A Melancholy Yiddish Classic That Also Happens to Be Hilarious

SONS AND DAUGHTERS, by Chaim Grade; translated by Rose Waldman

There’s a new old writer headed for the front tables of bookstores. The Lithuania-born Chaim Grade, who died in 1982, was one of the heavies of Yiddish literature in the 20th century. While never as well-known as Isaac Bashevis Singer or Sholem Aleichem, who also wrote in Yiddish, Grade (pronounced GRAH-duh) found an audience. His novel “Rabbis and Wives” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1983, the year it was claimed by “The Color Purple.”

Grade’s new book, to English-language readers, is “Sons and Daughters,” a sprawling and incident-packed novel, set during the 1930s in Poland and Lithuania, that is largely about rabbis and their wayward, modernity-seeking children. From the parent’s sickened perspective, their offspring are like eggs that have rolled off the countertop and broken. This book’s title could easily have been appended with a question mark.

Its path to publication was winding and uncertain. Grade wrote “Sons and Daughters” over a period of about 10 years in the 1960s and ’70s in the Bronx, where he moved after losing much of his family, including his first wife, in the Holocaust. The novel ran in serial form in two New York-based Yiddish newspapers. It was scheduled to be translated and published until Grade’s second wife, with whom he had an explosive relationship, denied access to the manuscript after his death.

It was only after her death, in 2010, that the project was renewed. The crossbow was drawn back long ago, in other words, but only now is the arrow released.

“Sons and Daughters” matters because it’s such an intimate and detailed portrait of Orthodox Jewish life in the old country between the wars. Antisemitism is on the rise. Israel is only a heady daydream. (“A new fad — a Jewish country!” one character says.) These Jews argue, and argue, about what is worth upholding and defending.

Chaim’s novel wouldn’t be worth talking about, though, if it weren’t alive. And it undoubtedly is. His fretful characters vibrate as if they were drawn by Roz Chast. Nearly everyone is about to smack someone. “Sons and Daughters” is a melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny.