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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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Pioneering restaurant chain Taïm closes, outlets padlocked for unpaid taxes
Taïm Mediterranean Grill, a pioneering fast casual Israeli food chain, is closing locations across the country, after New York State issued warrants for hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes.
The restaurant, founded by Israeli-American celebrity chef Einat Admony and now owned by the Illinois-based conglomerate Craveworthy Brands had expanded across New York, Washington D.C., and Chicago. Last week, pictures of two of New York City locations appeared on social media, with signage saying they had been seized by the state for nonpayment of taxes.
In an email to the Forward, a representative for Admony wrote that “she is unable to comment on the current status of the chain,” having not been involved with it since 2022.
When Admony first opened Taïm in New York’s West Village in 2005, it was one of the city’s first fast casual Mediterranean options. Zagat and New York Magazine gave the restaurant rave reviews, and lines formed outside the door.
Taïm opened its second location in 2012, and in 2018, former Chipotle executive Phil Petrilli and business partners invested in the restaurant and led its expansion across the country. By that time, Taïm faced a more crowded market, competing with Miznon, another Israeli fast casual creation by celebrity-chef Eyal Shani, and Cava, a Mediterranean bowl restaurant.
The restaurant switched ownership in 2024 when Craveworthy Brands bought Petrilli’s restaurant platform. But a year later, the state of New York issued dozens of tax warrants to Taïm-related entities at multiple locations. Some stores closed ahead of the recent round of state seizures.
The state has held both Pitrelli and Craveworthy’s CEO, Gregg Majewski, responsible for taxes owed. Pitrelli is currently suing Majewski, alleging that under their merger agreement, Majewski and Craveworthy are liable for all debts incurred by Taïm.
In his lawsuit, Pitrelli alleged the Taïm outlets owed $632,000 in unpaid taxes. Majewski did not respond to a request for comment; the Forward has reached out to his attorney.
Since the Hamas-led October 7 attacks on Israel, Taïm, which is Hebrew for “delicious,” has received some pushback. It has appeared on boycott lists and posts, criticizing it for being “Israeli owned,” even though its current owner is not Israeli. In a recent Instagram post noting the closure, users took to the comments to criticize the restaurant for being Israeli. However, a push to boycott Taïm specifically has not received as much widespread attention from the BDS movement as Goldie, a Philadelphia chain run by celebrity chef Michael Solomonov that recently closed six locations.
The restaurant currently brands itself as “Mediterranean,” though in the past it hashighlighted its Israeli background.
Others criticized Taïm for reasons unrelated to geopolitics. “They ruined that place when they changed the menu and made it like a big chain fast casual place,” one FoodNYC Redditor commented.
“Place has been going downhill for years, I’m not surprised,” another said.
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Antisemitism flourishes amid cultural and historical illiteracy. Classrooms should be a cure.
School will be back in session before we know it. A smattering of the headlines in the final weeks of the last academic year, coinciding with Jewish American Heritage Month in May, suggest that fighting antisemitism in educational environments will remain a monumental challenge.
They include a lawsuit against the nation’s largest teachers’ union for encouraging discrimination against Jewish teachers and students, a Texas private school displaying maps of the Middle East erasing Israel, swastikas scrawled on multiple school grounds in Massachusetts and in Georgia, and — just a few blocks from my child’s former school, which has had its own share of such issues — a flag bearing the hate symbol billowing over New York University.
The scene in the streets this summer has been arguably as bleak. Hate crimes against Jews are on the rise, even as rates of other major crimes fall. In response to the stabbing of a Jewish man in a kippah as he exited the Jewish Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Democratic congressional nominee Micah Lasher implored Mayor Zohran Mamdani to do more than react with the requisite expressions of empathy and promises of increased security, but to “take the temperature down” rather than foster a climate that jeopardizes Jewish safety.
Taking the temperature down is exactly what’s in order. We need proactive, preventative action from our political leaders, in New York City and beyond, to transform an environment in which antisemitic attacks still comprise the majority of hate crimes, and harsh words can too often combust into violence.
The good news is that we have a ready-made place to continue this urgent work: classrooms. As an educator, I have a strong sense of how historical and cultural illiteracy are far more rampant than unrepentant antisemitism, and that this is where we must focus our educational efforts in a more deliberate way than we currently do.
Ignorance provides antisemitism, an insidious shapeshifter that infects and unifies the otherwise polarized political right and left, with a powerful accelerant. Yet the only times when K-12 students might encounter Jewish experiences are in a Holocaust unit — mandated in 29 states — or in an antisemitism training, often introduced reactively after an incident. Neither approach addresses a generalized illiteracy about Jewish identity and experience that allows this hatred to fester. These traditional methods of “fighting antisemitism,” including in classrooms, are important but inadequate.
Rather than teaching about Jews primarily as targets of hatred — the obvious organizing principle of many lessons on the Holocaust and antisemitism training — it is crucial that students learn about Jewish identities and experiences as inextricable from our broader national narratives. When Jews are understood as full members of the polity, and as diverse participants in every historical era — as labor organizers and industry leaders, fashion designers and film directors, athletes and intellectuals — it becomes much harder to caricature us as evil or outsiders, or to render us invisible.
Such historical accuracy, rigorous source analysis, and a spirit of cultural inclusiveness, is the ethos of the New York City public schools’ Hidden Voices: Jewish Americans in United States History curriculum materials, for which I serve as lead scholar. Volume 1 is out now, and Volume 2 will be released later this fall.
A two-volume collection of profiles, original sources, guiding questions, and analytical essays written and reviewed by experts, the free materials enable history and social studies teachers to enrich existing lessons, or to create entirely new units of study.
Rich narratives about individuals illuminate broader historical eras, whether organizer Clara Lemlich on Progressive Era labor legislation, Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis on transformed legal approaches to monopoly, or Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s advocacy for sex education, to name a few. Moreover, Hidden Voices explores how each individual’s Jewishness shaped their contributions to American society.
Rather than just sprinkling in a few Jewish figures into existing narratives, “Portrait of an Era” essays show how integrating stories of both luminaries and lesser known Jews nuances and challenges dominant historical frameworks – like “the Civil Rights Era,” or “Postwar America” – in ways that render history more accurately, and more interestingly.
For example, what does it say about the early national period of a country founded on religious freedom that Rabbi Isaac Leeser worried Jews would become “Christianized,” and thus offered sermons in English, while simultaneously advocating for the “Judaization” of American Jews? Or, how is the notion that American Jews “became white” after World War II challenged by the fact that the first, and only, Jewish Miss America, Bess Myerson, sparked a torrent of complaints to pageant organizers, was disinvited from various appearances, and was encouraged to choose a less Jewish name (she didn’t)?
Hidden Voices is no hagiography — history as hero worship — even as one of its aims is to challenge negative stereotypes. Since students might only encounter one of these profiles throughout their studies, we were especially judicious in selecting individuals that highlight the complexity of history and of humanity. For example, Spaniard Luis de Caravajal y de la Cueva, whose family converted to Roman Catholicism but secretly practiced Judaism under the threat of death, arrived in the New World to advance colonization. Yet he used this position to rescue other persecuted conversos. Many years later, we profile Groucho Marx, who with his brothers indelibly shaped the worlds of vaudeville and film, new industries where Jews found success in part because antisemitism excluded them from more established ones.
Emphasizing Jews’ role in U.S. history at large is crucial, but so is educating about the specificity of Jewish experience, from the momentous — including the Holocaust and Israel’s founding – to the everyday, like mainstreaming blue jeans and bagels and establishing overnight camps. Cultural topics are especially powerful teaching tools, for students are often less guarded in discussing food or fashion than when grappling with the most fraught political questions. Given so many current conversations about Jews now turn to Gaza, Hidden Voices decenters this conflict to offer a wider lens on a diverse people too often unhelpfully decontextualized.
Why isn’t a more robust Jewish-American history curriculum already a staple in more schools, especially given how largely other identities loom in our classrooms and our culture? Indeed, Hidden Voices — which has covered race, ability, and other categories — has existed since 2018 in New York City, home to the largest population of Jews outside of Israel, and yet the project I lead was only commissioned in late 2023, spurred by Oct. 7. While Volume 1 has been downloaded 200,000 times, and encouraging reports of teachers using the materials are rolling in, integrating these Jewish stories into the study of U.S. history and culture remains optional.
Multiple factors account for this relative absence of Jewish stories in the teaching of American history, in New York City and nationwide: foremost, the widespread, reductive assumption that identity and power in the United States operate around a Black-white binary, with Jews on the white, privileged side, and thus not a marginalized group worthy of attention. Similarly, many identity-based frameworks focus on “underrepresented” groups, which Jews — despite comprising a tiny minority — are not. Lastly, many such curricula are introduced due to parental advocacy, but Jewish Americans have largely expended such energy on building a Jewish education network outside the public system.
Overlooking Jewish American history and experience intensifies both antisemitism and historical illiteracy, and must be addressed. While Hidden Voices may appear to “just add Jews” into a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion framework, it actually represents a subtly, but substantially, different intervention. First, the argument for such programs is often for people to “see themselves.” While I hope Jewish schoolchildren feel affirmed by such visibility, that aim is profoundly parochial. Learning the history of Jews — or Latinos, LGBTQ people and others — is not primarily valuable in order to cultivate particularistic pride, a dubious aim for a secular school in a pluralistic society. Rather, it is to equip all students to navigate our shared society with evidence, empathy, and universalism. Actually, a Jewish history curriculum arguably stands to be most valuable in districts without Jews at all, but ample room for antisemitism to fester unchecked by interpersonal experience.
I understand the skepticism of staking our hopes on a better future for Jewish Americans in educational institutions; I’ve been a vocal critic of how alienating these places have been to many since 10/7. To be sure, education is no magic pill, and ignorance is not our only enemy. Avowed antisemites and ideologues exist in K-12 and college classrooms, as in all professions, and they too demand our unsparing attention. But for the vast majority of Americans with scant awareness of Jewish history or experience, teaching and learning about Jews as integral to this nation’s past and present is a new, and potentially powerful intervention. We owe it to each other to pressure our politicians and our public schools to at least try it.
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What does DSA actually want? Its national co-chair can’t say.
It’s been a heady couple of months for the Democratic Socialists of America. Candidates the organization rallied behind ousted establishment Democrats in New York, Michigan, Colorado and Wisconsin state primaries. Pundits who doubted the movement last year are now eating crow.
With the DSA having forced its way into the spotlight, national co-chair Megan Romer went on The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast to share what the movement is all about. But the interview has elicited an online backlash — and some ridicule — after Romer said she would have attended an Oct. 8 protest and that she would have sought to stop Russia’s advance in Ukraine through diplomacy.
Just as damning to some viewers was Romer’s reluctance to provide specifics on a number of DSA policy positions when pressed for them by New Yorker editor David Remnick.
The backlash to the interview put Romer on the defensive. The day after its publication the national co-chair called Remnick a “debate bro” who had tried to make her look and feel stupid during the conversation. Remnick, a Pulitzer Prize–winner and former Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, has edited The New Yorker since 1998.
“Luckily lots of practice keeping my temper in check when debate bros are well-actually’ing me, tho it still flusters me,” Romer wrote Saturday on X. “I am def particularly sensitive when people are actively trying to make me look/feel stupid and it can throw me off my game.”
The interview highlighted a challenge that faces the organization as it gains members and breaks through on the Democratic stage: Translating its rallying cries into the gritty work of partisan politics — or, for the candidates DSA champions, getting things done while remaining true to the movement’s ideals.
Nowhere was that clearer than Romer’s talking points on Israel. Romer said the organization’s position was “a free Palestine with a capital in Jerusalem, and so I think that can safely be read as a one-state solution.” When Remnick asked her if DSA would have supported the proposed terms of the Camp David summit in 2000, had the Palestinians accepted it, Romer said: “Good question — I’d have to actually look at what the specifics there were.”
(The exact terms discussed at the summit are in dispute, but most agree it would have involved a separate Palestinian state with a capital comprising several Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem.)
A testy exchange followed around Romer’s stance on the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
Asked whether she supported New York congressional primary winner Darializa Avila Chevalier in attending a “pro-Hamas” rally on Oct. 8, Romer said yes — she would have gone herself.
“If you put people in an open air concentration camp, and you deprive people of rights, of dignity, of food, of the ability to live in safety,” Romer said, “you have to expect that they are going to not take that for that long. And that is not defending any harm of civilians or of non-combatants.”
Remnick replied, “Well, sure it is — you said you’re supporting it.”
Romer said, “I’m saying that I think it was inevitable.”
On issue after issue, Remnick pressed Romer for details and found few.
- Romer said DSA wanted to “tax the hell out of millionaires” but demurred on what that would mean in practice.
- Romer said she believed in open borders, but not in “throwing the gates open.” When Remnick asked if that wasn’t just immigration reform — which is to say the Democratic policy platform — Romer replied, “It means reforming the system we have while we rethink the system, while we build this new one from the ground up, and then hopefully eventually flipping the switch.”
- Romer said she did not believe in sending arms to support Ukraine in its war against Russia. She asked Remnick, “Why aren’t we doing any amount of actual diplomacy? Why aren’t we doing any amount of actual sending actual human beings to talk to human beings?” Remnick pointed out that there had been many attempts of diplomacy, “however failed,” since the beginning of the war.
- Remnick asked Romer what she meant when she said she believed in prison abolition. She answered that the safest communities were not ones with cops on every corner, but ones with “good schools, good jobs, good park systems, good recreation for their teenagers, things like that. Those are the safe communities.”
- As for her support for defunding the police, Romer said she was “not in favor of getting rid of police entirely tomorrow” but that she supported decreasing their budgets until a point where social services were sufficiently funded.
For the most part, Remnick — trying to fit Romer into a 30-minute podcast slot — let Romer’s answers speak for themselves whether they answered his question or not. But he did hint at a broader argument in one of his final questions, about the DSA’s position in favor of abolishing the U.S. Senate.
Given the scant likelihood of such a measure passing, Remnick asked, didn’t it distract from policy goals that were more likely to succeed?
“I don’t think so,” Romer replied. “I think taking principled positions tells people that you’re principled, and I think we see voters really responding to that, and we see people saying, ‘Oh, you’re actually thinking about the systems.’”
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