshiva bocher, I am modest about revealing myself...
...His English is fair, and even when the grammar is distorted his meaning comes through with crystal-clear impact, the force of a man who knows exactly what he wants to say...
...For whom...
...Like many poets, I find things to change in my poems...
...Many of them are aging burnt-out revolutionaries and radicals who have also renounced their faith of younger years...
...everything is meaningful...
...It was almost despite himself that his admirers, among them Curt Leviant, who translated The Agunah and The Yeshiva, have arranged that Grade's work appear more widely in English: He has an innate fear that others will not understand them any more than he does...
...The synagogue-court gates will not open for my bier...
...One has a baby by a White Russian who has saved her...
...Everything is absorbed and remembered...
...A word that was said, perhaps casually (although the analyst will say that nothing is casual) is recalled from a conversation that took place a half-dozen years ago...
...A good reader must learn to distinguish between the confession of a crime and the confession of an obsession by a criminal fantasy, by a curiosity about a crime...
...many of them are younger middle-minded families, some Orthodox, some Conservative, some with no religious affiliation at all...
...That is why I don't write about America...
...As befits a writer, nothing is dismissed as small talk...
...But they have been written...
...Other things I wrote when I was young and in a revolutionary phase...
...In the autumn, I went to temple in the mountains...
...It would be a mistake to dismiss Grade as a mere memorialist of the past...
...Like a survivor returning to pick up pieces of what was once home after a volcanic eruption, Grade collected, in his mind, the pieces of what had vanished...
...My world is from the 1920s to 1945, that is the world I remember...
...he writes, as all great writers do, of the never resolved struggle between man and evil, even of the struggle between man and his ideals—in short, of the conflict between man and his soul...
...In the end, a bout of flu spared him the decision...
...Then, during the war, in Russia, I wrote 'My Mother's Will.' My first book of prose, in 1929, was My Mother's Sabbath Days...
...When I will finish it, I don't know...
...His wife, also a writer, attended and served as surrogate for the acclaim his work received...
...The first hero is the oldest son of the second rabbi, a man who has run away from Yeshiva and become a doctor of philosophy...
...Of course, he did not commit them, yet no doubt those crimes were his obsessions...
...The people from Russia face a gulf that divides them from the people who survived the ghetto...
...A poet says everything in his own name...
...They take the first version, then a second, and then they write books comparing them...
...The writer knows some things about his poetry better than anyone else does—but some things he will never know...
...Rousseau created a great revolution because he wrote about what he did...
...it is stimulating, even flattering to the visitor who had forgotten what was said in that last meeting...
...As long as he can do that, he doesn't feel so separated from them...
...Stavrogin's confession to the violation of a little girl was Dos-toevsky's obsession—yet it was not his confession, for which reason he was able to create the image of Stavrogin...
...During a recent interview, he asked what the focus of the talk would be...
...Grade himself is an expressive man, short and strong featured, with eyes that penetrate a visitor with guileless curiosity, flooded with interest in what they perceive...
...Here he has written constantly, and his writing has gained recognition within Jewish society...
...I would rather read and learn things from other writers...
...Until recent years, he was little known to the English-speaking world, to any world but the one that still speaks Yiddish, and perhaps a bit to the Hebrew-speaking world in Israel, where he is also read...
...He went to theWitch of Endor...
...I began to write late, at 22...
...I don't know...
...Really, it is most important not to show that I am writing about my own life...
...He has been awarded honorary degrees by the Jewish Theological Seminary, Yeshiva University, and Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion, the only Yiddish writer to be so honored by the three institutions that represent the major approaches to Judaism in America...
...Grade, she says, was like Joyce, a seminarian born with sarcastic talent and an urge to demolish in order to rebuild...
...I know how Jewish life was before World War II, the suffering of the Jewish people during the war and the ten years after it...
...they are not important to my heart...
...sometimes I don't have the mood...
...Until the age of 22 he was a seminarian, a follower of Musar, a school of puritanical outlook that austerely looked upon any pleasure, any self-satisfaction, as an indulgence, a violation of submission to the Law and the Lord...
...And only in the world of spirits great will be the grief...
...He had to preserve, to resurrect, to put together the life that had been...
...possibly, of everything he has written or will write...
...Some time later, this young man called me...
...In every book, ten of them, there are a few poems about my mother...
...He gave me t'fillin—I have always had my tallis—and every time I go away I take them with me, even if I don't use them...
...If one truly commits a grave transgression or a crime, then all that remains to be written is a confession—as did Rousseau when he confessed his pathological actions, or Dostoev-sky's own Stavrogin in The Possessed...
...This was the way of the old writers, never to invent what could never happen, never to tell openly what happened or could have happened if it was too drastic...
...The war is still within them...
...I can't say new things...
...There he was exposed to both Orthodoxy and secular life...
...In the Talmud, there is an account of King Saul who wanted to see the dead prophet Samuel...
...When he was recently invited to join other leading American poets for a reading at the White House, he was hesitant about accepting, reluctant to read in his beloved Yiddish yet unwilling to read his work in English translation...
...In the early 1930s, Grade left Orthodoxy, although to judge from his writings, he never left it "to go over to the other side," a side equally orthodox, virulent, and zealous in its rejection of everything outside itself...
...I'm an old-fashioned writer...
...in English, The Rabbi's House...
...But I feel obligated to leave a mitzeva, a monument stone...
...They are one candle...
...Every week I write another installment...
...THE WORLD OF CHAM GRADE RICHARD ? SHEPARD In 1967, Elie Wiesel, reviewing the English version of Chaim Grade's The Agunah, wrote, "The work of Chaim Grade, by its vision and scope, establishes him at the age of 64 as one of the great—if not the greatest—of living Yiddish novelists...
...It seems trivial, demeaning, to reduce the man and his work to ratings such as "best," "most Jewish," or "best in Yiddish," as though he were in the running for some sort of literary sweepstakes, waiting for the Great Scribe to open the envelope from the impartial accounting firm that has taken the tally of merit...
...It is a story about people returning to Vilna after the Holocaust...
...I also have a manuscript in prose, a novel in galleys, 500 pages...
...Saul could see him but he could not hear him...
...Scholars like to discuss old versions and new versions, but scholars are superficial...
...When you take away the assumptions, the attitudes, of a people you take away the national pride...
...It is a world, rather than a style, which he fears cannot be translated...
...His family believes he is still a good Jew...
...He answered, 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi!—I am Emma Bovary!' I read somewhere that Flaubert added later, 'I am even her dog!' Consider Dostoevsky...
...He is poet and novelist, a Yiddish writer who recalls, poignantly but objectively, the rich Jewish life of Eastern Europe...
...What kind of philosophy can it be...
...A daughter has the fantasy that she wants to marry for love...
...He has a library of Judaica, a gentile wife and an 18-year-old son...
...It is like taking a trip to Los Angeles...
...His diffidence stems from his doubts about the possibility of anyone resonating with the world of lost Yiddishkeit that he recreates...
...First the poem, then the prose, but not consciously...
...In 1946 Grade emigrated to France, and in 1948 he came to the United States...
...The lines are dimmed, perhaps, in practice, but they never are obliterated...
...The poet is like that, some things he cannot see, some things he cannot hear...
...It's a question of Jewish survival...
...Upon his return to Vilna, both were gone, and so was the ancestral civilization in which his family had lived...
...Someone once asked Flaubert, who was Madame Bovary...
...I don't feel I understand the psychology of Americans, even the Orthodox here...
...A woman gave information about another man's wife and child...
...Do you want to make me a baal tshuval " 'No,' he answered...
...I was actually there two nights...
...I asked him how, if he no longer believed, he could continue to live such a life as he did, in Orthodoxy...
...But fate decreed him another destiny—to preserve and lament, Jeremiah-like, a world that had died and left him as lonely heir to its legacy...
...I know the last page, but how I will get there, I don't have it in my mind...
...The oldest rabbi is 85 years old, his son-in-law is 65, and the next generation's son-in-law is 45...
...They won't lament for me on the steps of the Old House of Prayer...
...I find a committee every time to publish me...
...I find that many people don't recognize the poems because I have reworked them...
...It makes me write every week, whether I want to or not...
...That is the secret of my prose, not to give myself away, consciously...
...We used to have publishing companies, with editors and proofreaders...
...He holds that it is possible to capture most of the thought...
...Now every writer has to publish by himself...
...The new novel tells the story of three generations of a family of rabbis...
...Reading takes 70 percent of my time...
...I don't want to write, but I feel I have an obligation to...
...He did everything he could, after the war...
...It is not yet finished and already I have to cut a little...
...Is there only one kind of philosophy, Spinoza's...
...In modern writing, it is the fashion for a writer to write as though he himself has done what his heroes do...
...They think that there can be a science of literature but they don't think about the spirit of literature...
...For many of these years I have been writing a long poem, 'Talmidei Hachamim in der Lite,' 'Students of Wisdom in Lithuania,' but I have never—not yet, anyhow—finished it...
...Every day I get in the mail Yiddish newspapers, all kinds of magazines...
...Today, Grade lives in the Bronx, in an apartment in a quiet, well-kept union cooperative...
...I published ten books of poetry...
...In the words of his wife, Inna Hecker Grade, "He doesn't idealize the lost world, he loves it...
...The Grade apartment is comfortable and tasteful...
...It is interesting that the consummation of a pathological urge of a crime uses up the energy necessary to create a fictional character capable of committing the crime, and thus to explore in fiction its psychology, its nature...
...Here is the problem: What does it mean, selected poetry...
...Chaim Grade is, in fact, considered by many connoisseurs to be the finest, most Jewish of Jewish writers living today...
...These books are not my hobby, they are my passion...
...Now I am doing a book of 600 pages of my selected poetry...
...It's not important to them that he mentions it...
...Grade is prolific, an unending producer of words and ideas, a mind that is never off duty...
...But he remains a man who is comfortable only within the orbit of Jewish life...
...Because the last memorial light for the old Vilna has burned out...
...They ask, why didn't you fight back...
...But you will get there...
...Men vet nit maspid zein mich oyfdi treplach fun kloyz yoshen...
...How, you don't know, by way of Detroit or Chicago...
...Grade recited the opening lines and his wife translated: Men vet nit far mein urn effenen dent shulhoif toyr...
...I began to cry because the prayers, the services, reminded me of the Jews I grew up with...
...The man just wants to keep on hearing about what happened to his wife and child...
...World War I, that is, not to see his mother and father and he is afraid that they will come to see him...
...A half-dozen years ago, I met a young rabbi who made it his business to convince me to return to Torah...
...A real writer of prose says everything about himself, but not in his name...
...After that, you can deal with all philosophical, intellectual and theological problems...
...Old friends, former Communists, don't like those poems...
...It is not that he believes that poetry is "that which is not translatable," as has been said...
...One son has gone to America and wants to make his father look ridiculous out of a wish for revenge...
...Richard F. Shepard is a cultural news reporter at the New York Times...
...Grade draws lines of demarcation between himself and his writing, between his prose and his poetry...
...Another gave her child to the Germans to save herself...
...For me, when I look at these poems I have written, it is like looking at a strange thing...
...They are part of his discipline as a writer...
Vol. 5 • September 1980 • No. 8
