What do you think?
Rate this book
Yeshiva Volumes I and II
Book by Grade, Chaim
- GenresHistorical Fiction
600 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
1 person is currently reading
50 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 21, 2023
A fascinating and surprising novel about a sort of Jewish Byronic hero. Tzemach Atlas is part of the Eastern European yeshiva world, and is drawn to its most militant and ideologically pure branch, the Novardok movement. Yet on the first page of this novel he loses his faith, and his primary motivation is shown to be an intense, self-punishing focus on burnishing his character - no, how does one translate shevirat ha-midot - destroying the ego, perhaps? His foil in this is the Mahaze Avraham, an (extremely thinly) disguised portrait of the Chazon Ish, the influential leader with whom Grade studied in his youth.
A thinly disguised alter ego of Grade appears in the book too, the young romantic Chaykel Vilner, who the rabbi adopts as a student in an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to keep him within the fold. And the town of Valkininkai, described in the book in loving detail - its beautiful wooden synagogue with ornate wooden carvings, its fiery debates between zealots and Mizrachniks after its rabbi departed for the holy land in 1925, its mussar yeshiva for young students run by Rabbi Yitzchak Leizerovski (is this our hero, Tzemach Atlas?)
Much of Grade's lifelong opus consists of working through the contradictions in his upbringing. From the warm and lively sabbath afternoons in his mother's kitchen in the "Butchers' Street" in Vilna, to the intensity and moral seriousness of his years in Novardok, to his bond with the Chazon Ish and subsequent life as a celebrated poet and novelist (the centre of the "Yung-Vilne" writers' group), who abandoned his faith but always felt a lingering ambivalence about it. (Of his war years, in which he fled to Siberia and lost his family, before finally washing up in New York, he never spoke.) When Isaac Bashevis Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize, many Yiddishists felt that it was Grade who should have gotten it, and that his books more authentically described the lost Eastern European Jewish world. (When Grade's somewhat paranoid second wife died in 2010, finally releasing his papers, it was a "Dead Sea scrolls" moment for Yiddishists.)
It is hard to quite convey the strangeness of the Novardok movement, which, as David Fishman has written, drew no small amount from the febrile revolutionary spirit of the times, with which it competed for young hearts and minds. It was composed of cells which would spread out and form new branches, proselytize aggressively, smuggle people across borders, and relentlessly police each other's ideological purity. It placed little value on the traditional piety and scholarly traditions of yeshivot - its founder, the Alter , was not especially known as a scholar, and the movement scorned mainstream, bourgeois piety as "ווייַבישער פרומקייט" (which I'd prefer not to translate…) Of course, unlike the socialists who dreamed of a communal Utopia, mussar stressed individualism and solitude, rejecting the world and battling one's inner temptations to the death.
So this is some background for our hero, who is swept up with the Novardok spirit, smuggling students through dangerous territory, dedicating his life to establishing yeshivot, unable to hold back his searing moral critique of everyone around him. And yet his core is hollow: he isn't sure why he does any of this, and this is brought home to him by his nemesis, the Chazon Ish, and by the damage he leaves in his wake.
The Chazon Ish was a fascinating, complex person, described in glimpses here and in exhaustive detail in Benny Brown's 1,000-page biography from 2010. He was critical of Novardok and the mussar movement (something which was later censored from his book Emuna uBitachon). He was kind and patient, but also an uncompromising zealot, who in his opposition to Zionism, army service and secularism did a lot to shape the modern ultra-Orthodox world. (And the recent move to supply "kosher electricity" on the Sabbath in Israel gives another posthumous win to one of his once-fringe opinions.)
This book portrays him intimately, as his protégé saw him: sickly and myopic, estranged from his wife, worn out by constant visitors who want his counsel and distract him from his study, but also humorous and patient and possessed of acute psychological insight. Tzemach Atlas is not exactly representative of the mussar movement. He is a renegade, rejected by and rejecting the world, and both the Alter and the Chazon Ish accuse him of arrogance. In Novardok, says another Grade character (Hirsch Rasseyner, in the eponymous story) they believed that all false beliefs stemmed from bad moral traits. Tzemach Atlas internalizes Novardok's suspicion of every action, its seeing ulterior motives everywhere, but his tragic flaw is an inability to see it in himself. The advice the Chazon Ish urges on him is to be suspicious of his own motivations but forgiving toward others.
The saddest part of the book is the two women who love Tzemach, Ronya the shochet's wife and his own wife, the nonobservant Slava. Both see his flaws but are unable to stop loving him despite that, no matter how much it hurts them.
Grade somewhat idealised his teacher the Chazon Ish, and he comes across in the book as a wise and balanced person, an island in a stormy world. Grade left his faith when the Chazon Ish moved to Palestine, and the letter he wrote to him from Vilna in 1934, in wretched poverty, touches the heart with its desparate need for approval. Yet the reason that he moved to New York rather than Israel seems to have been to avoid confronting his mentor. He paid an emotional visit in the 1960s and wept on his grave. In America, he laboured in obscurity, never learning much English, until a later generation of Yiddish scholars discovered him: he gave the first guest lecture in Yiddish at Harvard.
One of those scholars, Ruth Wisse, has observed that Grade's genius is to recreate the world of his youth not in an elegiac way, but through conflict. Everything else changes: but the fights over principle have not. Those fights continue today; only the backdrop changes.
A thinly disguised alter ego of Grade appears in the book too, the young romantic Chaykel Vilner, who the rabbi adopts as a student in an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to keep him within the fold. And the town of Valkininkai, described in the book in loving detail - its beautiful wooden synagogue with ornate wooden carvings, its fiery debates between zealots and Mizrachniks after its rabbi departed for the holy land in 1925, its mussar yeshiva for young students run by Rabbi Yitzchak Leizerovski (is this our hero, Tzemach Atlas?)
Much of Grade's lifelong opus consists of working through the contradictions in his upbringing. From the warm and lively sabbath afternoons in his mother's kitchen in the "Butchers' Street" in Vilna, to the intensity and moral seriousness of his years in Novardok, to his bond with the Chazon Ish and subsequent life as a celebrated poet and novelist (the centre of the "Yung-Vilne" writers' group), who abandoned his faith but always felt a lingering ambivalence about it. (Of his war years, in which he fled to Siberia and lost his family, before finally washing up in New York, he never spoke.) When Isaac Bashevis Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize, many Yiddishists felt that it was Grade who should have gotten it, and that his books more authentically described the lost Eastern European Jewish world. (When Grade's somewhat paranoid second wife died in 2010, finally releasing his papers, it was a "Dead Sea scrolls" moment for Yiddishists.)
It is hard to quite convey the strangeness of the Novardok movement, which, as David Fishman has written, drew no small amount from the febrile revolutionary spirit of the times, with which it competed for young hearts and minds. It was composed of cells which would spread out and form new branches, proselytize aggressively, smuggle people across borders, and relentlessly police each other's ideological purity. It placed little value on the traditional piety and scholarly traditions of yeshivot - its founder, the Alter , was not especially known as a scholar, and the movement scorned mainstream, bourgeois piety as "ווייַבישער פרומקייט" (which I'd prefer not to translate…) Of course, unlike the socialists who dreamed of a communal Utopia, mussar stressed individualism and solitude, rejecting the world and battling one's inner temptations to the death.
So this is some background for our hero, who is swept up with the Novardok spirit, smuggling students through dangerous territory, dedicating his life to establishing yeshivot, unable to hold back his searing moral critique of everyone around him. And yet his core is hollow: he isn't sure why he does any of this, and this is brought home to him by his nemesis, the Chazon Ish, and by the damage he leaves in his wake.
The Chazon Ish was a fascinating, complex person, described in glimpses here and in exhaustive detail in Benny Brown's 1,000-page biography from 2010. He was critical of Novardok and the mussar movement (something which was later censored from his book Emuna uBitachon). He was kind and patient, but also an uncompromising zealot, who in his opposition to Zionism, army service and secularism did a lot to shape the modern ultra-Orthodox world. (And the recent move to supply "kosher electricity" on the Sabbath in Israel gives another posthumous win to one of his once-fringe opinions.)
This book portrays him intimately, as his protégé saw him: sickly and myopic, estranged from his wife, worn out by constant visitors who want his counsel and distract him from his study, but also humorous and patient and possessed of acute psychological insight. Tzemach Atlas is not exactly representative of the mussar movement. He is a renegade, rejected by and rejecting the world, and both the Alter and the Chazon Ish accuse him of arrogance. In Novardok, says another Grade character (Hirsch Rasseyner, in the eponymous story) they believed that all false beliefs stemmed from bad moral traits. Tzemach Atlas internalizes Novardok's suspicion of every action, its seeing ulterior motives everywhere, but his tragic flaw is an inability to see it in himself. The advice the Chazon Ish urges on him is to be suspicious of his own motivations but forgiving toward others.
The saddest part of the book is the two women who love Tzemach, Ronya the shochet's wife and his own wife, the nonobservant Slava. Both see his flaws but are unable to stop loving him despite that, no matter how much it hurts them.
Grade somewhat idealised his teacher the Chazon Ish, and he comes across in the book as a wise and balanced person, an island in a stormy world. Grade left his faith when the Chazon Ish moved to Palestine, and the letter he wrote to him from Vilna in 1934, in wretched poverty, touches the heart with its desparate need for approval. Yet the reason that he moved to New York rather than Israel seems to have been to avoid confronting his mentor. He paid an emotional visit in the 1960s and wept on his grave. In America, he laboured in obscurity, never learning much English, until a later generation of Yiddish scholars discovered him: he gave the first guest lecture in Yiddish at Harvard.
One of those scholars, Ruth Wisse, has observed that Grade's genius is to recreate the world of his youth not in an elegiac way, but through conflict. Everything else changes: but the fights over principle have not. Those fights continue today; only the backdrop changes.
December 15, 2022
If I had rated this book in the early 80s when I found it in the university library and devoured it, I would have given it a solid 4-5 stars, probably 5. I was very interested in learning about Judaism at the time, and ever since I have remembered the book fondly, though I could never find it. A few weeks ago I discovered it on the Internet Archive and set about reading it with remembered delight.
And what a comedown.
This is a rambling string of episodes with no real overarching narrative, no resolution, and no conclusion. The main character has no faith in either God or Judaism and yet feels he must start a yeshiva in a small town. He is basically "fleeing forward", running from one place, relationship, job to another without finding fulfilment in any of them--because fulfilment comes from within. He considers himself a man of integrity and intellect, without realising that his lack of faith renders all his efforts to educate others in the faith he does not have null and void.
All of the characters save one are constantly angry, shouting, quarrelling; even the young scholar Melechke is self-absorbed, more interested in impressing people with his babyish "knowledge" than actually learning or doing something positive.
I kept reading and reading, thinking, "Now I'll get to the good part; surely in this section I'll find the part that was so interesting over 40 years ago." However, when I read the last sentence and turned the page only to find the word Glossary staring me in the face, I realised there wasn't a "good part" for the me I am today. I can only imagine that since I grew up in a highly dysfunctional family where anger and squabbling and sarcasm were the norm, it was familiar and "comfortable" back then. Today, I cannot recommend this book to anyone.
I almost wish I hadn't read it again, since my fond memories of how much I enjoyed this book turned out to be based on nothing.
And what a comedown.
This is a rambling string of episodes with no real overarching narrative, no resolution, and no conclusion. The main character has no faith in either God or Judaism and yet feels he must start a yeshiva in a small town. He is basically "fleeing forward", running from one place, relationship, job to another without finding fulfilment in any of them--because fulfilment comes from within. He considers himself a man of integrity and intellect, without realising that his lack of faith renders all his efforts to educate others in the faith he does not have null and void.
All of the characters save one are constantly angry, shouting, quarrelling; even the young scholar Melechke is self-absorbed, more interested in impressing people with his babyish "knowledge" than actually learning or doing something positive.
I kept reading and reading, thinking, "Now I'll get to the good part; surely in this section I'll find the part that was so interesting over 40 years ago." However, when I read the last sentence and turned the page only to find the word Glossary staring me in the face, I realised there wasn't a "good part" for the me I am today. I can only imagine that since I grew up in a highly dysfunctional family where anger and squabbling and sarcasm were the norm, it was familiar and "comfortable" back then. Today, I cannot recommend this book to anyone.
I almost wish I hadn't read it again, since my fond memories of how much I enjoyed this book turned out to be based on nothing.
January 29, 2023
“ A man leaves his house by the front door to search for what he lacks. He searches far and wide, to the farthest corners of the earth. Years later he returns home, to the back door, bent, begging to be lent in, only to discover that what he sought for years in far-off places was waiting for him in his own home.” P. 365. (See Siddartha)
“What should be man’s trade in this world? Let him be mute.” P 370
“What should be man’s trade in this world? Let him be mute.” P 370
May 17, 2018
The Yeshiva is an exciting novel set in eastern Europe in the late '20s or early '30s. It is written in a style similar to that of I.B. Singer. In other words, it is superior literature, grapples with important questions, and tells an interesting story. I would have given this novel 5 stars if a little more happened a bit more quickly. As it was, I almost gave up half-way through.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews