April 5: Chaim Grade

Chaim Grade, one of the great stylists of modern Yiddish literature, was born on this date in 1910 in Vilna. Grade became a founder of the “Young Vilna” group of experimental artists and writers in the 1930s. He survived the war in the USSR and came to the U.S. with his wife Inna in 1948. After he died in 1982, Inna “cantankerously repulsed almost all efforts to translate or publish his work or sift through his papers,” according to Joseph Berger in the New York Times. Following her death in May, 2010, their apartment was open to inspection and his papers, including some unpublished manuscripts, are being sifted by YIVO, the National Yiddish Book Center, the New York Public Library, and Harvard University. Grade’s short story, "My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” about the reunion of a secular Jewish Holocaust survivor with a khasidic friend from yeshiva, was made into an excellent 1991 film, The Quarrel, which eloquently explores the meaning of Jewish theology and Jewish identity in the post-war, post-modern world.

“They should take over that apartment as if they were taking over King Tut’s tomb.” —Dr. Ralph Speken