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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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From golems to Horton to banana menorahs: This year’s Hanukkah kids’ books light up the imagination
(JTA) — From Who-ville to Schmoozeville, and from island getaways to cozy homes, this year’s crop of Hanukkah books for kids of all ages take families on journeys to imaginative settings, some familiar from the pantheon of children’s literature and Jewish ideas. Families from across the diverse Jewish spectrum will enjoy the new titles that celebrate the popular eight-day holiday, also known as the Festival of Lights.
Three titles garnered the recommendation of the Association of Jewish Libraries — “Construction Site, Hanukkah Lights,” “Banana Menorah” and “Lost and Found Hanukkah.”
Hanukkah begins at sundown on Sunday, Dec. 14.
“Construction Site Hanukkah Lights”
Sherri Duskey Rinker and Shawna J.C. Tenney
Chronicle Books; ages 2-4
The youngest children — particularly those who are vehicle-obsessed — will enjoy lifting the flaps of this rhyming story, in which a dump truck, a crane and a cement mixer transform a construction site into a Hanukkah wonderland with a dazzling giant menorah and a huge pile of shiny gold Hanukkah gelt.
“Happy HanukKat”
Jessica Hickman; illustrated by Elissambura
Kar-Ben Publishing; ages 1-4
Jessica Hickman’s sweet, rhyming board book about a lively Jewish family of kittens will tickle the youngest kids, who will have fun celebrating each night of the holiday with the Hanukkah party-loving cat family. Elissambura’s playful illustrations feature kitties in Hanukkah party hats and sweaters.
“Golem Loves Latkes: A Tasty Hanukkah Tale”
Doreen Klein Robinson; illustrated by Anna Krajewska
Intergalactic Afikomen; ages 3-10
In Doreen Klein Robinson’s fun-filled story, an endearing little girl loves to visit her bubbie for Hanukkah in the happy village of Schmoozeville, where everyone likes to schmooze – chat, in Yiddish. But this year, the usually friendly townsfolk are bickering about the best topping for fried potato latkes — applesauce or sour cream. The young girl makes a clay dreidel that spins to life as a golem, the centuries-old Jewish mystical clay figure who protects Jews. When the latke-loving golem gobbles up all of Schmoozeville’s crispy latkes, the clever girl takes the golem’s message to the warring camps: Enjoy your latkes however you like and celebrate the true meaning of the holiday. Anna Krajewska’s lively, colorful illustrations add to the mayhem and score points for featuring a youthful, active bubbie.
“Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Hanukkah Party!”
Leslie Kimmelman; illustrated by Tom Brannon, based on “Horton Hears a Who!” by Dr. Seuss
Random House; ages 3-7
Horton the Elephant looms large in Leslie Kimmelman’s rhyming riff on the classic “Horton Hears a Who!” by Dr. Seuss. The original features an elephant who champions the small against the mighty — a perfect character for the Hanukkah story. In this version, only Horton hears the faint sound of celebration that goes on night after night, so his jungle friends tease him. On the eighth night Horton sees the sparkling menorah belonging to a rabbi, who invites Horton and his pals to his family’s celebration. Tom Brannon’s illustrations translate the essence of Seuss’s floppy-eared Horton to a Jewish setting.
“Banana Menorah”
Lee Wind; illustrated by Karl West
Apples & Honey Press; ages 3-5
In Lee Wind’s light-hearted story, Skylar, a spirited young girl, and her two fathers are vacationing on an island far from home on the first night of Hanukkah. But both dads forgot to pack a menorah. The clever girl improvises with what’s on hand — the first night, it’s a banana menorah, the next, a granola bar. When they get home in time for the fourth candle and light their three menorahs, Skylar misses the new ones. For the rest of the holiday, her family celebrates with friends and all kinds of menorahs. Karl West’s animated illustrations add to the fun for a playful, creative holiday. Instructions for a banana menorah at the end — though there are also mass market versions available to buy.
“Lost and Found Hanukkah”
Joy Preble; illustrated by Lisa Anchin
Chronicle Books; ages 5-8
LGBT families and homemade menorahs are part of Joy Preble’s heartwarming story about Nate, who loves celebrating Hanukkah and lighting his family’s three menorahs, including one he made. When he and his two fathers move to a new apartment, Nate’s menorah gets lost. At Amy’s Judaica shop, Nate befriends the latke-loving, furry store kitty named Kugel, who runs out of the shop. When Nate’s dads fry up a batch of latkes for the holiday, the clever boy hatches a plan to find Kugel. By story’s end, everyone is reunited in time to celebrate Hanukkah and Nate carves a perfect new menorah. Lisa Anchin’s large cartoon-style illustrations reflect the story’s warmth and love.
“The Book of Candles: Eight Poems for Hanukkah”
Laurel Snyder; illustrated by Leanne Hatch
Clarion Books; ages 4-8
Children will enjoy following a young girl, her siblings, their parents and — again — a kitten as they light Hanukkah candles every night. Each night’s poem flows lyrically to the next. The award-winning Laurel Snyder adds a note for each candle that illuminates the themes of the holiday and turns the story into a teachable moment. Leanne Hatch’s cartoon-style illustrations capture the cozy, wintry setting and glow of the flickering flames
“A Dragon Called Spark: A Hanukkah Story”
Lily Murray; illustrated by Kirsti Beautyman
Kalaniot Books; ages 4-7
In Lily Murray’s imaginative tale, a young girl named Eva feels lonely when she and her family move somewhere new and she is far from friends at the start of Hanukkah. For comfort, Eva turns to Spark, her imaginary friend, a diminutive flying dragon. But Eva is worried that Spark is lonely and hopes for a Hanukkah miracle — a friend for herself and for Spark. When she meets Charlie, her neighbor, they become friends and she tells him about Spark, whom he can’t see. The power of friendship shines in this poignant story. Kirsty Beautyman’s illustrations capture the magic of the tale, which gets high marks for featuring a multiracial friendship.
“Eight Fairy Nights”
Imagined and illustrated by Bub
BookBaby; ages 4-8
Bub’s unique Hanukkah story introduces young kids to a fairytale version of the Hanukkah story and the Maccabees — who are lauded for their courage. Readers then meet eight fairies with eight virtues, one for each night. The book captures Bub’s enthusiasm for celebrating Hanukkah, and his weakness for riddles. Without referencing God’s hand in the Hanukkah miracle, “Eight Fairy Nights,” may be especially appealing to secular and humanist Jews.
The post From golems to Horton to banana menorahs: This year’s Hanukkah kids’ books light up the imagination appeared first on The Forward.
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America’s oldest Jewish congregation launches a kosher food pantry on the Upper West Side
(JTA) — On Thanksgiving morning, as volunteers gathered at Congregation Shearith Israel for the synagogue’s 11th annual “packathon,” they also marked a new milestone: Their synagogue was opening a kosher food pantry on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Shearith Israel, an Orthodox congregation that is also known as The Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, was established in 1654, making it the oldest congregation in the United States.
The synagogue’s Thanksgiving-morning volunteer event draws a large crowd each year in part because of its location along the Macy’s parade route. But its Thanksgiving tradition stretches back centuries: In 1789, when George Washington announced the first national Thanksgiving, Shearith Israel’s leader at the time, Gershom Mendes Seixas, held the country’s first Jewish Thanksgiving service.
With a history older than the founding of the United States, Louis Solomon, the president, or parnas, of Shearith Israel, said the congregation was looking for a way to celebrate the country’s upcoming 250th birthday.
“It’s been a part of our culture for 3,000 years, but certainly a part of our culture in America for 372 years, to give back, to try to do what we can,” said Solomon. “So the congregation has gotten itself together and thought about, what is it that we could actually do?”
Over the summer, Shearith Israel reached out to Alexander Rapaport, the executive director of Masbia, a kosher soup kitchen and food pantry, to propose an idea: Masbia could open a location in their synagogue.
“They’re celebrating America turning 250 years, and they’re thinking of what they can do, something special,” said Rapaport. “And one of the things they think that could be is opening up a food pantry in their place.”
At the event on Thursday morning where the new Masbia Relief Annex was announced, volunteers from local faith groups, including the Jewish Center, the Latter-Day Saints and the West End Church, watched the parade and assembled 2,000 packages of food.
Solomon said Shearith Israel had pledged to contribute $50,000 to the new Masbia annex, and was asking local faith groups to collectively match their donation.
The new food distribution center is scheduled to open sometime before Hanukkah, and will allow Masbia to serve Manhattan through the use of Doordash, which provides the nonprofit with free delivery services.
Rapaport said that this month, due to the tightened federal rules around the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Doordash had provided Masbia with 11,000 free deliveries. So far, Rapaport said they were on track to hit that number.
“We’re hoping that DoorDash is our go-to thing, because that eliminates the breadline stigma, and it just brings people food. It also gives us flexibility,” said Rapaport.
Masbia currently has three locations, two in Brooklyn and one in Queens. Now, Rapaport said the new space will allow the food nonprofit to provide delivery service in Manhattan as well.
“We’re here to help people. It’s a new borough, it’s not a borough that we were in. We’re going to reach out to the community and see where the need is, and slowly take on hopefully,” said Rapaport. “The first week we’ll only serve a few dozen people, but then if it grows to hundreds, we’ll be very happy.”
The post America’s oldest Jewish congregation launches a kosher food pantry on the Upper West Side appeared first on The Forward.
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Hezbollah Leader Leaves Open Possibility of New War With Israel
Lebanon’s Hezbollah Chief Naim Qassem gives a televised speech from an unknown location, July 30, 2025, in this screen grab from video. Photo: Al Manar TV/REUTERS TV/via REUTERS
The head of Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah said on Friday it retained the right to respond to Israel‘s killing days ago of its top military commander and left open the possibility of a new conflict with Israel.
Naim Qassem spoke in a televised address as fears grew in Lebanon that Israel could escalate its bombardment of the country to compel Iran-backed Hezbollah to relinquish its arsenal across the country, which the group has repeatedly rejected.
Israel‘s killing of Hezbollah’s top military commander Haytham Ali Tabtabai in a strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Nov. 23 sharpened those worries.
Qassem said the group would “set the timing” for any retaliation, and said threats of a broader air campaign had no impact on the group – but that renewed war was possible.
“Do you expect a war later? It’s possible sometime. Yes, this possibility is there, and the possibility of no war is also there,” Qassem said.
Qassem did not explicitly say what the group’s position would be in a new war but said Lebanon should prepare a plan to confront Israel that relies on “its army and its people.”
Qassem also said he hoped Pope Leo’s upcoming visit to Lebanon “will play a role in bringing about peace and ending the [Israeli] aggression.”
Lebanon is under growing pressure from both Israel and the United States to more swiftly disarm Hezbollah and other militant groups across the country.
Moments after Qassem’s speech ended, Israeli military spokesperson Avichay Adraee said the Lebanese army’s efforts to seize Hezbollah weapons in the country’s south were “inadequate.”
“Hezbollah continues to manipulate them and work covertly to maintain its arsenal,” Adraee said in a post on X.
But Hezbollah has said it is unwilling to let go of its arms as long as Israel continues its strikes on Lebanese territory and its occupation of five points in the country’s south.