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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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Denmark Unveils $18 Million Plan to Combat Rising Antisemitism Amid Surge in Attacks
People take part in an anti-Israel demonstration in Copenhagen, Denmark, Oct. 4, 2025. Photo: Ritzau Scanpix/Emil Nicolai Helms via REUTERS
Denmark’s government on Tuesday unveiled an $18 million, five-year plan to combat antisemitism through 2030, focusing on security, education, and research, as the country’s Jewish community continues to face a wave of targeted attacks and hostility.
“Following Hamas’s terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza, there has been a flare-up in antisemitism in Denmark,” the Danish Justice Ministry said while announcing the new plan.
Building on Denmark’s first national plan to combat antisemitism from 2022, the new initiative will focus on boosting security for Jewish institutions, combating online hate, and introducing programs for children and young people.
As a new addition to the previous plan set to expire at the end of this year, the newly released program will appoint an Education Ministry coordinator to fight antisemitism in schools and establish an association to combat antisemitic hate crimes.
Other measures will include expanded educational programs, giving all upper secondary schools the opportunity to apply for study trips that teach students about the Holocaust and antisemitism.
“Jews in Denmark should neither feel persecuted, harassed, nor receive death threats,” Danish Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard said in a statement.
“Fighting antisemitism must be done through education and prevention, as well as tough and firm consequences towards those who spread antisemitism and hatred against Jews,” he continued. “Jews in Denmark must be able to live and move freely and safely.”
The new plan also includes the creation of the Weinberger Institute, a research center focused on hate crimes, led by Jonathan Fischer, a former vice president of the Jewish Community of Denmark.
The government’s new initiatives come amid a startling rise in anti-Jewish hostility in the country, with attacks that include vandalism of businesses, murals, and memorials, as well as physical assaults and death threats targeting Jews and Israelis.
According to the Danish Jewish Community’s Department for Mapping and Registering Antisemitic Incidents, the country recorded 207 antisemitic incidents in 2024, up 71 percent from 121 the previous year and up sharply from just nine before the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
Over the last few years, the local Jewish community in Denmark has experienced a sharp rise in antisemitic bullying, violence, and death threats.
“Danish Jews are part of our common culture, history, and soul, and we as a society have a responsibility to surround our Jewish fellow citizens when antisemitism rears its ugly face,” Hummelgaard said.
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More Than 200 Celebrities Join Campaign Calling for Israel to Release Convicted Terrorist Marwan Barghouti
Marwan Barghouti gestures as Israeli police bring him into the District Court for his judgment hearing in Tel Aviv, May 20, 2004. Photo: Reuters / Pool / David Silverman.
Paul Simon, Sting, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, and Margaret Atwood are among the more than 200 cultural figures who have backed a campaign calling for Israel to release Palestinian terrorist mastermind Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life sentences plus an additional 40 years in prison for orchestrating deadly terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada.
The celebrities who support the campaign are recognizable in the music, film, music, literature, and sports industries. They include actors Ian McKellen, Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Nixon, Simon Pegg, Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem, Stephen Fry, Hannah Einbinder, and Ilana Glazer. Others who have joined the campaign include author Sally Rooney; broadcaster and former footballer Gary Lineker; and the musicians Annie Lennox, Brian Eno, Fontaines D.C, Massive Attack, and Mabel.
They are all urging the United Nations and governments around the world to pressure Israel to free Marwan, 66, who has so far spent 23 years in Israeli prison. They also condemn what they describe as Barghouti’s “violent mistreatment and denial of legal rights whilst imprisoned.”
According to Israeli officials, Barghouti co-founded Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a US-designated terrorist group that carried out suicide bombings and shootings attacks during the Second Intifada from 2000-2005, and formerly was the head of Fatah’s Tanzim armed wing. Barghouti, who denied having such a leadership role, was arrested in 2002 and convicted for helping to plan terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada that killed five civilians. He has been nicknamed the “Palestinian Mandela” by his supporters.
“Everyone that believes in freedom and dignity for the Palestinian people should join in the call for his immediate release” said Scottish actor Brian Cox from “Succession.” French writer Annie Ernaux claimed Barghouti “embodies the possibility of peace which [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu refuses, determined as he is to continue with the expansion of settlements in the West Bank.”
The International Campaign to Free Marwan that was launched on Nov. 29 is spearheading the efforts, which they claim resemble the cultural movement that helped secure the freedom of Nelson Mandela and ended apartheid in South Africa. Others who are backing the campaign to secure Barghouti’s freedom include billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson, journalist Peter Beinart, Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, author and speaker Gabor Maté, and activist and author Angela Davis.
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StandWithUs Legal Team Requests Florida Investigate Guinness World Records for Anti-Israel Policy
In 2019, students, faculty and parents from the San Diego Jewish Academy broke the Guinness World Record for most sandwiches made in under three minutes, all of which were donated to San Diego’s Alpha Project, an organization dedicated to helping the homeless achieve self-sufficiency. Photo: Courtesy.
StandWithUs, the international nonprofit organization that fights antisemitism and promotes education about Israel, has called on the state of Florida to investigate Guinness World Records (GWR) over its ban on applications from Israel and to ensure that public funds do not support companies engaged in such a “discriminatory policy” against the Jewish state.
StandWithUs Saidoff Law, which carries out legal action for the pro-Israel group, sent a letter on Thursday to members of the Florida State Board of Administration (SBA) following the revelation this week that GWR has enforced a policy since 2023 not to accept submission applications from Israel and the Palestinian territories. Saidoff Law formally requested that the board investigate GWR and its affiliate Guinness World Records North America regarding the “boycott policy” to see if they should be included on Florida’s official list of “Scrutinized Companies or Other Entities that Boycott Israel” in accordance with Florida law. Guinness World Records North America is registered in Florida as a foreign profit corporation.
Created in 2016, the list currently includes 109 companies or entities that participate in a boycott of Israel, including actions that limit commercial relations with Israel or Israeli-controlled territories. The SBA is prohibited from acquiring direct holdings of the companies on this list, which is updated and published every quarter following review and approval by SBA trustees. In late September, 91 new entities were added to the list.
StandWithUs Saidoff Law is urging the Florida State Board of Administration to review GWR’s actions to see if they can be added on the list. “We hope that prompt action from the SBA will reaffirm Florida’s strong commitment to opposing discriminatory boycotts and upholding the integrity of the state’s investment and contracting policies,” the letter stated. It was signed by StandWithUs Saidoff Law Director Yael Lerman and Assistant Director Gadi Dotz.
Guinness World Records recently rejected a submission application by an Israeli charity that is organizing an event where a record-breaking 2,000 kidney donors will gather in one place. GWR said that since November 2023, “we are not generally processing record applications from the Palestinian Territories [sic] or Israel, or where either is given as the attempt location, except those done in cooperation with a UN humanitarian aid relief agency.” The policy was enforced shortly after the start of the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, which began with the Hamas-led massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
GWR said it is “monitoring the situation carefully” and its policy is subject to a monthly review. “We hope to be in a position to receive new inquiries soon,” it noted.
StandwithUs Saidoff Law wrote in its letter to Florida’s State Board of Administration that GWR’s “refusal to engage in commercial relations with entities in Israel and Israeli-controlled territories … appears to be intentional, discriminatory in that it singles out Israel and Israeli-controlled territories despite its political neutrality policy, and is not based on neutral business criteria. Also, it squarely falls within Florida’s definition of a boycott of Israel.”
According to Florida law, a boycott of Israel means “refusing to deal, terminating business activities, or taking other actions to limit commercial relations with Israel, or persons or entities doing business in Israel or in Israeli-controlled territories, in a discriminatory manner.”