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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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West Point graduated more Jewish cadets this year than ever before, official says
The very first class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1802 consisted of two graduates, one of whom was a Jew named Simon Levy who served briefly in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before passing away at the age of 33. Levy was accepted into the academy based on his skill in mathematics and the strength of his ”good conduct” at the Battle of Maumee Rapids, one of the last skirmishes in the Indian War in Ohio in 1794.
This year on May 23, according to Col. Benjamin Wallen, a lay Jewish leader involved in the West Point Hillel chapter and the academy’s Jewish choir, 30 Jewish cadets graduated from the academy. Though West Point’s Public Affairs Office said it couldn’t confirm the number of Jewish cadets because the military academy “does not track or maintain official data on cadets’ religious affiliations, Col. Wallen said the Class of 2026 had the most Jews in West Point’s 224-year history.
Asked what accounted for the upsurge in Jews at West Point, Wallen said the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and the rise in antisemitism are likely factors.
“This is one place that none of that has reared its ugly head,” Wallen said of the ubiquitous campus demonstrations against Israel. “Not a hint of it. Because that’s just not who we are. There’s no place for hate of any kind at West Point.”
Wallen, a Jewish officer with 30 years in the Army, is a civil and environmental engineering professor at West Point and also serves as Associate Dean for Faculty Development. He called West Point “a wonderful place to be Jewish and to serve your country.”
Two of the grads in the Class of ’26 are twin sisters from Millburn, NJ. Catherine Brodsky is headed to Duke Medical School to become an Army surgeon. Her sister Claudia is bound for Anchorage, Alaska, where she’ll serve as a logistics officer.
“I had the most amazing time at West Point,” Brodsky told me over the phone from Budapest, where she and her sister are visiting. “I’m very grateful for it. I think it was really instrumental in challenging me and making me grow as a person and as a leader.”
The newly minted second lieutenant said the Jewish cadets had a deep sense of community.
“We had a lot of events that kept us close-knit, like choir and various trips,” she said. “Celebrating the holidays together was really important.”
Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff, a professor of Judaic Studies at Stern College for Women in Manhattan who conducts extra-curricular classes at West Point, hosted the Jewish cadets at his home in nearby Monsey during Jewish holidays and Shabbat.
“They really are the most remarkable bunch of men and women,” Hajioff said. “From my talking to the students, I’d say there’s definitely been a shift of young men and women wanting to protect this country.”
Rabbi Hajioff posted photos on Instagram of the baccalaureate service for Jewish cadets at which the Jewish choir performed. One photo showed him standing next to Ron Chajmovic of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, in his dress whites.
Lt. Chajmovic, who attended Georgia Military College before arriving at West Point, is headed to helicopter flight school, Hajioff said. His older brother Yoni is in the Israel Defense Forces and is currently stationed in Gaza according to their grandfather, Paul Chajmovic. The elder Chajmovic, who is about to turn 80, served in the Israeli air force during the Six-Day War.
“I miss it, believe it or not,” he told me. “I would volunteer again but I’m too old.”
Chajmovic’s other grandfather came from Israel to West Point for the graduation ceremony.
West Point’s Class of ‘27 and Class of ‘28 both have 27 Jewish cadets, according to Col. Wallen, though he said that Jewish representation is down in the Class of ’29, which he said has 17 or 18 Jews.
The Class of ‘30 will include an 18-year-old graduate of a Jewish day school in Nevada. Yonah Mowery arrives at West Point on June 29 to start six weeks of basic training. Mowery is a graduate of the Adelson School in Las Vegas, which was started by the late Sheldon Adelson, the Jewish casino billionaire and Netanyahu supporter. Mowery ran cross country, played basketball and swam on his school team. He took 10 advanced placement classes and participated in Moot Beit Din, a student competition based on rabbinical court.
“I know that by being in the American military, I will be defending not just Jews in Israel but Jews around the world because the United States is a major world power,” Mowery told me in a telephone interview.
The Mowery family has a long history of military service. His paternal grandfather served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. His grandfather’s uncle, Mowery said, was among the American soldiers who helped liberate Dachau. And there were 13 Mowery men who fought for the Union and perished at Gettysburg.
“The more Jews we have in the American military, the less alone we all feel,” Mowery said. “It’s an honor to be in the United States military as a Jewish kid, especially since this country is founded on Jewish and Christian values.”
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The visionary Jewish poet who survived the Holocaust but not its aftermath
Paul Celan: A Life
By Anna Arno
Translated by Soren Gauger
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 416 pages, $35
During a 1969 poetry reading in Israel, Paul Celan’s audience requested “Deathfugue,” his most famous poem. With its hypnotic images of death as “a master from Deutschland,” prisoners drinking the “black milk of dawn” and smoke rising to “a grave in the clouds,” it remains one of the most powerful artifacts of the Holocaust.
But like a rock star weary of endlessly repeating his greatest hits, Celan declined. Instead, he offered other poems, scorned by some commentators as “hermetic, esoteric, divorced from reality.”
So we learn from Anna Arno’s intelligent, intricate biography, Paul Celan: A Life, ably translated from the Polish by Soren Gauger. Interweaving literary criticism with Celan’s life story, Arno quotes liberally from Pierre Joris’ English translations. Even so, she can’t quite do the work justice. In translation and wrenched from their poetic context, Celan’s innovative verses, credited with a radical remaking of the German language, come across as cryptic and impenetrable.
Arno covers Celan’s schooling, wartime experiences, work history, travels, friendships, psychiatric ordeals and overlapping romantic interests, at times departing from strict chronology. Though defensible, the narrative strategy renders the book somewhat convoluted.
One thread is Celan’s intermittent, decadeslong involvement with the accomplished Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann. That relationship, more passionate and enduring for Bachmann, preceded his mostly happy marriage to the French artist Gisèle Lestrange and continued during it. In an odd twist, Bachmann and Lestrange, bonded by both their love for Celan and their anxiety about his well-being, developed “a kind of impossible sisterly friendship.”
Despite Celan’s devotion to his wife, “other women,” Arno writes, “were always drifting through his life.” A chapter toward the end of the biography details some of Celan’s most important romantic relationships. Other chapters focus on his inventiveness as a translator and his worsening mental illness.
Celan was born Paul Antschel in 1920 in Czernowitz, Romania (officially Cernăuți, and now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) on the fringes of the recently defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. The French-sounding Celan is a pen name, an anagram of Ancel, a Romanian version of Antschel.
Celan’s parents were German-speaking Jews, and German was Celan’s native language. But he was a polyglot, a talent that shaped his poetry and enabled his career as a translator. Along with Romanian, in which he wrote some early poems, and French, the language of his postwar life in Paris, he learned Russian (under Soviet occupation) and English. He had at least “a passive knowledge of Yiddish,” picked up enough Hebrew for his Bar Mitzvah and studied Italian, Latin and Greek. “His intellectual ease gave him a sense of superiority,” Arno writes.
World War II interrupted Celan’s medical studies in France, and back home he enrolled in Romance language courses. The Soviet occupation was brutal but, for Jews, the Romanian fascist regime that succeeded it was worse. Celan’s parents were deported and died in a Nazi labor camp. Celan, separated from them, survived forced labor, but remained “wracked with grief” over his parents’ fate. He would describe “Deathfugue,” written in 1945, as his mother’s epitaph and grave. The poem may have influenced Theodor Adorno, who famously described poetry after Auschwitz as “barbaric,” to modify his views.
After leaving a ruined Czernowitz for Bucharest, where Celan translated, wrote poetry, flirted with Surrealism and “bounced from one relationship to the next,” he traveled to Vienna. “Young, dashing, full of charm,” he eventually settled in Paris and became a naturalized French citizen. But he chose German as his poetic language, despite the emotional dissonance that entailed.
Over the years, he traveled to Germany to read his work and accept prizes. In the process, he developed relationships with leading postwar German writers, including Heinrich Böll, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Günter Grass. But the 1950s were a tricky time. “He could have crossed paths with a murderer at every step,” Arno writes.
Celan recoiled viscerally at what he saw as persistent antisemitic currents in German culture, which hadn’t yet reckoned with the magnitude of Nazi crimes. He interpreted bad reviews as instances of antisemitism, and Arno suggests that he wasn’t always wrong.
Even more traumatic were accusations of plagiarism leveled against him by Claire Goll, the widow of Yvan Goll, whose poetry he had translated. Arno describes the charges as both malicious and baseless, and “probably an act of revenge for her spurned advances.”
They nevertheless affected Celan’s reputation and threatened his health. “Claire Goll’s smear campaign was to become the main cause of the poet’s mental breakdown,” Arno asserts. It’s a strong statement. Certainly, he had endured other losses: the murder of his parents, the death of his day-old infant son, François, after a botched delivery.
On the cusp of middle age, Arno reports, Celan experienced bursts of paranoia. “He could not always separate justified precautions from obsessive mistrust, vigilance from a fit of persecution mania,” she writes. “His deeply buried despair, moral severity, and tempestuous personality all caused sudden and violent fits.”
In 1962, he had what Arno calls “his first bout of psychosis,” which included hallucinations and violent episodes. He was hospitalized and medicated and underwent psychotherapy. Insulin injections, a since-discredited treatment, damaged his motor skills. Even during his hospitalizations, he continued to write poetry. (His productivity in the throes of mental health crises calls to mind Sylvia Plath.)
Arno, noting that Celan’s medical records remain sealed and his journals unavailable, doesn’t offer a diagnosis. The hallucinations and paranoia suggest schizophrenia, but Arno also mentions mania and depression, along with numerous suicide attempts. He tried his best to stay connected to his only child, Eric. But his instability cost him many friendships and ultimately his marriage.
In 1970, the 49-year-old poet drowned himself in the Seine, joining a sad company of writers who survived the Holocaust but not its emotional aftermath. What exactly triggered Celan’s suicide is impossible to know. Arno says only: “He was no longer capable of supporting the weight of the past as it flushed to the surface.”
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‘The Naked Woman’ asks — what would Jewish Chekhov look like?
Earlier this year, a lauded revival of Anton Chekhov’s overlooked opus Ivanov occasioned the question: What if Chekhov, that great chronicler of overeducated depressives, was a bit more Jewish?
That show has a substantial Jewish subplot, with the title character’s wife subjected to antisemitic smears.
For Jewish Russians, Chekhov, like his great interpreter Stanislavsky, is a part of the culture they still claim. For that reason expat companies, like Igor Golyak’s Arlekin Players, have long been in the business of reinterpreting him. Novelist Gary Shteyngart, in his pandemic novel, Our Country Friends, took things a step further, transmuting Chekhov’s dachas into the Belleville bungalow colony where he, and many ex-Soviet Jews, would summer.
Allie Avital and Alia Azamat Ashkenazi’s The Naked Woman, now in a limited run at 154 Theater, returns this proposition to the stage with some usual markers of the Russian master: characters brought low by their own inertia, a love triangle, frustrated ambitions and failures to launch. Into the mix they add the following staples of first generation Jews: immigrant parents’ expectations and the tension between the generation that recalls the weight of repression and the rising one that has only ever known American freedom. There are obligatory references to rabbis; the word “mensch” is dropped, but this is not a Shabbat-observing crew. If you know this specific demographic, there’s no doubting the affiliation.
Misha (Ilia Volok and Roman Freud alternate the role — Freud played him my evening), a successful architect, who moved to the U.S. decades before for a better life. For the New Year, and his birthday, he has made camp at his upstate country home. Some creaky exposition — on Pili Weeber’s set of floating timber, the Empire State’s answer to birch trees — sets up the interpersonal tensions that will go off in later acts like Chekhov’s proverbial gun.
Misha’s 35-year-old daughter Dasha (MaryKate Glenn) tells him his last check for her grad school tuition bounced. She’s there with her all-American boyfriend and is secretly pregnant. His bohemian older brother Grisha (Dima Koan), ever-clad in funky sweaters and kerchiefs by costume designer Kostya Goncharuk, resents Misha for their parents’ decision to only pay for his higher education and for being dependent on him for income. Rina (Natasha Goubskaya), Misha’s long-suffering wife is quietly working to save the family from financial ruin.
With these pieces set in place, the holiday is interrupted by, as advertised, a naked woman, screaming for help. Dismissing her as a “druggie in the woods,” Misha does nothing, a choice that brings questions of insularity and assimilation to the fore.
Dasha can’t get over her father’s inaction.
Rina explains it: “This American obsession with caring about strangers It’s all words and ideas. It’s THEATER. It doesn’t mean anything.”
The play is based on a short film by Avital, an accomplished director of visually-striking music videos for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Olivia Rodrigo and Moses Sumney. In that more abridged version, with mostly Russian dialogue, the Naked Woman stands in for the forces of mortality.
As one character in that film notes, in Russian, the word for death is “in the feminine, and therefore death is a woman. When death doesn’t hide, doesn’t wear a disguise, then it’s naked.”
Here the character is a more elusive metaphor: an avatar for Misha’s selfishness, the rift between his and Dasha’s concern for others or maybe her perception of herself as vulnerable and in need of saving. She could also be Rina’s aching feeling of neglect.
Avital and Ashkenazi’s background in film — Ashkenazi has a long resumé as a script supervisor and directed the short Esther’s Choice — is evident in the drama’s pacing. The piece doesn’t have the patience of Chekhov, who lets the action settle around the samovar and steep in subtext. This makes the show more dynamic, but more superficial in its psychology.
“I’ve always wondered why no one can truly love me, why they always leave me,” Dasha tells her father, coming off a monologue that hits the ear like a stilted translation of The Seagull’s yearning actress Nina or Vanya’s tragically dutiful Sonya. “But now I understand why. Because I’m just like you.”
It’s a tidy thesis, from creatives whose film work lives on the power of suggestion, with cinematography and movement being the major narrative force. Though Avital’s staging is capable, the script is crying out for an injection of subtlety that perhaps only a closeup can deliver.
This play is something of a proof of concept for a forthcoming feature film to be directed by Avital. If the short is any indication, its words and ideas may translate better taking a step away from the theater.
It may not be the natural medium for Chekhov, but it’s well-suited to his heirs.
Allie Avital and Alia Azamat Ashkenazi’s The Naked Woman is playing through June 14 at Theatre 154 in Manhattan. Tickets and more information can be found here.
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