opinion
YIVO Digitizes Chaim Grade’s Archive, a
Yiddish Treasure With a Soap Opera Backstory
Andrew Silow-Carroll
Y ears ago, when I worked at
the Forward, I had a cameo in
a real-life Yiddish drama.

A cub reporter named Max Gross
sat just outside my office, where he
answered the phones. A frequent
caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer
Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy.

Mrs. Grade would badger poor Max in dozens of phone
calls, especially when a Forward story referred kindly
to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Grade’s
widow described Singer as a “blasphemous buffoon”
whose fame and reputation, she was convinced, came
at the expense of her husband’s.

As Gross explains in his 2008 memoir, “From Schlub
to Stud,” Mrs. Grade “became a bit of a joke around the
paper.” And yet in Yiddish literary circles, her protective-
ness of one of the 20th century’s most important Yiddish
writers was serious business: Because Inna Grade kept
such a tight hold on her late husband’s papers — Chaim
Grade (pronounced “Grah-deh”) died in 1982 — a gener-
ation of scholars was thwarted in taking his true measure.

Inna Grade died in 2010, leaving no signed will or
survivors, and the contents of her cluttered Bronx
apartment became the property of the borough’s
public administrator. In 2013, Chaim Grade’s personal
papers, 20,000-volume library, literary manuscripts
and publication rights were awarded to the YIVO
Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library
of Israel. They are now stored in YIVO headquarters on
Manhattan’s West 16th Street.

YIVO and the NLI just announced the completion
of the digitization of “The Papers of Chaim Grade and
Inna Hecker Grade,” making the entire archive publicly
accessible online. When the folks at YIVO invited me
to come and look at the Grade collection, I knew I had
to invite Gross, not just because of his connection to
Inna Grade but because he has become a critically
acclaimed novelist in his own right: His 2020 novel
“The Lost Shtetl,” which imagines a Jewish village in
Poland that has somehow escaped the Holocaust, is in
many ways an homage to the Yiddish literary tradition.

We met with the YIVO staff, who were tickled by
the T-shirt Gross was wearing, which had a picture of
Chaim Grade and the phrase “Grade is my homeboy.”
(Gross said his wife bought it for him, although neither
could imagine the market for such a shirt.)
The Grade papers — manuscripts, photographs,
correspondence, lectures, speeches and essays — are
stored in folders in gray boxes, whose neatness belies
14 FEBRUARY 16, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
the years of effort that went into putting them in order.

Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of YIVO,
described for us the Grades’ apartment, which he
visited shortly after Inna’s death.

“It was like a combination of my grandmother’s apart-
ment and a writer’s home,” he said. “Everything was
books, books to the ceiling. You open a drawer in the
kitchen where you think there’ll be knives and forks,
there are books, there are manuscripts. You open the
cabinet in the bathroom, there are more manuscripts
and books and books. .... But the thing I remember
most is that at the top of a shelf there was that much
dust.” He held his fingers about two inches apart.

Inna Grade was Chaim Grade’s second wife. The writer
was born in Vilna (now in Lithuania) in 1910. He was able
to flee east during the Nazi occupation, leaving behind
his mother and his first wife under the assumption that
the Germans would only target adult men. It was a tragic
miscalculation, and their deaths would haunt Grade for
the rest of his life. Inna Hecker was born in Ukraine in
1925 and met Grade in Moscow during the war. Married
in 1945, they immigrated to the United States in 1948.

Chaim Grade had already established a reputation
as a poet, playwright and prose stylist before the war;
English translations of his novels “The Agunah” and “The
Yeshiva” and serial publication of his novels in the Yiddish
press brought him recognition in America for what the
Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse calls a “Dostoyevskian
talent to animate in fiction the destroyed Talmudic
civilization of Europe.” Columbia University professor
Jeremy Dauber, in a YIVO release, said that Grade was
possessed “by the spirit of the yeshiva world he’d left
behind; then possessed by the spirits and memories of
those who’d been murdered by the Nazis.”
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives,
showed us the physical evidence of that possession:
Grade’s notebooks, in which he wrote down ideas and
inspiration in a careful Yiddish script; manuscripts for at
least two unpublished dramatic works, “The Dead Can’t
Rise Up” and “Hurban” (“Destruction”); a photograph of
Grade standing amidst the ruins of Vilna during his only
visit after the war; pictures of the Bronx apartment taken
when the couple was still alive, book-filled but still tidy.

Halpern also showed us the Yiddish typewriter
recovered from the apartment, with what is believed to
be the last page he worked on still rolled in its platen.

The archivists are also careful to give Inna Grade her
due. After arriving in America, she studied literature
and received a master’s degree from Columbia, and
often translated her husband’s work. Thanks to her,
hundreds of clippings of Grade’s work and articles
about him have survived.

Her correspondence reflects the lengths she went
to protect her husband’s legacy during and after his
lifetime, including a bizarre and lengthy letter to the
Vatican complaining about Singer. “She was a brilliant and
creative person, devoted in a way only a widow can be,”
Brent said. “And perhaps devoted to a maddening extent.”
If all that sounds like the stuff of Jewish fiction, it is:
In 1969, Cynthia Ozick wrote a novella called “Envy; or,
Yiddish in America,” about Yiddish writers very much
like Grade consumed with envy for a writer very much
like Singer. “They hated him for the amazing thing that
had happened to him — his fame — but this they never
referred to,” Ozick wrote. “Instead they discussed his
style: his Yiddish was impure, his sentences lacked grace
and sweep, his paragraph transitions were amateur, vile.”
Halpern showed us a mailgram from Inna Grade
to the Forward that makes it clear that she and her
husband read and hated the story. In it, she describes
Ozick as “no less grotesque than evil.”
For all of the gothic Yiddish aspects of its retrieval,
“this is probably the single most important literary
acquisition in YIVO’s postwar history,” Brent said of
the archive. He described publishing projects already
underway with Schocken Books and other publishers
that will draw on the material.

Gross and I discussed what it felt like to see what
had become “a bit of a joke” around the Forward office
placed at the center of an epic exercise in literary
preservation. He was struck by the way Inna Grade’s
personality came through in the papers. “This was her,”
he said. “Her obsession, her struggle, all these things. It
was definitely remarkable to see that.”
I recalled overhearing his conversations with Inna
Grade, and how her behavior could seem funny and
exasperating, but also admirable and more than a little
sad — in that her devotion to her husband’s reputation
may also have prevented scholars from doing the work
that would have made him better known.

“Exactly, but that’s one of the reasons why you get
into Yiddish literature, because all of these things are
true at the same time,” Gross said. “Those kinds of
scores, rivalries, feuds within Yiddish literature is what
is so great about it. It is great to see that somebody
really cared and that literature was taken so seriously.

And the pettiness was something you couldn’t quite
divest from the rest of it.” ■
Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor-in-chief of the New
York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency. He previously served as JTA’s
editor-in-chief and as editor-in-chief and CEO of the
New Jersey Jewish News.




nation / world
Three Minor Quakes in 24
Hours Rattle Israel
Two earthquakes shook Israel on Feb.

8, measuring 3.3 and 3.9 on the Richter
scale, respectively, JNS.org reported.

The fi rst was in central Israel, and the
second was in Lebanon but felt across
A view of the Old City of Jerusalem
the Golan Heights.

on Dec. 17, 2019
The temblors followed a 3.5 magni-
tude quake overnight on Feb. 7 centered 9 miles southeast of Ariel, which was
felt in Jerusalem and surrounding areas.

There were no reports of injuries or damage, aside from limited cracks in the
walls of residential apartments.

The three quakes, occurring within 24 hours, come on the backdrop of the devas-
tating earthquakes that have killed more than 35,000 people in Turkey and Syria.

The Knesset Internal Aff airs and Environment Committee earlier in the week
called for an emergency meeting to review the country’s earthquake prepared-
ness in light of the devastation in Turkey and Syria. Concurrently, Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has directed National Security Council head Tzachi
Hanegbi to “update and reiterate the steps we need to take.”
Barcelona Mayor Severs Ties With Twin City of Tel Aviv, Citing
Israeli ‘Apartheid’
Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau announced that the city is no longer twinned with
Tel Aviv, citing claims that Israel is guilty of “apartheid,” as well as “fl agrant and
systematic violation of human rights.,” JTA.org reported.

Barcelona and Tel Aviv entered the relationship in 1998 — when both cities
jointly signed a “twin city” agreement with Gaza City. Colau’s decision comes
less than a year after Barcelona launched two linked campaigns — “Shalom
Barcelona” and “Barcelona Connects Israel” to appeal to Jewish and Israeli
tourists interested in exploring their heritage. Last summer, the city opened up
the world’s fi rst Michelin-starred kosher restaurant.

“More than 100 organizations and over 4,000 citizens have demanded that
we defend the human rights of Palestinians and for this reason, as mayor, I have
written to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to inform him that I have
suspended temporarily the institutional relationship between Barcelona and Tel
Aviv,” said Colau, who has been Barcelona’s mayor since 2015, on Feb. 8.

The Federation of the Jewish Communities of Spain condemned the decision,
which it called “sophisticated antisemitism.”
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Photo by Moshe Shai/Flash90 via JNS.org
Bill to Criminalize Egalitarian Prayer, Immodest Dress at Western
Wall Is Shelved
A proposed Israeli law that would sharply curtail the rights of women and non-
Orthodox Jews at the Western Wall sparked alarm on Feb. 9, leading Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pledge that regulations at the holy site
would “remain exactly the same” as they are now, JTA.org reported.

The bill was submitted by a lawmaker from Shas, the Sephardi haredi Orthodox
party that is a member of Netanyahu’s governing coalition. It would have criminal-
ized mixed-gender prayer at the site, as well as immodest dress and the playing
of musical instruments.

Women would be forbidden from reading from a Torah scroll or blowing a
shofar at the site. Women would not be allowed to don prayer shawls or tefi llin,
the leather boxes and straps traditionally worn by Jews during morning prayers
and historically worn only by men.

The bill’s provisions also would have applied to the Wall’s non-Orthodox
section, adjacent to the main plaza. Off enders would have faced a fi ne of approx-
imately $3,000 or six months in prison. ■
— Compiled by Andy Gotlieb
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM 15