Chaim Grade

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Chaim Grade (b. April 4, 1910, in Vilna, Russia (Wilno, Poland after World War I until the Soviet Union's invasion on September 17, 1939) now Vilnius, Lithuania); d. April 26, 1982, Los Angeles, California) was one of the leading Yiddish writers of the twentieth century.

Chaim Grade, the son of Rabbi Shlomo Mordecai Grade, a Hebrew teacher and maskil (advocate of the European Enlightenment), received a secular as well as Jewish religious education. He was the favorite disciple of Rabbi Avrohom Yeshaya Karelitz, the Chazon Ish (1878-1953), one of observant Judaism's great Torah scholars. In 1932, Grade began publishing stories and poems in Yiddish, and in the early 1930s was among the founding members of the "Young Vilna" experimental group of artists and writers. He developed a reputation as one of the city's most articulate literary interpreters.

Following the German invasion of Vilnius in World War II, Grade fled eastward and sought refuge in the Soviet Union. When the war ended, he lived briefly in Poland and France before relocating to the United States in 1948.

Grade's postwar poetry is primarily concerned with Jewish survival in the wake of the Holocaust, among whose victims were his wife Frumme-Liebe Grade (nee Misholi), the daughter of the Rabbi of Glebokie, and his mother Vella Grade Rosenthal, daughter of Rabbi Rafael Blumenthal.

Grade's most highly acclaimed novels, The Agunah (1961, tr. 1974) and The Yeshiva (2 vol., 1967-68, tr. 1976-77), deal with the philosophical and ethical dilemmas of Jewish life in prewar Lithuania, particularly dwelling on the Novardok Mussar movement. These two works were translated from the original Yiddish into English by Curt Leviant. Grade's short story, "My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner," is an affective account of two old friends, one a rabbi and the other a secular Jewish writer, who meet by chance after the holocaust and debate its meaning for their lives as Jews. Though posed as a discussion of Jewishness, it powerfully addresses religion in the postmodern world. The story has been made into a film, The Quarrel.

While less famous than Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yentl or Sholem Aleichem's Fiddler on the Roof Chaim Grade's meticulous description of Eastern European Jewry, the civilization which the German Nazi's forever annihilated, places him on a plane with Dostoevsky and Balzac. --71.194.100.254 04:31, 20 February 2007 (UTC)