Sons and Daughters - Chaim Grade

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Sons and Daughters

by
Chaim Grade

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Title:	Sons and Daughters
Author:	Chaim Grade
Genre:	Novel
Written:	(1965-76) (Eng. 2025)
Length:	664 pages
Original in:	Yiddish
Availability:	Sons and Daughters - US
	Sons and Daughters - UK
	Sons and Daughters - Canada

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Serialized, under various titles, between 1965 and 1976; never published in book form
Translated and with a Note by Rose Waldman
With an Introduction by Adam Kirsch

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Our Assessment:

B : fine, sprawling epic of rabbinical families in Poland between the wars

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Forward	.	25/2/2025	Yossi Newfield
The NY Times Book Rev.	.	10/3/2025	Dwight Garner

From the Reviews:

"It masterfully describes the breakdown of tradition as modernity made ever deeper inroads into the shtetl way of life. (...) One of Grade’s most disturbing characters is the mercurial Shabse-Shepsel. (...) Shapse-Shepsel, seen as somewhat of a madmen by the other characters, has some of the most memorable lines in the novel. (...) Grade apparently created the character Shabse-Shepsel as a stand-in for the shtot meshugener, the town idiot. This narrative device makes the Holocaust palpable on every page of the first half of the book. And you truly feel it." - Yossi Newfield, Forward

"His fretful characters vibrate as if they were drawn by Roz Chast. Nearly everyone is about to smack someone. Sons and Daughters is a melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny. It’s a great beard novel. (...) Sons and Daughters is also a great food novel. (...) This is probably the place to point out this novel’s drawbacks, which to me are minor but might mean more to you. Sons and Daughters is so tightly written that the action moves at a crawl. (...) I don’t read Yiddish, but Rose Waldman’s translation of Sons and Daughters seems miraculous to me. The language is crisp and clean; it is also bright, like a painting that has been restored." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Chaim Grade published what has now been edited and translated as Sons and Daughters serially in two Yiddish periodicals between 1965 and 1976, but the author never completed work on transforming all of the material into a novel(-manuscript) or, indeed, finished the work itself. (Amusingly, in her Translator's Note, Rose Waldman notes that: "I prefer to keep my curiosity piqued, and so I tend to read and translate simultaneously. Because of this, I had invested about a year's work and nearly completed the 450-page translation before I realized the novel was unfinished" -- though at the time she only had the first of Grade's planned two volumes of the novel; she pieced together (what there was of) the rest from the serial-publications.)
       Grade's serials were published under three different titles: The Old House, Sons and Daughters, and The Rabbi's House. A sprawling family saga, Sons and Daughters is appropriate enough for this English version, as much of the story deals with the different paths of, in particular, the sons and daughters of the rabbi of (fictional) Morehdalye, pater familias Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen -- though it extends considerably further as well, including to the household of Sholem Shachne's father-in-law, Eli-Leizer Epstein, another rabbi (with his own set of sons and daughters ...), as much of the action is set in an around not one but several rabbi's house(hold)s.
       The rabbi-figures do dominate, with many of the sons following in their father's footsteps and the rabbinical and scholarly life (of this particular sort -- devoted to studying and interpreting the Torah), but also straying from the path(s): few fathers here are happy with those that their sons follow. Already fairly early on Eli-Leizer commiserates with his son-in-law:

"You're already a grandfather," he said, "and I, thank God, a great-grandfather. But in truth, neither one of us has children."
"I'm so ashamed before my congregants to have such children. I'm ready to leave everything behind and flee to the other end of the world," Sholem Shachne said.
"And I'm not ashamed at al !" the old man cried, his voice regaining strength. "I did everything possible to set my children on the right path, and if it didn't succeed, it's not my fault. These corrupting Jews have wrecked my family, and that's why I war against them so stubbornly."

These two rabbis have a clear idea of how the true faith is to be honored and followed, but other forces, from within and without, pull in other directions. Language is part of that too; though mostly in the background here it suffuses the text -- more obviously, of course, in the original Yiddish. The rabbis read and speak rabbinic, 'holy' Hebrew, and Sholem Shachne complains to his wife:

"If my sons had stuck to the Torah," he said, "they'd be writing me innovative interpretations in Hebrew and asking me to send regards to their mother. But, well, they became whatever they became, so all of them write in Yiddish. Even the chalutz. So you can read it to yourself.

       While the sons are, in part keeping up with the times, Sholem Shachne holds fast to the old -- language and all, noting of one son, for example: "Apparently, Refael'ke is learning the new Ivrit, modern Hebrew. I don't understand every word here, but I certainly get the gist of it". Those Jews turning to modern Hebrew are suspect -- one academically gifted youth (who, however, later also abandons the path), with a great grasp of (rabbinic) Hebrew grammar is described as wanting: "nothing to do with the youth studying modern Hebrew, the ones preparing to emigrate to the land of Israel".
       Set mostly in the Poland of the 1930s, the older rabbinical generation holds onto tradition, set in their ways and places, with Eli-Leizer going so far as to say of the idea of 'Israel': "A new fad -- a Jewish country !" as he and Sholem Shachne focus on their local communities, and, above all, on religious devotion and the study of the Torah ("If you don't believe in God and the Torah, what do you need the land of Israel for ?"). Yet the communities -- certainly in Morehdalye -- are already increasingly isolated ones: the politics of the times is left largely unspoken of, but the virulent antisemitism in Poland and Germany does loom ominously all over, even as mentions of its local manifestations only occasionally crop up (as with the militant groups that won't allow Polish Christians to shop in Jewish stores: "the Polish bojówkas hovered near the Jewish shops, forbidding Polish peasants from going in and buying from the zhids") -- though also because, as one character points out, unlike elsewhere in Poland, where it has come to clashes and pogroms, there has been no very active resistance from the local Jewish community: "Here in Morehdalye it's deathly silent, like a cemetery". The characters encounter little antisemitic violence in person; among the few acknowledgements of much worse things going on is only presented at its most distant, one of Sholem Shachne's semi-wayward sons, Naftali Hertz, who lives in Switzerland concerned and upset about: "the news of the antisemitic excesses in Poland that he'd read about in the papers. Hatred ran rampant in the cities, and in the villages there were pogroms".
       Sholem Shachne is deeply religious and conservative: he won't shake a a woman's hand, and gets apoplectic at the thought of any violation of the Sabbath: "Enraged, Sholem Shachne burst out, 'On Shabbos ? You traveled from Bialystok to Morehdalye on Shabbos ?'" (no worries, readers -- they hadn't). For all his sons' straying from the right path, he nevertheless also imbued them with a sense of what true piety involves. Naftali Hertz -- who does the unthinkable, marrying a Christian (and allowing his son to remain uncircumcised), so shameful that he can not bring himself to tell his parents ... -- explains to his Swiss wife that the practice of the faith in Switzerland is of a different order than from where he comes from: "I've already explained to you that our local Jewish community can't be compared to the Polish Jews. It's like comparing a stick figure to a real live person". Another son, Bentzion, is sent by Sholem Shachne to Bialystok, where Sholem Shachne's older brother is the rabbi, but, although Bentzion does not want to follow in his father's (and uncle's) rabbinical footsteps, he still avoids his uncle's house because, as he explains to his father: "his home is completely devoid of spirituality", and that: "my uncle and his sons exploit the Torah for business. All they talk about in that house is money -- money, money, and more money", and he can't respect that.
       Naftali Hertz comes to realize that: "Judaism isn't the sort of business you could be rid of" -- and:

One's ancestry, Naftali Hertz mused, with all its roots and branches, keeps rabbinical children entangled with their source, so that they cannot tear themselves free.

So, indeed, the siblings find, with the fiancé of one of Sholem Shachne's daughters, Bluma Rivtcha, recognizing about her and Naftali Hertz that distance and different careers only take them so far:

Just as your brother, the little doctor, is still a yeshiva boy, you're still a rebbetzin.

       Sholem Shachne agonizes over where he went wrong, though his kids seem to have turned out reasonably well -- save for the fact that they haven't really embraced their Judaism in the way Sholem Shachne had hoped for and expected. Even where one more or less does -- eldest daughter Tilza dutifully married a rabbi -- she can't fully embrace the rebbetzin-life (and is disappointed by her husband's lack of tenderness: "What I'm lacking from Yaakov Asher is the Song of Songs"), and complains about the yeshiva boys as being: "all so shamelessly pious".
       The greatest shame -- that Naftali Hertz married a Christian ("Neither I nor you uncle would suspect you of such a thing. How could anyone even imagine that a son of mine would take a Christian wife ?" Sholem Shachne tells him at one point ...) -- is one that Naftali Hertz keeps from his parents for decades, making for some of the ongoing narrative tension in the novel (as well as some of the humor, as, for example, his mother responds to Naftali Hertz's objection to Bluma Rivtcha's fiancé by pointing out: "It's not as if your sister brought a goy into the house", with Naftali Hertz then struggling to keep from blurting out his dark secret). The tension about this terrible secret builds towards the novel's conclusion -- with Naftali Hertz's wife bringing things to a head with an ultimatum -- and figures also in the apparently planned resolution, a brief excerpt translator Rose Waldman presents in her concluding Note ("Not an actual ending, but a glimpse of what we might have gotten had Grade completed Sons and Daughters").
       Over the course of the long novel there's also a variety of professional and personal antagonism between the various characters. Grade juggles many here -- it's a very crowded novel (with a helpful Cast of Characters-list at the beginning, to help readers keep track ...) -- and some get short(er) shrift, as we learn less about some of the sons and daughters' doing than we might want. The serial nature of the story -- and perhaps the long time over which Grade worked on it -- also makes for an uneven, at times very episodic feel to the novel, with an uneven progression to it -- though there are some strong narrative stretches, extending over several chapters, throughout.
       The novel is here divided into four parts, with especially the last having a very different feel from the rest. Though the fourth section was presumably the one Grade had no opportunity to (re)shape more into novel-form, it has some of the novel's strongest scenes, and whereas much of the discussion and argument between characters and generations in the earlier sections is succinct, the characters here seem to be allowed more space to make their cases -- helped in no small part by the appearance of Grade-stand-in, Bluma Rivtcha's fiancé, the wannabe Yiddish poet Khlavneh Yeshurin. (Naftali Hertz's presence, and his personal crisis (and antipathy to Khlavneh Yeshurin, whom he dismisses as a "jargon writer"), also help in this section.)
       Early on already, readers are told that Sholem Shachne is convinced: "all novels were taboo, immoral" -- yet his wife is also able to convince him to allow their daughter, Tilza, to read them (perhaps because she: "never finished reading them, not even halfway. It was enough for her to skim a few pages and then go back to daydreaming"). The subject of 'creative' writing -- as opposed to the religious texts that otherwise so completely dominate -- come to the fore again near the end of the novel as, in making the case for her fiancé, Bluma Rivtcha tells her parents:

But a poet is also a kind of person who feels and thinks differently, sees things differently, expresses himself differently. And I trust Khlavneh. I have no doubt that just as he excelled at Torah learning, he'll excel at writing poetry

       Of course, anything 'different' is a threat to the ancient, hidebound traditions Sholem Shachne clings to. So also Khlavneh Yeshurin's choice to write in Yiddish is shocking -- at least to Naftali Hertz. Here, Sholem Shachne proves to be the (somewhat) more open-minded, arguing: "Makes no difference which language a person writes in; the important things is what he writes."
       Other writing -- specifically philosophy -- also feature some, most prominently Nietzsche, who is embraced with particular fervor by one of the secondary characters (another son), while Marx gets little more than a passing nod: outside thought is acknowledged, but its reach remains limited. Naftali Hertz is a doctor of philosophy -- but can't get an academic posting and winds up a librarian, overseeing: "the Jewish division of the Bern university library", a return of sorts to the (inescapable ...) fold .....
       Sons and Daughters is sprawling and meandering -- agreeably so, for the most part, though (perhaps appropriately ?) it often feels somewhat stuck in place, not really moving forward (while it is at its best when there is forward movement, when the sons and daughters do get on with their lives -- but with its focus on Sholem Shachne this often isn't central enough). Grade offers some vivid description, but most of the action is limited to the rabbis' houses and related locales; there's little sense of the lives of the common man in the shtetl -- a shame, because some of the best scenes are when Grade ventures elsewhere, for example when he sends Sholem Shachne on the road, including to visit one of his sons in Bialystok. The large cast of characters is also somewhat problematic, as not all can get their due, with interesting threads and fates left dangling.
       A strong piece of work, Sons and Daughters is -- unsurprisingly, given its textual history -- a bit unpolished, leaving it feeling somewhat misshapen. Still, it's a rewarding and entertaining read.

- M.A.Orthofer, 18 March 2025

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Links:

Sons and Daughters:

Alfred A. Knopf publicity page

Reviews:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Israeli, Hebrew, and Yiddish literature
See Index of Eastern European literature
See Index of Contemporary American fiction

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About the Author:

Yiddish-writing author Chaim Grade (חיים גראַדע) lived 1910 to 1982

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