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YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory
(JTA) — Years 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 Max 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 protectiveness 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 generation 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 W. 16th Street.
This week YIVO and the NLI will announce 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 Max, 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 on Thursday with the YIVO staff, who were tickled by the T-shirt Max was wearing, which had a picture of Chaim Grade and the phrase “Grade is my homeboy.” (Max said his wife bought it for him, although neither could imagine the market for such a shirt.)
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, and novelist Max Gross discuss a thick file containing news clippings relating to the late Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade at YIVO’s Manhattan offices, Feb. 2, 2023. (New York Jewish Week)
The Grade papers — manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, lectures, speeches, essays — are stored in folders in gray boxes, whose neatness belies 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 apartment 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 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, says 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” (“Sacrifice”); 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.
Chaim Grade’s typewriter, preserved in the condition it was found when the Yiddish author died in 1982, contains what are apparently the last lines he ever wrote. (New York Jewish Week)
The archivists are also careful to give Inna 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,” said Brent. “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,” wrote Ozick. “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 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.
Max 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. Max was struck by the way Inna’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, 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,” said Max. “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.”
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Iran Prepares Counterproposal as Trump Weighs Strikes
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with members of the media on board Air Force One en route to Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., January 31, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard
Iran’s foreign minister said on Friday he expected to have a draft counterproposal ready within days following nuclear talks with the United States this week, while US President Donald Trump said he was considering limited military strikes.
Two US officials told Reuters that US military planning on Iran had reached an advanced stage, with options including targeting individuals as part of an attack and even pursuing leadership change in Tehran, if ordered by Trump.
Trump on Thursday gave Tehran a deadline of 10 to 15 days to make a deal to resolve their longstanding nuclear dispute or face “really bad things” amid a US military buildup in the Middle East that has fueled fears of a wider war.
THREATS OF ATTACK FOLLOW CRACKDOWN ON MASS PROTESTS
Asked on Friday if he was considering a limited strike to pressure Iran into a deal, Trump told reporters at the White House: “I guess I can say I am considering” it. Asked later about Iran at a White House press conference, Trump added: “They better negotiate a fair deal.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said after indirect discussions in Geneva this week with Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner that the sides had reached an understanding on main “guiding principles,” but that did not mean a deal was imminent.
Araqchi, in an interview on MS NOW, said he had a draft counterproposal that could be ready in the next two or three days for top Iranian officials to review, with more U.S.-Iran talks possible in a week or so.
Military action would complicate efforts to reach a deal, he added.
After the US and Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities and some military sites in June, Trump again began threatening strikes in January as Tehran crushed widespread protests with deadly force.
Referring to the crackdown on Friday, Trump said there was a difference between the people of Iran and the country’s leadership. He asserted that “32,000 people were killed over a relatively short period of time,” figures that could not immediately be verified.
“It’s a very, very, very sad situation,” Trump said, adding that his threats to strike Iran had led the leadership to abandon plans for mass hangings two weeks ago.
“They were going to hang 837 people. And I gave them the word, if you hang one person, even one person, that you’re going to be hit right then and there,” he said.
The US-based group HRANA, which monitors the human rights situation in Iran, has recorded 7,114 verified deaths and says it has another 11,700 under review.
Hours after Trump’s statements on the death toll, Araqchi said that the Iranian government has already published a “comprehensive list” of all 3,117 killed in the unrest.
“If anyone doubts the accuracy of our data, please speak with evidence,” he posted on X.
ARAQCHI SAYS DEAL POSSIBLE IN ‘VERY SHORT PERIOD’
Araqchi gave no specific timing as to when Iranians would get their counterproposal to Witkoff and Kushner, but said he believed a diplomatic deal was within reach and could be achieved “in a very short period of time.”
United Nations spokesperson Stephane Dujarric reiterated concerns about heightened rhetoric and increased military activities in the region.
“We encourage both the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran to continue to engage in diplomacy in order to settle the differences,” Dujarric told a regular news briefing at the U.N.
During the Geneva talks, the United States did not seek zero uranium enrichment and Iran did not offer to suspend enrichment, Araqchi told MS NOW, a US cable television news network.
“What we are now talking about is how to make sure that Iran’s nuclear program, including enrichment, is peaceful and would remain peaceful forever,” he said.
He added that technical and political “confidence-building measures” would be enacted to ensure the program would remain peaceful in exchange for action on sanctions, but he gave no further details.
“The president has been clear that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons or the capacity to build them, and that they cannot enrich uranium,” the White House said when asked about Araqchi’s comments.
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Israeli Strikes in Lebanon Kill at Least 10, Including Senior Hezbollah Official
People inspect the damage at the site of an Israeli strike on Friday, in Bednayel, Bekaa valley, Lebanon, February 21, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
At least 10 people were killed and 50 wounded in Israeli strikes in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, two security sources told Reuters, after the Israeli military said it had targeted Hezbollah sites in the Baalbek area.
The strikes on Friday were among the deadliest reported in eastern Lebanon in recent weeks and risk testing a fragile US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Shi’ite Islamist group Hezbollah, which has been strained by recurring accusations of violations.
The Israeli military said in a statement that it struck Hezbollah command centers in the Baalbek area, part of eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.
In a separate statement on Saturday, it said it had “eliminated several terrorists of Hezbollah’s missile array in three different command centers … recently identified as operating to accelerate the organization’s readiness and force build-up processes, while planning fire attacks towards Israel.”
Hezbollah said on Saturday that eight of its fighters, including a commander, Hussein Mohammad Yaghi, were killed in Friday’s strikes in the Bekaa area.
CEASEFIRE BROKERED IN 2024
Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a US-brokered ceasefire in 2024 intended to end more than a year of cross-border exchanges of fire that culminated in Israeli strikes that weakened the Iran-aligned group. Since then, the sides have traded accusations of ceasefire violations.
US and Israeli officials have pressed Lebanese authorities to curb Hezbollah’s arsenal, while Lebanese leaders have warned that broader Israeli strikes could further destabilize the country already battered by political and economic crises.
Separately, the Israeli military said it also struck what it described as a Hamas command center from which militants operated in the Ain al-Hilweh area in southern Lebanon. Ain al-Hilweh is a crowded Palestinian refugee camp near Sidon.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun condemned the overnight Israeli strikes on the Sidon area and towns in Bekaa as a “new violation” of Lebanon’s sovereignty and a breach of U.N. obligations, urging countries backing regional stability, including the United States, to press for an immediate halt to avert further escalation, the presidency said.
Hamas condemned in a statement the Israeli strike on Ain al-Hilweh and rejected Israeli assertions about the target, saying the site belonged to the camp’s Joint Security Force tasked with maintaining security.
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The ‘Hymietown’ affair degraded Black-Jewish relations. Jesse Jackson wasn’t the real culprit
Conventional wisdom suggests Rev. Jesse Jackson’s infamous, unfortunate, off-the-record, 1984 “Hymietown” comment radically reshaped and further degraded Black-Jewish relations. It’s true. But not for the reasons that one might imagine.
Jackson, then a presidential candidate, initially denied the report, first published in The Washington Post, that he had used the aforementioned slur in a Washington, D.C. airport bar. Two weeks later he reversed course. In an address at synagogue Adath Yeshurun in New Hampshire, he asked to be forgiven.
How much damage to Black-Jewish relations did Jackson’s remark actually do? Some, for sure. But given how wobbly the two communities’ once-vaunted “grand alliance” had become by 1984, the degree of the slur’s impact has, I think, been overstated. Both groups had already built a vast reservoir of mutual mistrust. Among the causes: Jackson’s meetings with Yasser Arafat of the PLO rendered him suspect to Jews, and Jewish opposition to affirmative action struck Blacks as a betrayal. Ditto for the Andrew Young affair of 1979, a takedown of one of the community’s most distinguished public servants.
What actually changed Black-Jewish relations for the worse was not the “Hymietown” indiscretion, but Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan’s entry into the fray.
On Feb. 25, 1984, 12 days after the slur was first reported and one day before his synagogue apology, Jackson attended a meeting of the Nation of Islam in Chicago. There, Farrakhan told Jews: “If you harm this brother, I warn you in the name of Allah, this will be the last one you harm.”
Farrakhan was just getting started. On March 11, he referred to Hitler “as a very great man.” In June, he described Judaism as a “gutter religion.” By summertime, Jewish organizations were demanding that Jackson, still at that point running for president, fully denounce Farrakhan. Jackson initially resisted that call, instead downgrading the controversial cleric’s status from campaign “surrogate” to “supporter.” Eventually, with his campaign on fire, a besieged Jackson made a complete disavowal.
The long-term repercussions of this episode for the fragile Black-Jewish alliance were immense. The scandal launched Farrakhan — who until that point could have been described, per The New Republic, as “the boss of a fringe Muslim sect” — into national and even international visibility, so much so that Libyan ruler Muamar Gaddafi soon donated to his cause. Perched atop this new platform, Farrakhan set about injecting his group’s unremittingly antisemitic worldview into the cultural mainstream.
Conspiracy theories with lingering influence
The consequences of this ascent are still unfolding today.
For instance, the falsehood that Jews were major players in the African slave trade had little traction before the events of 1984. After them, it became a hot subject in popular and even academic circles. The far-right commentator Candace Owen’s antisemitic espousal of it to her audience of millions is only the most recent manifestation of that trend.
Under Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam argued that “so-called Jews” were imposters who had usurped and appropriated an African religious identity. That trope has recently reappeared in statements by public figures like Nick Cannon, Kyrie Irving, Deshawn Jackson, and Ice Cube — some of whom have since apologized.
It’s not just the Jewish community that has suffered in response. Farrakhan’s emergence also triggered what journalist Marjorie Valburn has called a “litmus test” for Black politicians: A requirement that Black political candidates must publicly denounce Farrakhan, often at the summons of a Jewish leader. The test has been administered countless times, including to former President Barack Obama during his 2008 campaign; numerous Democratic lawmakers in 2018; and Congressman Jamaal Bowman in 2024.
As Cynthia Ozick once observed, a Jew is a person who makes distinctions. Major Jewish organizations who subjected Blacks to the litmus test seemed incapable of doing precisely that. Jackson was clearly not Farrakhan. Truth be told, most Black people who shared Farrakhan’s concerns about economic empowerment were not and are not Farrakhan; they have little interest in his antisemitic obsessions.
In any case, I know of no case where applications of this test helped to improve Black-Jewish relations. Quite the contrary: It bred further resentment and distrust.
A mistaken mythology
As I learned while co-authoring a book about Black-Jewish relations with Terrence L. Johnson, the Black-Jewish alliance was never quite as “feel-good” as its champions have alleged. Even when the groups collaborated toward impressive Civil Rights accomplishments,their encounter was rife with every imaginable tension.
Johnson and I date the alliance from the NAACP’s founding in 1909 to the Six-Day War in 1967. One of our key observations was that inter-group tensions between Blacks and Jews were exacerbated and even driven by intra-group tensions. In other words, pitched battles between Jewish liberals and conservatives, and between Church-based liberals and Black radicals did much to shape — and endanger — the alliance, even when it was racking up victories for civil rights.
The same held true after 1984. Because of the intra-group complexities with which Jackson was dealing — trying to temper the effusions of radicals like Farrakhan while absorbing them into his coalition — his relations with Jews got worse. And tension within the Jewish community about how to respond equally spurred reasonable mistrust on the other side. Many forgave, but others, like then- executive director of the ADL, Nathan Perlmutter, did not: Perlmutter once said that Jackson “could light candles every Friday night and grow side curls, and it still wouldn’t matter. He’s a whore.”
The irony and tragedy is that Jackson was, in fact, one of the leaders in either community who put in the most effort to repair the shattered alliance. He understood its importance, and the risks of its dissolution. He sought to solve collective problems by forging common ground among disparate actors in a mutli-racial, multi-ethnic Rainbow Coalition.
His plan did not come to fruition. But as we mourn his passing, we should ponder his legacy, and revisit his compelling vision.
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