Sons and Daughters: A Novel

by Chaim Grade, Rose Waldman (translator), Adam Kirsch (introduction)

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE • A KIRKUS BEST FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR • LONGLISTED FOR THE FREUDENHEIM TRANSLATION PRIZE • From “one of the great—if not the greatest—contemporary Yiddish novelists” (Elie Wiesel), the long-awaited English translation of a work, Tolstoyan in scope, that chronicles the last, tumultuous decade of a world succumbing to the march of modernity.

“A great beard novel . . . Also a great food novel . . . A melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny . . . [Grade’s] fretful characters vibrate as if they were drawn by Roz Chast [and] Rose Waldman's translation seems miraculous to me.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“It is me the prophet laments when he cries out, ‘My enemies are the people in my own home.’” The Rabbi ignored his borscht and instead chewed on a crust of bread dipped in salt. “My greatest enemies are my own family.”

Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen’s world, the world of his forefathers, is crumbling before his eyes. And in his own home! His eldest, Bentzion, is off in Bialystok, studying to be a businessman; his daughter Bluma Rivtcha is in Vilna, at nursing school. For her older sister, Tilza, he at least managed to find a suitable young rabbi, but he can tell things are off between them. Naftali Hertz? Forget it; he’s been lost to a philosophy degree in Switzerland (and maybe even a goyish wife?). And now the rabbi’s youngest, Refael’ke, wants to run off to the Holy Land with the Zionists.

Originally serialized in the 1960s and 1970s in New York–based Yiddish newspapers, Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters is a precious glimpse of a way of life that is no longer—the rich Yiddish culture of Poland and Lithuania that the Holocaust would eradicate. We meet the Katzenellenbogens in the tiny village of Morehdalye, in the 1930s, when gangs of Poles are beginning to boycott Jewish merchants and the modern, secular world is pressing in on the shtetl from all sides. It’s this clash, between the freethinking secular life and a life bound by religious duty—and the comforts offered by each—that stands at the center of Sons and Daughters. 

With characters that rival the homespun philosophers and lovable rogues of Sholem Aleichem and I. B. Singer—from the brooding Zalia Ziskind, paralyzed by the suffering of others, to the Dostoyevskian demon Shabse Shepsel—Grade’s masterful novel brims with humanity and heartbreaking affection for a world, once full of life in all its glorious complexity, that would in just a few years vanish forever.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Jewish, Classics, Literary Fiction, Historical, Literature

685 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 25, 2025

Reviews

[The Bookish Elf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters is a literary relic resurrected—a novel of immense cultural, spiritual, and historical significance that carries the depth of Tolstoy, the pathos of Turgenev, and the vivid, vanishing world of the shtetl. Translated with precision and care by Rose Waldman, this long-awaited English edition invites readers into a quietly tumultuous portrait of Jewish life in interwar Poland. It is not simply a novel, but a living, elegiac monument to a world eclipsed by the Holocaust, a complex dissection of generational rifts, and a meditation on what it means to preserve identity while teetering on the edge of modernity.

In this historical literary fiction set primarily in the small Polish town of Morehdalye during the 1930s, Grade explores the familial, ideological, and spiritual disintegration within the household of Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen. At its core, Sons and Daughters is not about singular rebellion but about collective erosion—the erosion of tradition, authority, and belief in the face of secularism, Zionism, socialism, and assimilation. Each child in the Katzenellenbogen household represents a different answer to the question that quietly dominates the novel: how does a Jew live in the modern world?

Plot Overview: The Family as Microcosm

Rabbi Sholem Shachne is the patriarch whose authority begins to crumble as his children drift—emotionally, spiritually, and geographically—from the world of Torah and yeshiva to universities, professions, and revolutionary ideals. His eldest, Naftali Hertz, leaves for a philosophy degree in Switzerland and marries a non-Jewish woman. Bentzion becomes a businessman in Bialystok. Tilza, his daughter, unhappily marries a rabbi but yearns for personal freedom. Bluma Rivtcha seeks purpose through nursing and is conflicted about marrying a Torah student. The youngest, Refael’ke, inspired by Zionism, dreams of emigrating to Palestine and joining a kibbutz.

Their divergence is more than generational; it is existential. These sons and daughters don't just question the old world—they abandon it, reform it, or rebel against it. Through these character arcs, Grade poses an essential inquiry: Can tradition and progress ever truly reconcile?

The tension that drives the novel is not resolved in dramatic outbursts but simmers through dialogues, inner monologues, and intergenerational silence. When Rabbi Sholem Shachne laments, “My greatest enemies are my own family,” the line lands like a quiet thunderclap. It’s not just sorrowful—it’s prophetic.

Character Analysis: Ideals vs. Individuals

Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen

He is the linchpin of the novel—a man of spiritual rigidity, emotional depth, and mounting despair. Sholem Shachne is not merely a father; he is the embodiment of a fading worldview. His failure to keep his family within the bounds of religious orthodoxy is also a broader metaphor for the Jewish establishment's inability to retain the younger generation. Grade portrays him with both dignity and desolation, never mocking his devotion but always exposing its fragility.

Bluma Rivtcha

Bluma Rivtcha is one of the novel’s most compelling characters, a figure caught in emotional and ideological crosscurrents. Her resistance to being paired with the awkward and indecisive Zindel Kadish is emblematic of her yearning to escape inherited roles. Her conflict is not overtly rebellious, but internal, reflective of a growing feminist consciousness.

Zindel Kadish

Zindel is a poignant character precisely because of his mediocrity. His desire to be a rabbi overseas, his reluctance to commit, and his dull predictability mirror the spiritual vacuum afflicting second-tier religious leadership. His contrast with the intellectual fervor of Naftali Hertz or the political fire of Marcus Luria underscores the dwindling middle path.

Tilza & Yaakov Asher

Tilza and her husband, the rosh yeshiva Yaakov Asher, reflect a marriage suffocating under mismatched expectations. Tilza’s quiet discontent speaks volumes, while her husband’s fundamentalism—wrapped in pious monotony—represents the dull, rigid end of religious devotion. The clash between them mirrors the broader discord in the rabbi's house.

Writing Style: Description as Elegy

Grade’s writing, as masterfully preserved by Waldman’s translation, is dense, poetic, and unhurried. His attention to the textures of Morehdalye—its sagging willow trees, dusty roads, moss-covered rooftops—imbues the novel with a sense of mournful stillness. One can feel the dying light of a civilization in every detail.

- Grade is a connoisseur of silence. In his world, what characters don’t say often carries more weight than what they do.

- Dialogue flows like Talmudic debate—probing, philosophical, weary with wisdom.

- Similes and metaphors are richly embroidered, often spiritual, sometimes folkloric.

This is not a novel for hurried readers. Its rhythm mirrors the pace of life in the shtetl, steeped in reflection, conflict, and inevitable decay.

Themes: Memory, Identity, and Moral Rupture

1. The End of a Civilization

At the heart of Sons and Daughters is a requiem for Eastern European Jewry. Though the Holocaust is never explicitly mentioned, its shadow looms. Every scene feels saturated with premonition.

2. Generational Disillusionment

Like Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, this novel is about irreconcilable worldviews. Each child carves out a new path, often at odds with their father’s values. Grade doesn’t idealize the youth; many of them are confused, arrogant, or naïve. But neither does he demonize them.

3. Spiritual Loneliness

Rabbi Sholem Shachne is not alone in the world—but he is spiritually abandoned. This theme of abandonment reverberates—through Tilza’s estrangement from her husband, through Refael’ke’s ideological wanderings, and through Zindel’s tepid ambitions.

4. Language and Cultural Erosion

Each child adopts not just a new ideology but a new language—German, Hebrew, Russian, even English—while Yiddish, the mother tongue of this civilization, quietly disappears. Grade’s own choice to write in Yiddish is both an act of resistance and resurrection.

Strengths of the Novel

- Profound Character Psychology: Grade never settles for caricatures. Even the most minor characters pulse with interior life.

- Historical Immersion: The depiction of interwar Poland is textured and resonant, from economic hardship to political boycotts.

- Balanced Perspective: Grade does not sentimentalize the past nor glorify the future. He renders both with painful honesty.

- Translation Quality: Rose Waldman’s translation reads as though it was first written in English—faithful yet fluent.

Where the Novel Falters

- Pacing: The novel’s deliberate pace, while stylistically consistent, can test reader patience—especially in a modern literary environment attuned to tighter arcs and quicker resolutions.

- Unresolved Endings: Sons and Daughters ends without a clear conclusion. This is partly due to Grade’s original plan to write a second volume—a plan never realized. Some narrative threads feel incomplete, leaving readers suspended in ambiguity.

- Philosophical Density: At times, Grade’s reflections border on abstraction. Characters can become vessels for ideology, and conversations occasionally blur the line between narrative and polemic.

Final Thoughts: A Graveyard Song Sung in Living Words

Chaim Grade was once called “the gravestone carver of my vanished world”—and Sons and Daughters is perhaps his most moving epitaph. The book mourns a world that has passed but never ceases to believe in the sacredness of that lost life. While modern readers may wrestle with its pace and unfinished resolution, what remains is a novel rich with truth, complexity, and deep emotional reverberation.

In reading Sons and Daughters, one becomes not just a reader but a witness—a participant in the quiet tragedy of forgetting and the noble labor of remembrance.

[Captain Absurd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here I encountered an epic tale, which in scope is equal to the classics of world literature. We get a saga about how easy it is to lose the burden of tradition in the relay of generations. Naftali, who is supposed to be the personification of the author, gets into a difficult life situation that resembles a trap, his way of functioning in the world of parents and grandfathers is based on lies. While reading I kept wondering how I myself bridge the generation gap. A very powerful thing, five out of five!

[Sharon Hart-Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

This us definitely one of Grade's finest works. It's a shame that he never finished it, though the novel is so superb that it barely matters. Also, the translator did a wonderful job in translating it from the Yiddish.

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating story set in pre-Holocaust Poland in the Jewish shtetl. I loved the many characters and marveled that the reader was easily able to keep track of all of them because the author is a master storyteller and created such vivid characters. Based on his memories of living in Vilna, it is clear Grade had a divine spark to bring those people back to life. I never quite got out from under the shadow of what is to come for these people from the past - how in just a short time, their entire world would be gone and them along with it. It is unspeakably tragic. I am not Jewish, but I enjoy learning about Jewish culture and religion so this was a glorious read for me. I will be reading other works of this author. Totally enjoyed this.

[Isadora · Rating 4 out of 5]

SWEEEEEET SWEEEEET VICTORYYYYYY

(I’ll be reviewing this for JBC so you can read that there. but overall a very good and interesting book. could be tedious …very tedious… at times. but a fascinating look at an extended jewish family and the many ways they are impacted by modernism and discussions surrounding piety. and the history of the translation itself is so interesting. )

(to be published march 25 go read it!)

[Steven Z. · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the tradition of Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer and his younger brother, Israel Joshua Singer, both Yiddish novelists, Chaim Grade last novel, SONS AND DAUGHTERS captures a way of life that no longer exists – the rich Yiddish culture of Poland and Lithuania of the 1930s that the Holocaust destroyed. The novel, which is finally available in English was originally serialized in the 1960s and 70s in two New York based Yiddish newspapers, dissects the lives of two Jewish families in early 1930s Poland torn apart by religious, cultural, and generational differences.

Grade who passed away in 1982 was one of the leading Yiddish novelists of the 20th century. His novel, RABBIS AND WIVES was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1983 and his last book was expertly translated by Rose Waldman from Yiddish to English. SONS AND DAUGHTERS is a sprawling and eventful novel that takes place in the villages of Morehdalye and Zembin and depicts daily life as it unfolds among two families of rabbis that are splintering as they face the pressures of the modern world. The rabbis, Sholem Shachne Katzenellenberg and Eli-Leizer Epstein possess wonderful reputations as Torah scholars and leaders of their communities. Interestingly, Sholem Shachne is the son in law of Eli-Leizer, and both belong to different generations and beliefs of their children. They differ in religious stridency, the grandfather is stricter, but in no means is the son in law lax, even though he is more lenient. Both expect their sons to become rabbis, or at least Torah scholars, and their daughters to marry men of the same persuasion. Grade is the perfect novelist to convey this type of story as he was raised Orthodox, studied in Yeshiva as a teenager, but developed a strong secular view of life. Having lost his family in the Holocaust, he resettled in New York, remarried, and turned to fiction, writing in Yiddish.

The revolt by the younger generation against orthodox Judaism drives the novel’s plot, though Grade doesn’t forfeit his sympathy with old men who are trying to keep Judaism alive. The Sholem Shachne family is developed first as his children rebel against their religious upbringing. In his discussion with his son in law, Yaakov Asher Kahane we learn how each child rebelled. Bluma Rivtcha, perhaps the most attractive character in the novel, leaves home to attend nursing school in Vilna after her father fails to negotiate a successful arranged marriage. Naftali Hertz, the eldest son ran away to study at a secular university in Switzerland, earning a doctorate in philosophy and married a Christian woman who gave birth to a son who was not circumcised. Tilza, Sholem Shachne’s daughter is married to Kahane, but their marriage has issues as she does not want any more children with her husband as she rejects the life of a rebbetzin. Bentzion leaves for Bialystok to study business, and the youngest son, Refael’ke wants to join the pioneer Zionists and run off to Palestine. For their father there is a constant debate in his psyche as to the way his children have rejected the rabbinical life and what role he played in their decisions. He possessed internal demons, and he had to admit to himself that he had not been successful in instilling in his children the sense and strength to rebuff the modern trends developing in Poland in the early 1930s.

Grade’s writing apart from dissecting the rabbinical community embodied in Jewish family life is also an ode to nature as he describes the weather, the leaves, the trees, the Nariv river, fruit, lush green foliage that surrounded his village. Grade also describes inanimate objects with the same degree of detail and emotion, items like dishes, cups, glasses, figurines are all part of his approach. Grade also discusses his characters with the same introspective scope he applies to nature and objects through the diverse personalities he presents which allows the reader to gain an understanding of the Orthodox Jewish world of the period. In addition, we witness the arguments and disagreements between different rabbis and diverse individuals which at times reflects the similarities between the old world and the oncoming secular environment.

The Katzenellenbog family is at the center of the novel. The travails brought on by some of the children are fully explored, but Grade integrates the lives of other families, particularly that of Eli-Leizer Epstein, the Zembin rabbi who refuses to allow Jews to travel on the sabbath or attend any form of entertainment. The conversations between Sholem Shachne and Eli-Leizer are emblematic of the crisis in Judaism as it is confronted by an increasingly secular world. Both feel betrayed by their children as they torture themselves in trying to rekindle old world beliefs among family members.

Grade does a marvelous job developing interesting characters who epitomize the crisis in Judaism but also the character traits of people who are not part of the rabbinical world. Chavtche, one of Eli-Leizer’s four daughters despised her father’s third wife, Vigasia, who she believed was robbing her inheritance for her own sons. Further, she lived off her sister, Sarah Raizel’s money, who had a fulltime job. When Eli-Leizer wins a lottery much to Chavtche’s chagrin, he and Vigasia decide to devote the money to rebuild the Talmud Torah where orphans had been living in squalor. Chavtche is a selfish and jealous person emitting the characteristics of many people.

Refeal Leima is another sibling who left for the United States as he grew tired of the strict religious life fostered by his father and became a rabbi and Rosh Yeshiva of Chicago which practiced a less orthodox approach to Judaism. Shabse Shepsel, Eli-Leizer’s eldest son suffered from what appears to be a manic-depressive personality with delusions of grandeur as he changed his avocation repeatedly. He married Draizel Halberstadt because of her impressive dowry. He would deplete her wealth with a number of faulty business decisions but would move back to Zembin and purchase a house near his father who he disrespected. Grade uses his character as a vehicle to explain the religious dichotomy that exists throughout the novel. In fact, Grade describes him as “half demon and half schlemiel.” It seems that Shabse Shepsel is stalking his father and trying to humiliate him. But in the contorted logic of the rabbinical student mind, he also defends his father in a dispute over the teachings of the Tarbus school, where one of the teachers described his father an “an old, senile dotard who expects Jews to sit with folded hands here in exile until the Messiah comes and redeems us.” He further argued that the faithful hide behind their mezuzahs in the hopes it will protect them against the perpetrators of pogroms. Shabse Shepsel’s dichotomy is on full display as he humiliates his father in private and defends him in front of his congregation leading Eli-Leizer to try and convince his son in Chicago to send for Shabse Shepsel if at all possible due to America’s stringent immigration quotas.

Grade creates a number of important characters apart from the two main rabbinical families. We meet Rabbi Zalia Ziskind Luria, the head of the Silczer dynasty and father of the protagonist, Marcus Luria. He is described as an ascetic sage, burdened by the suffering of others and trying to keep Judaism alive in a world where the younger generation is rebelling against it. He is a complex character, portrayed with both sympathy and a sense of the harsh realities of the world he inhabits, seeming to absorb the pains of others as his own, reinforcing his depressive personality which fostered hatred on the part of his family. Further, as a favor to his friend, Sholem Shachne he tutored Naftali Hertz at his yeshiva to try and reinforce Judaism, however, it failed, and he would soon flee for Switzerland where he failed to fully free himself from his intense Orthodox upbringing. Marcus Luria, however, is a young man who also abandons his studies at rabbinical school after becoming wealthy in the stock market, signifying his rejection of his father's traditional Jewish path. Marcus is seen as a pawn of trendy ideologies, who unlike his father embodies the younger generation's revolt against traditional Judaism, and sees himself as a follower of Friedrich Nietzsche, and eventually turns to communism. Lastly, Grade introduces Khlavneh Yeshurin, an aspiring Yiddish poet, seemingly modeled on himself. Khlavneh is the fiancé of Sholem Shachne’s daughter Bluma Rivtcha and strongly believes that secular Yiddishists like himself hadn’t rejected Judaism, but rather, they understand religion and Jewish folklife differently than their predecessors.

It is clear from Grade’s portrayal of Judaic Polish society with its petty jealousies, fervent scholars, crooked businessmen, class consciousness, dysfunctional families, constant conflict between religious and secular issues, fears of political movements, in this case Zionism in actuality mirror the same types of conflicts that exist among people in the gentile world. As a former Yeshiva student, Grade was well trained in the art of Talmudic debate. Unlike the first half of the novel, which describes the horrible reality the Polish Jews will face on the eve of the Holocaust, the second half of the novel accentuates the philosophical which is highlighted by arguments between Naftali Hertz and Khlavneh. It is in the protracted philosophical arguments that the author’s talents dominate.

One of the characterizations of the rabbinical world that Grade describes concerns Dwight Garner’s label that SONS AND DAUGHTERS is a beard novel. Writing in his New York Times book review of March 30, 2025, Garner states; It’s a great beard novel. The emphatic facial hair possessed by Grade’s rabbis and Torah scholars curls luxuriously around the margins of nearly every page. Here is a typical sentence: “Eli-Leizer’s mustache was still moist from the meal, and some dairy farfel noodles stuck to his beard.” And: “Avraham Alter Katzenellenbogen’s beard hung stiffly from his chin to his waist, as if it were made of porcelain like a seder plate. Who can trust these new, clean-shaven, Americanized rabbis? The greats of the Torah had beards so bushy they could hold water.”

The issue of how to raise one’s children emerges in numerous discussions. Sholem Shachne’s wife, Henna’le complains to her husband that had he been more flexible his children would not have run away. He wonders: “where they disobeying him because he slapped them too frequently, or because he hadn’t slapped them enough?” The doubts and inner thoughts of parents reflect this dichotomy which can be applied to modern children as well as rabbinical ones. Other issues that Grade integrates into the novel include the role of Zionism in Palestine, the ideas of Marx and Nietzsche, the allure of America, arranged marriages, the selling of kosher and non-kosher clothing, the overcrowding in rabbinical homes, what do trees tell us, and the beauty of certain foods. All are part of an intense examination of the orthodox world but also told with a great deal of humor. What stands out is a remark by Naftali Hertz who ruminates on children who have been bequeathed an inheritance which is basically growing up in a shtetl, and its impact on their lives which in the end is why they desert their family and home.

As the book begins to wind down, parents and children begin to soften toward each other, but since Grade never finished volume two of the novel (it was to be written in two parts) we do not know how the familial tensions were resolved. But at the same time modernity cannot be stopped as Jewish socialist youth groups parade through villages, and more concerning, anti-Semitic Polish nationalists mount a successful boycott against Jewish merchants across the region.

In her article describing SONS AND DAUGHTERS appearing in the April 2025 edition of The Atlantic Judith Shulevitz relates that “Toward the end of the book, Grade unites life and fiction in the character of a lapsed yeshiva bocher (student) named Khlavneh who has become a Yiddish poet. He is the fiancé of Sholem Shachne’s daughter, the one who went to Vilna to study nursing. Lest we fail to grasp that Khlavneh is a self-portrait, Grade drops hints. The daughter, for instance—an attractive, spirited woman, perhaps the most appealing figure in the novel—is named Bluma Rivtcha, a rhyming echo of Frumme-Liebe, the name of Grade’s murdered first wife, also a nurse and also the daughter of a rabbi. Bluma Rivtcha brings Khlavneh home to meet the family. Over Shabbos dinner, the brother who moved to Switzerland and no longer observes Jewish laws ridicules him for writing poetry in “jargon”—that is, Yiddish, the bastard language of the uneducated Jew, “a common person, an ignoramus, a boor”—rather than in Hebrew, and for thinking that he and his fellow Yiddish writers could capture the spirit and poetry of Jewish life without following Jewish law themselves. Khlavneh refutes the brother in a brilliant show of erudition, then concludes: “You hate the jargon boys and girls because they have the courage to be different from their fathers and grandfathers, even to wage battles with their fathers and grandfathers, and yet, they don’t run away from home. The father, who everyone thinks will be offended by a guest’s outburst at the Sabbath table, laughs in delight. Grade, having fashioned a world in which the old fights mattered, now gets to win them.”

Rose Waldman, the translator provides interesting insides in her note at the end of the novel. She describes Gade’s personal dilemma as he experiences “the tension between his desire to live and write like a secular human being in a modern world and the constant nostalgic pull of his Yeshiva past, the traditional Jewish Vilna of his youth.” For Grade sees himself as “a thoroughly ancient Jew, while the man inside me wants to be thoroughly modern. This is my calamity, plain and simple, a struggle I cannot win.” This dichotomy is pervasive throughout the novel. Waldman does the reader an important service by tracing the history of the novel’s preparation for publication and the difficulties that arose due to the fact that it was incomplete. Grade was prepared to write a two volume novel but never completed the second volume. However, the translator discovered some of Grade’s ideas for the second book and its ending, which she includes in her note which provides the reader with a semblance of a conclusion.

The tortuous rabbinical arguments are on full display throughout the novel as the characters dissect the Torah, Mishna, and Gemora, and other sacred texts of Judaism as they apply them to their modern situations. These commentaries can appear to be provincial but in their day were the rule of law and every yeshiva bocha (which I was one in the 1950s and 60s!) must conform to. In the end Grade’s novel overflows with humanity and heartbreaking emotions for a world, once full of life with all of its contradictions, that within a decade of the novel’s setting would be destroyed forever.
In closing, Grade never mentions the coming Holocaust in the book, however its future existence is felt on every page. According to Yossi Newfield in his February 24, 2025 review in the Yiddish newspaper, Forward; “In some sense, SONS AND DAUGHTERS can be considered a Holocaust memorial, as the events it describes foreshadow the upcoming annihilation of Polish Jewry. It is this tragic awareness that animates Grade’s questioning and demand for answers from the rabbinic establishment, from the Torah, and from God himself.”

[Leah Linfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whew! Sitting at a dense 800 pages, this book was an effort to get through. But it was originally published serially in the 70s in Yiddish publications, so I felt like I was actually adhering to the original intention by reading this in pieces over the course of a month+.

My dad told me that my great-grandfather (who ran a Yiddish theater troupe called the Folksbienne in the Lower East Side) thought Chaim Grade was a criminally underrated Yiddish novelist.

And I agree, thanks to a brilliant English translation by Rose Waldman! Set in 1920s Poland amid rising antisemitism, this book depicts all kinds of Jews -- religious zealots, "free-thinkers," yiddish poets, depressed rabbis, early Zionists, Marxists, Labour-unionists. And let me tell you, they did not get along with each other. There's an existential argument about the meaning of Judaism and the fate of the Jewish people on nearly every page.

My favorite parts of the book were the simultaneously beautiful and gloomy descriptions of religious life in the shtetl:

"In the window of the rabbi's house burned the first Chanukah light, a pale blue elongated flame, dancing breathlessly this way and that. It seemed to be fighting off strangulation, burning lonely in an eight-pronged menorah."

"The rabbi imagined that the curtain covering the Torah scrolls in the aron kodesh, the table on the bimah, the bookcases holding the holy books, and the lecturns were all waiting along with him to see what Yaacov Asher had to say. A tall white yartzheit candle, stuck to the amud, burned dimly with a kind of flaming sigh, as if it was embarrassed to be burning in the middle of a bright day in a beis midrash flooded with sunlight."

While I wouldn't necessarily recommend this novel, it made me feel so connected to my history and my people (and my great-grandfather). I'm grateful to have this as a model for how to unapologetically write about Jewish ideas.

[Bob Mendelsohn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very long book with a cast of characters which is unnecessarily long. Even at the end, Grade or whoever ended up finishing the manuscript seemed to bring in a new character. And each character is introduced to us first by girth and other physical attributes.
The somber tone never ends.
The pain of a father’s suffering at his children walking away from his way of life is hard to read once or twice but 50 times? A bit much.
To be fair, the times were painful for the Jews in Europe and Russia. But there was very little joy which I kept hunting.
Moving to Israel or the USA was seen rigidly as falling away and becoming goyim.
Maybe if the book were shorter I could have endured it more easily.

[Leah M · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve shared a bit about my family background, and I grew up in a home where both of my parents spoke fluent Yiddish (but all I managed to learn is bad words). As such, my parents encouraged me to read, and provided a huge array of reading materials to me. I distinctly recall reading about the thriving world of Eastern European Jews through the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholom Aleichem. I always enjoyed those tales, and have consistently made an effort to consciously read books by Jewish authors. And much like there is a sense of recognition and comfort when reading a book set in a location you know well, I’ve found that I experience those same feelings of familiarity and comfort when finding a book that is so entrenched in Jewish culture.

This is a long book. The audiobook was over 28 hours, and like the stories of Charles Dickens that were serialized, this was originally published in serialized form in not one, but two prominent Yiddish language newspapers. It is compared to Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and as a fan of his, I wasn’t surprised to discover that I was falling in love with this story and the tale it was trying to tell. It’s a slow, meandering stroll through the lives of an Orthodox Jewish family caught up in the intersection of their traditional religious and cultural expectations, and the tempting progress of a modern world.

One of the things that I loved the most about this book is that it gave me insight into a world that existed for hundreds of years, and allowed me a glimpse of what pre-war life must have been like for regular people like my father. Jewish families in Eastern Europe lived in what was known as a ‘shtetl,’ (pronounced shte-tell), or the Yiddish word for town. These shtetls were dotted through Eastern Europe, but if you’re picturing the impoverished country village depicted in Fiddler on the Roof, you wouldn’t be too far off. For over a hundred years, the Russian Empire allowed Jews to live in the Pale of Settlement, a region encompassing the western edge of the Russian Empire, encompassing all or part of modern-day Belarus, Moldova, Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, and Russia. However, they were forbidden to leave the Pale of Settlement in most cases, and it offered little hope of economic promise, religious freedom, or even basic safety, as these towns were often subjected to pogroms or other forms of antisemitic violence.

By the time Grade wrote this, the world he takes readers to visit no longer existed. Between the major changes after WWI, the push towards Zionism (it just means the right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland), and the sweeping social changes affecting Europe in the interwar period, culminating in the Holocaust that all but wiped out the Jews of the shtetls. My father was born into one of these villages and brought up in the usual way for his first years. He started attending cheder at a young age, or a primary school that teaches the basics of the Hebrew language, and of Judaism itself. In this book, Rabbi Katzenellenbogen is more than simply a regular Hasidic rabbi, he’s a rebbe, or someone who is viewed as a spiritual leader, and often develop these long dynasties of rabbinic teaching and practice.

However, we catch him on the cusp of a changing world. In his tiny Polish village of Morehdalye, they’re already facing increasing levels of antisemitic violence and boycotts from neighboring Poles, and each of his children has taken a different approach to the central theme of the novel, which is how Judaism adapts to a changing world. This was a major focus in my own house, although I wasn’t brought up in a Hasidic family with a rabbi for a father, so I found a lot of validation and a sense of recognition in these pages. Grade’s writing is incredible, and he is able to paint a vivid picture with his words, so that I could easily put myself into the shoes of these characters, and to some extent, to my own family’s history.

Like many other Hasidic families, the Katzenellenbogens are a large clan, and as the rabbi’s children all become adults, they each approach the central conflict in a different way—one daughter follows his wishes and marries a rabbi, only to feel stifled and unhappy in a relationship suffering from differing goals and aspirations; another decides to postpone marriage to study nursing; another son who dreams of living in the British Mandate of Palestine, getting caught up in the growing move to throw off the shackles of Europe and dreaming in an excessively idealistic way; another goes to Bialystok to study to be a businessman; and Naftali Hertz headed in a different direction, moving to Switzerland to pursue a doctorate in philosophy and winding up with no desire to return back home, especially after he takes a non-Jewish wife, which would be grounds for ostracism from the community. Notably, none of his sons became rabbis, although one daughter did marry a rabbi.

Rabbi Katzenellenbogen is caught in the rigid and unmoving ways of the past, as each of his children navigates their own journey into adulthood. The characters are realistic—each has their strengths but also their flaws, and we can see the poor decisions that are made at times in the story, along with the consequences and emotions that come along with those choices. Grade had managed to capture a world on the cusp of extinction, although he stops short of mentioning the oncoming crisis that people just like these characters would be facing. There were times where I wanted to shake a character for not wanting to leave Europe, knowing what would be coming for them, although the majority of these shtetl residents wouldn’t be alive in another decade or so.

This caught my attention, and held onto it, despite the slow, ambling pace of the novel. There is a rich literary tradition within Judaism, and even Grade’s writing style reminds me of my own years in yeshiva. Jewish learning involves questioning and analyzing everything, and always searching for deeper meaning, how it relates to our lives, and reflecting on how religious teachings can be understood best. And much like that learning style, the book felt comfortable and familiar to me. For a reader who isn’t as familiar with Judaism or classic Yiddish literature, there are a lot of Yiddish terms in this book, and it may involve a lot of looking up. I read the audiobook version, so there might be a glossary in the print copy, but the practicalities of Hasidic Jewish life in the interwar period may be a bit complex. But this sprawling epic held my attention for the entire time, and I loved how Rose Waldman translated this so beautifully that it didn’t even feel like a translated work. Rob Shapiro narrated the novel, and did a really good job with almost all of the Yiddish words, aside from cholent, which he pronounced as ‘kho-lent’ instead of ‘chu-lent,’ but props to Shapiro for demonstrating his ability to pronounce the hard ‘ch’ sound that is so commonly found in Jewish and Yiddish words. These words can be hard to look up because of the difference in spellings, but if you aren't knowledgeable about Judaism and Hasidism to start, having a hard copy might help in looking up some the more unfamiliar words. Overall, Grade has a true gift, and it would be a shame to miss out on this rare talent.

[Kathleen Flynn]

In the years between the two world wars of the 20th century, some 3 million Jews lived in Poland, within borders that encompassed what is today Lithuania, as well as a good chunk of modern-day Belarus and Ukraine. They were roughly 10 percent of Poland's population, and a vibrant and extremely varied bunch. Religious, atheist, Orthodox, Reform, rich, poor, Communist, capitalist, speaking Yiddish, speaking Russian, speaking Polish, living in big cities, living in tiny villages. Doctors, musicians, playwrights, journalists, labor organizers, shopkeepers, rabbis, factory workers, factory owners -- their lives spanned the gamut of what 1930s Poland had to offer, and many were famous and successful despite the pervasive antisemitism.

And then, of course, they were nearly all murdered in the space of six years. All this complexity, drama, and history reduced to a single, depraved fact. There is the sadness of each life lost, but also the disappearance of an entire world.

Chaim Grade devoted himself to recreating it in fiction. Born in Vilna, he survived the Holocaust by fleeing to Central Asia. He moved to America after the war and continued, as he had begun, writing in Yiddish. Sons and Daughters, as its title suggests, is focused on an extended family: the older generation devotedly religious, from a long line of distinguished misnagdic rabbis and scholars, the younger rejecting this heritage in favor of, variously, secular learning, Zionism, Communism, trade, and writing in Yiddish. There's pain on both sides: the parents feeling they've failed, the children escaping the religious constriction but struggling with the guilt of how they've disappointed their parents.

What's particularly interesting about this book is how it doesn't take sides. Grade himself had a rigorous Orthodox education, which he rejected to become a secular writer in Yiddish. Despite leaving that world behind, he shows the reader its appeal: both to the intellect and to the spirit, in a sense of daily life being infused with the sacred.

Though I enjoyed it very much, this novel is not without flaws. It had a rocky road to publication, as the introduction explains and which I will not summarize in detail. It was written in installments, published in Yiddish newspapers in the late 1960s and early 70s. Grade did not live to smooth out the novel in a final book-like form, which I think would have made it much better. There are pacing issues, and toward the end, a lot of speechifying. It doesn't, in fact, quite end properly, although it gets most of the way there.

[Emmett Dubnoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Obviously, I’m a socialist. There’s no such thing, I think, as a Yiddish poet who isn’t a socialist” -Chaim grade in his self insert character.

this was my TOLSTOY (I say, knowing my largest experience with Tolstoy is The Great Comet as I have not actually read his books.) wowwww. This was a 660 page mammoth of a book that was missing its last few chapters and was published posthumously and is Insane. Incredible look into ultra orthodoxy in the 1930s shtetlekh, fascinating portrayal of the rabbinic communities as well as the crazy thought of knowing nearly everyone in these towns will very soon be murdered. overall, though it was long, a brilliant brilliant book and it made me think and laugh a lot. filled with many annoying men but a few lovable ones.

[Linda Tomase · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cilvēka dzīves fenomens ir, ka mēs katrs esam savas dzīves centrā un mums katram šķiet, ka pasaule griežas ap mums. Ka dzīve un nākotne ir atkarīga no mums. Ir un nav. Dzīves lielā mīkla.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This sprawling novel of manners about Orthodox Jewish families in interwar Poland was begun in the 1960s and published for the first time this year in2025. Grade never had to chance to complete the book, but the translator was able to chase down material that wasn't included in the original manuscript, creating a cohesive work.

[Izzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This translation of Sons and daughters by Chaim Grade mirrors the destroyed world of scholarly religious Jews of 1930’s Poland…..what follows are my summaries and appropriate quotes:
Part 1
Blume Rivtcha, the rabbi’s daughter
Zindel Kadish, Blume’s fiancé, 23 wants out of Poland
Sholem Schachne Katzenellenbogen, 65
brother Avrham Alter katzenellenbogen, 67 a Bialystok Dayan (and rabbi))
Yaakov Asher Kahane, 39+
his wife Tilze, no rebbetsin, not happy

Sholem Schachne’s father in law is Eli-Leizer Epstein; Elka’le,’s first wife’s death is quickly followed by his second wife, Tamara’s death ; Vigasia, his third wife’s 3 sons are watchmakers
Eli-Leiser is at war with his enemies


A sweet freshness wafted up from the Narev, but also a deep, cold melancholy, as if the waves were weary from their ceaseless swelling.”
Blume Rivtcha:
Her leafy friends were even squabbling among themselves. From one tree she heard, “For heaven’s sake, her father mustn’t find out that Zindel wants to become a rabbi in a foreign land and wants her to join him. Should her father find out, he’d again start searching for a match for her from among the overly pious yeshiva boys.””

The dedication of the remodeled Zembin Talmud Torah, brings son in law to Zembin, along with Chavtche, Eli-Leizer’s youngest daughter
Part 2
Eli-Leiser’s oldest son is Refael Leima, , a small town rabbi in Dalhinev, a secluded outskirt

Nosson-Nota Goldstein,Rabiner (official state rabbi) good friends with Refeal Leima
He decided to come to America

Shabse-Shepsel, 30’s, much younger brother to Refeal Leima, thought of as buffoon by father surprises by marrying Dreizel, daughter to Menashe; h treats her like mud.
Eventually they go to America …then come back to Poland… then off to Israel

Menashe Halberstadt, a rich widower
Aryeh Leib Halpern, shabse Shepsel partner, swindler, who takes in Shabse-Shepsel

Themes
Relationships of various Jewish groups
- the very pious
- Bundists
- Chalutsim
- Businessmen
- Young athletes (Macabees)
Relations with Poles:: economic boycott
Relations with Polish government
Relations to Russia (the other side of Sambatyon River
Relations with American Landsmen
- As a place to emigrate
- Financial support: the art of flowery letter writing
- Reality of (new) immigration quotas in America

Filial relationships
The art of flowery letters

Part 3 begins in Switzerland
Naftali-Herts Epstein, close to 40, with his Christian wife, pastor’s dtr Annelyse, and uncircuncised son Karl, now 15
Attended his sister Tilze’s, then age 24 wedding to Yaakpv-Asher after the war, but only for two days
Interacts somewhat with brothers Bentsion and Rafaelke, then age 10and his sister, then 13, Bluma Rivtcha
Blum => nursing school in Vilna
Marries at age 30Bentzion => business school in Bialystok
Rafael’ke in a Vilna Kibbutz for chalutzim

Moving on to Zalia Zixkind, the hunchbacked, depressive genius of Duenaburg Latvia
He marries at age 32, Zissele, moneyless orphan, dtr of widow of rabbi of Visoki-Dvor
Weighing empathy over dowry and becoming town rabbi, in 5660 (1899-1900).
Becoming rosh yeshiva in Visoki-Dvor; his singing exceeds his pilpul, melting hearts
Mottel Luria, his son, age 4 when consumptive mother dies after 9 years of marriage
Zissele’s sister Sirka raises Mottel (Marcus); Zalia); winds up at Moredalye rabbi’s;
Zalia Ziskind studies with Naftali Hertz (then 17); returning with him to Visoki-Dvor
Naftali Hertz dissembles his secularism, and flees to Switzerland; shortly before War

Reasons to marry: desire, pedigree, dowry, pity
Sirka marries widowed former genius Meier Moshe Baruchovits; Marcus is estranged

Places
Zemben (Epsteins)
Moredalye (Katzenellenbogens)
Visoki-Dvar (Zalia Ziskind)
Lecheve (Yaakiv Asher - Arranged marriage to Tilze Ellenbogen

Ch 9,part 3; Zalia Ziskind subbing at Lecheve Yeshiva for traveling Yaakov-Asher
Marcus a disciple of Nietzsche; self love

Naftali Hertz has broken the golden chain of rabbis, and suspects that Rafael’ke and Blume-Rivcha want to do the same
He sees Marcus as also rejecting the Jewish God
Rafael’ke thinks fondly of Morehdalye, Zembin, and Lecheve.Believes in coexistence
Tall and fresh skinned like a young pine glowing golden in the sunrise
Yaakov Asher continues to lack worldly sophistication and is narrow and dull to boot
Naftali Hertz has quite the nightmare his last night in Lecheve.
Part 4 begins with a sick Sholem Schachne Katzenellenbogen & M. Jewish community..
Warsaw, Bialystok & America’s help sought ;
Dr Bennett the M. cardiologist treats his MI
Naftali Hertz will visit at Chanukah
Naftali Hertz was like a Job without faith!
Doesn’t lust for his wife.
Huge guilt for abandoning parents
A failed Doctor of Philosophy & hypocrite (to fool his parents)
Zalia Ziskind Luria, the genius of Duenaberg, now a substitute
The worn out fathers and grandfathers

Marcus, a rebellious young man,now Communist, (formerly a Nietzschean) is hiding from police!
Father in Morehdalye is his safe haven

The three sisters from Warsaw
Sholem Schachne their brother in law
Chavtche engaged to Leopold Silverstein
(who is impressed with her Yikhes)
Exploiter of her sister Sarah Raisel
Wants a dowry from theZembin rabbi
They are aunts to Naftali Hertz
Kona married to Banet Michelson, a shipping agent with a 25 year old daughter Tubya, and 29 years old Bania

One’s ancestry, Naftali Hertz mused, with all its roots and branches, keeps rabbinical children entangled with their source, so that they cannot tear themselves free.”
Bluma Rivtcha brings her writer fiance to Morehdalye, a Yiddish poet!
Hunchbacked Zalia Ziskind: “our merciful Father, knows the difference between a pathetic thief of a money pouch and someone who steals our trust, our heart, our feelings.”
…this old renowned genius who’d renounced his greatness and had become a beadle, an assistant.”
Believes … “that God sides with the persecuted even when the persecutor is a saint and the persecuted is evil.”
Khlavneh: But I’m not a Torah learner, saint, or distinguished scholar. They’re the ones who refuse to go to their chuppah before they’re assured of their dowry and room and board.””
NaftaliHertz: He might have had the audacity to go on lying if it weren’t so clear from their faces that they didn’t believe a word he said.”
Last word: A shudder, a deathly fear, as well as a wild desire, would course through Naftali Hertz as he watched the animalistic pleasure of the great white bear with his paw dangling over the cliff.”
Grade: “It’s easier to write a new book than to convert a serial work into a regular novel. I see all the mistakes I made. And then I’m so busy writing poems for the newspaper, preparing speeches, and quarreling with my wife and then making peace with her.”

[Jeffrey Spitz Cohan · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the saddest aspects of being Jewish is feeling disconnected from history.

Even if you know the names of your great-grandparents, there is no returning to their ancestral homes, generally speaking. Few remnants of the shtetl remain. Go back three or four generations, and, more often than not, we find a gaping black void.

Fortunately, Penguin Random House and the translator Rose Waldman have come to our aid with the publication this year of “Sons and Daughters,” the magnum opus of Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade.

“Sons and Daughters” vividly describes the physical setting, and, more importantly, the aspirations, the fears and the struggles of shtetl Jews in the fraught period between the two World Wars.

At the center is Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen, the elderly head rabbi of a Polish shtetl. His children vex him, as, one-by-one (with one exception), they abandon his halachic lifestyle to pursue modern ambitions.

The specter of the looming Holocaust lurks throughout the novel, but the characters don’t have the benefit of our hindsight as they experience the rising tide of antisemitism in real time. Amid the pogroms and boycotts, they still find ample bandwidth to confront family dysfunction and to passionately debate issues of Jewish continuity, identity and theology.

Grade was studying in a yeshiva in Lithuania during part of the interwar period. Although he ultimately left the yeshiva to become a writer and immigrated to the United States, he retained a strong emotional connection to his former community.

Two decades after the war, he took on the burden of recreating the world that he left behind – and that the Holocaust obliterated – in full-color detail.

With this novel, Grade posthumously joins I.B. Singer and Sholem Aleichem in the pantheon of the 20th Century’s greatest Yiddish authors, in my estimation.

But the novel owes debts to the Russian literary masters. The title of the book is a nod to Ivan Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons,” a classic about intergenerational conflict. It is Fyodor Dostoevsky, though, who Grade truly emulates.

The influence of Dostoevsky’s opus “The Brothers Karamazov” is obvious. The rabbi’s eldest son, Naftali, bears a strong resemblance to Ivan Karamazov. Both of them are tortured souls, torn between secular reasoning and spiritual longing. Similarly, the rabbi’s youngest son, Rafaelke, reminds me of Alyosha, the youngest Karamazov. Both of them are beloved by their entire contentious families.

Grade also follows Dostoevsky stylistically. Most of the characters operate in a constant state of agitation and anguish. And they are not shy about launching into extended monologues.

“Sons and Daughters” presents the full catalogue of movements and identities that roiled the Jewish world in the 1920s and ‘30s. In addition to our ultra-Orthodox rabbi and his daveners, we find Zionists, Communists, secularists, merchants, and emigrants to America, along with Modern Orthodox and Reform Jews. There is even a character who flirts with Nietzscheism.

Young Jews had options, like never before in history, and much to the chagrin of the rabbi, his children responded to the pull of this newfound freedom.

The novel doesn’t have a plot, or even an ending. Grade died before he finished it. Nonetheless, it rises to an apex of sorts over the final three chapters.

In one sequence, Naftali and his sister’s fiance, Klavneh, spar at the Shabbos table over the root causes of Jewish survival and continuity. Naftali attributes our continued existence to the tangle and rigidity of Jewish law, which has set us apart from other nations. Klavneh points toward our Prophetic tradition, our ethics, morality and love.

Grade wrote himself into the novel as Klavneh, an aspiring Yiddish writer, so you know where the author lands in the debate. But many readers will side with Naftali. In the spirit of Dostoevsky, Grade presents both arguments in good faith and with full force.

In these days of ideological polarization, within both the Jewish community and our nation, the even-handedness of “Sons and Daughters” is a breath of fresh air.

In the final chapter, Klavneh meets Zalia Ziskind, an aging, hunchbacked rabbi and friend of the family. Ziskind embodies the sense of tragedy that hangs over the entire novel. He tells Klavneh that he saves old Warsaw newspapers to revisit the accounts of people killed in mishaps and accidents.

“I’ve been asking God terrible Job-like questions about His management of the world, and I never got an answer,” Ziskind says.

Those unanswered questions multiplied after the Holocaust.

The characters we meet in “Sons and Daughters” could not foresee the Shoah. They squabble and scheme. They have arguments and ambitions. Moments of doubt and despair. Some success, mostly failure.

In the end, it was all for naught. Most of them would have been murdered just a few years after the final chapter. Shabbos-keepers and secularists would have all met the same fate. But at least we got to know them.

They weren’t our actual ancestors. But, chances are, people quite similar to our great-grandparents live somewhere in “Sons and Daughters.” And for that, we owe Grade, Waldman and Penguin our gratitude.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Grade’s {Sons and Daughters} --composed in the 1960s and 1970s, but which languished due to his widow’s refusal to cooperate with publication as far back as 1982-- Ruth Waldman conveys in sprightly, yet never sentimental, translation Grade’s solid skills of structuring a long-form novel which capitalizes on its mechanism of parsing out an epic and recruiting its big ensemble.

At first, a reader may quail at the lack of a roster of those roaming hundreds of pages. (An e-galley has been consulted; its print version may be handier in assistance, as there will be a glossary of Yiddish and Hebrew terms, here partially completed.) Yet Grade latches on to a device which couples his brisk chapters in succession. He multiplies his cast, if in measured cadence. He’ll mention somebody’s relative and leave it at that. Eventually, a steady storyline cycles around through the omniscient creator to concatenate such-and-such; his or her role then joins this pageant. Therefore, one isn’t overwhelmed with confusion by such profusion.

Having access only to an ARC, quoting directly can’t be done. Suffice to assure, Grade’s deft touches, such as his endearing anthropomorphic attribution of emotion and chatter to leaves, clouds, bookcases, candles and buildings now and then, only enhance the depth rendered the {Litvak} settlements, with their muddy lanes, humid brooks, brash markets and dimly lit small synagogues. Within unprepossessing surroundings, Grade conjures up masterful set-pieces.

Most action occurs in humdrum Morehdalye. Circa 1930, a congeries of siblings competes for their parents’ affections, denies the same, or flee abroad to a secular kibbutz, a Swiss library or Canada. They’ll disdain or sustain their inherited commitments. As shoe-salesman, skeptic, flirt, half-wit, poet, hunchback. Zionist, socialist, Bundist, Nietzschean, Bolshevik. None of these Jews stand as stock figures. If at a glance they risk reduction to sketchy stereotypes, according to gossipy suitors, cousins, foes and cuckolds, they reveal themselves real, sharp and rounded.

A moving encounter between a rabbi weary of Morehdalye’s in-fighting, his jaded congregants and their petty scrabble for success, with an aged, destitute counterpart surviving on his blunt faith enlightens the protagonist as to sincerity rather than sanctimony in common commitment to Torah. Grade filters this epiphany gradually and subtly. He avoids pitfalls of ginning up facile, caricatured burdens of Orthodox Judaism upon the poor. And any temptation of selling out this setting for Marxist rants about the oppressive system where generations scrabble in cycles of want under aristocracy dominated by Catholic nobility, now decimated by post-WWI realpolitik.

While social dynamics reverberate, they remain, as do the Gentiles themselves, in the shadows. Grade shows rather than tells of the divide that, as if ordained, certainly often dictated, all but {naturally} keeps these two factions segregated in their mundane routines. There’s a boycott, catcalls, if one soccer match between {goyim} and Jews; throughout, Grade sticks to his people.

Unfortunately, this impressive volume never reached full promise. A revised manuscript had been typeset, but Grade died before he could finish transforming its serial contents into a two-volume saga. For that, see {The Yeshiva}, (1977/8) which deserves reissue. It’s to be hoped that, given Grade’s wife’s passing away in 2010, Knopf may continue to offer English-language readers more of the literary legacy of an astute and canny articulator of two sides of his stark upbringing.

Despite his “quite probably the last great Yiddish novel” elegiac send-off with which Adam Kirsch introduces {Sons and Daughters}, Kirsch concludes by observing that while worldlier advocates of Yiddishkeit largely have either met with premature demise or have faded away, their traditional contingent today, in more than one urban diaspora, speaks in a venerable {mamaloshen} of their ancestors. Both Brothers Singer and Chaim Grade might applaud. Perhaps a future Nobel winner may emerge from those carrying on in a wry mother tongue spoken now, and over a millennium.

Grade early on left {shul} for the street. Whether inside or outside hallowed walls or dank cellars, his accomplishment endures. He summed himself up in a 1970 letter, as a {gravestone carver of my vanished world}. Yet, Grade engraves stolid sturdy plots elegantly, in this vivacious memorial.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Translated into English for the first time this year, Sons and Daughters is a fascinating read from a cultural and historical viewpoint, okay as a story

In the Introduction, Kirsch writes that Sons and Daughters is quite probably the last great Yiddish novel and a fascinating look into a world that would be devastated by the Holocaust. Grade wrote it in the 1960s and 1970s, but set it in the 1930s, wanting preserve the memory of the rich culture he remembered. The story depicts a struggle between tradition and modernity in a family in a fictional shtetl. It never explicitly alludes to the fate Jews there would later suffer, but for a modern reader who knows what happened, the future looms in the background.

I do think it was very interesting from a cultural and historical perspective. This story shows the rich lives of people living in this time and place very well, all the small details brought to life. What surprised me was that yes, there was hardship, but it did not feel like the primary focus of the story. There were moments that felt downright cozy, evoking kind of a warm nostalgia, which was a pleasant surprise, and perhaps what Grade intended. The characters were vivid and there are a lot of interesting ideas brought up in the book about Jewishness, generational struggle and retaining tradition in a modern world. The Introduction was helpful to appreciating the contribution this book makes to literary fiction. As Kirsch writes, Grade shows a loyalty to a Yiddish future, one that would be lost. Grade writes empathetically both about the rebels of the younger generation and the older rabbis struggling to hold onto the old ways in the face of immense challenges.

“Anytime a Jew came up with a new creed, a new school of thought, he instantly had to prove that everything he was saying had already been said by the Prophets, the Sages, the pious philosophers, or the Kabbalah teachers. No one was ever able to say anything new or take a single step on an untrodden path. Our heads had to be turned backward, always looking to the past. That was considered moving forward, climbing higher...We can’t even move a limb, for fear that some hallowed, moldy artifact might crumble into dust…But in order to be happy, we must be ahistorical.”

Because it appeared in serial form in newspapers, it has a bit of a rambling pace, and reads somewhat episodically with a large cast of characters. Many of the characters feel larger-than-life, like characters from folktales who have more extreme personalities, but, I guess, it also makes them memorable, if hard to relate to. Because Grade never finished writing it, it doesn't have an ending or at least, a strong sort of conclusion. A note at the end provides a suggestion for how Grade planned to end it, if he had gotten the chance, though, which gives some closure, but also leaves room for imagination. It can be a bit slow, especially when characters go on long philosophical or religious debates, largely because these sections are hard to understand without significant background knowledge, in my opinion. This may have been because Grade was writing for a particular audience, but I'd say it does not make the book as accessible as it could be.

[Marsha Rafalski · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is considered “one of the great—if not the greatest—contemporary Yiddish novelists” (Elie Wiesel).

“A great beard novel . . . Also a great food novel . . . A melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny .“—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Chaim Grade was a successful author in the New York Yiddish newspapers when Sons and Daughters was serialized during the 1960s-70s. He writes for an audience of the emerging Post-War Jewish communities capturing a glimpse of a dying way of life. The story begins in the 1930s as Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen’s children are caught up in a time between two worldwide nightmares, echoed in his own home! One brother is studying business; daughter Bluma Rivtcha is a nursing student; the oldest daughter is marrying a young Rabbi who is being groomed by her father to become Rabbi when he retires; another brother has moved to Sweden and married a non-Jewish wife and soon has a non-Jewish son; finally, the Rabbi’s youngest son wants to immigrate to Israel to establish a country in the Holy Land.

Over the next 20 years, we follow the lives of the Katzenellenbogen children and grandchildren while they come of age in a world where most people lived a life based on religious belief and duty. We see them through the major historical events of the early to mid 21st Century. The book looked at a world built on culture, traditions, language, literature and intellectual pursuits crumbling under the weight of a secular based lifestyle.

This book was the last novel written by Grade and was actually unfinished until a young writer was hired to deal with the first half (complete) and to organize his informal notes and papers. He found an outline for the second half with some notes on how the story was to be written. With the approval of Grade’s family, he was able to ghostwrite a version for publication. The first part completed by Grade was over 450 pages and the final published work is 704 pages. The audiobook is 29 hours. This book may have required almost a 100 years of life to produce a family saga with this depth.

The characters are fully developed, the settings are carefully described and the plot is just the act of living. The book describes a culture struggling to survive in a hostile environment and against great difficulty. Although it was a long book, I didn’t have any trouble staying with the audiobook after getting invested in the world and the characters in the early parts. Inevitably, language lies at the heart of Sons and Daughters, a novel about a family struggling with the meaning of Jewishness. Before the Holocaust there were over 11 million Yiddish speakers. It is estimated today that 150,000 remain. In addition to the audience for Yiddish being reduced in numbers, Yiddish has come to be the language for social, educational, and family interactions. The language most identified with literary pursuits is now Hebrew. The reader should read the Introduction and Notes of the Translator for an in-depth look at issues related to publication and translation. Recommend to readers of general literature, Jewish historical fiction, literary fiction, language and adult classics.

[Alan Kaplan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every year I try to read one great book. I found this book because the New York Times highly recommended it. It is a very hard book to read. It is not dense and you are able to get through it. I can explain fully. Sons and Daughters is about a rabbinical family in Poland in the 1930’s. The father and the grandfather are orthodox, but like in all families, many of the children choose a different path which causes great grief to the parents. One son actually moves to Switzerland and obtains a Phd and marries out of the faith. One son decides to move to Israel. Another son wants to go into business. One daughter does marry a rabbi, but she is extremely unhappy in her arranged marriage. Another daughter trains to be a nurse and is engaged to a poet. I believe that the poet is the alter ego of the author. Like all parents, they have a hard time understanding how their children are not following in their path. The story is like Fiddler on the Roof but with a much more realistic and harder edge. The son in Switzerland is racked by guilt because of his marriage, and he cannot bring himself to tell his siblings and his parents the truth. The author supposes that they have figured it out anyway. This is the shetlt popularized by the paintings of Marc Chagall.
Why was the book hard to read? The author, a famous Yiddish writer wrote the book in the 1970’s in New York. His mother and wife were murdered in the Holocaust. He knows what is going to happen to the people in this book and you know what is going to happen. There are early elements of anti-semitism. There is a boycott of all Jewish businesses and the town is immediately sent into financial depression. But these kinds of things have been occurring for hundreds of years in Poland. This entire culture and everyone in this book will be erased in a few years. Think about that. They, obviously, have no idea what is in store, and that is a horrifying tragedy. They thought and the world thought that what was going to happen to them was unimaginable until it wasn’t. As we are entering a new period of anti-semitism where the Jews are blamed for everything, we have been there done that. What do you think Globalize the Intifada really means? It means kill every Jew on the planet. You can sugarcoat all you want but that is the truth. What exactly does Never Again really mean? Now is the time to find out. The blood libel of Israel being accused of genocide is an obscene inversion of the truth. In the 1930's and 1940's, the Nazis wanted to murder the Jews because they were breathing air and on the planet. Now it is the Palestinians. When that issue is solved, something else will be found to blame on the Jews.
The world actually attempted to murder every Jew not too long ago. I fear that the world is once again moving in that direction. But this time, we will not go easy.

[Deborah · Rating 5 out of 5]

"From “one of the greatest—if not the greatest—contemporary Yiddish novelists” (Elie Wiesel), the long-awaited English translation of a work, Tolstoyan in scope, that chronicles the last, tumultuous decade of a world succumbing to the march of modernity.
“It is me the prophet laments when he cries out, ‘My enemies are the people in my own home.’” The Rabbi ignored his borscht and instead chewed on a crust of bread dipped in salt. “My greatest enemies are my own family.”
Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen’s world, the world of his forefathers, is crumbling before his eyes. And in his own home! His eldest, Bentzion, is off in Bialystok, studying to be a businessman; his daughter Bluma Rivtcha is in Vilna, at nursing school. For her older sister, Tilza, he at least managed to find a suitable young rabbi, but he can tell things are off between them. Naftali Hertz? Forget it; he’s been lost to a philosophy degree in Switzerland (and maybe even a goyish wife?). And now the rabbi’s youngest, Refael’ke, wants to run off to the Holy Land with the godless Zionists.
Originally serialized in the 1960s and 70s, in New York-based Yiddish newspapers, Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters is a precious glimpse of a way of life that is no longer—the rich, Yiddish culture of Poland and Lithuania that the Holocaust would eradicate. We meet the Katzenellenbogens in the tiny village of Morehdalye, in the 1930s, when gangs of Poles are beginning to boycott Jewish merchants and the modern, secular world is pressing in on the shtetl from all sides. It’s this clash, between the freethinking secular life and a life bound by religious duty—and the comforts offered by each—that stands at the center of Sons and Daughters.
With characters that rival the homespun philosophers and loveable rouges of Sholem Aleichem and I. B. Singer—from the brooding Zalia Ziskind, paralyzed by the suffering of others, to the Dostoevskian demon Shabse Shepsel—Grade’s masterful novel brims with humanity and with heartbreaking affection for a world, once full of life in all its glorious complexity, that would in just a few years vanish forever."

This was fabulous, sometimes hard to follow, but a virtuoso novel. I would have loved to have read if he wrote about this wor30s.ld post 19

[Karen Levi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A remarkable book for many reasons, though I was not aware of this when I began the 600+ pages. The work is unfinished. The author died before he completed the book. Chaim Grade is considered a notable Yiddish writer, on par with Isaac Bashevis Singer.
The manuscript was found many years after Chaim Grade’s death in 1982. He wrote the book in Yiddish from 1966-1976. The editor and English translator compiled the pages and added installments from a series in a Yiddish newspaper.
Though unnecessarily lengthy and sometimes tedious, the story concerns a rabbinic family in 1930’s Poland, in what is now Lithuania, prior to World War 2. The main characters include several rabbis and their wives and children. The writer did not include the voices of the Jewish townspeople.
The main theme is the generational conflict between children and their parents, in this case the children’s desire to leave the strict lifestyle of a Litvak Orthodox Jewish shtetl.
Grade himself abandoned yeshiva life to become a writer, very much like several of the characters in the book. He experienced the same conflicts—as are described in the book—as a result of leaving a rigid scholarly life. Mr. Grade was born, in what is now Lithuania, in 1910 and successfully escaped the Nazis.
The ongoing antisemitism of the Polish peasants is a backdrop to the story. The boycott of Jewish businesses by the Polish citizens foreshadowed the tragedy to come. The author never referred to the Second World War, though the reader knows. He intended to include the Holocaust but changed his mind. Instead, he wrote a memorial to a vanished lifestyle.
What it means to be Jewish lies at the center of the novel. Ideas about this topic are bandied about like a game of badminton. The distinction between the traditional orthodox practice of Judaism and its more modern iterations is the main concern for the protagonists. The traditionalists of the small village consider change to a more modern version of Judaism a dangerous development and a conflict between good vs. evil.
Grade wrote beautiful prose. There are stunning passages filled with symbolism and metaphors.Though this story is set in the early 1930’s, the disagreements between the generations are timeless.

[Maine Colonial · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a free digital advance review copy provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

Years ago, I binged on the works on Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Chaim Grade. I was excited to have the chance to read an English translation of Grade’s family saga.

As I read, it was hard not to think often about how these characters and their village would be wiped out in only a few years after the story’s setting, and this world lost. While this lends the reading a deep sadness, it doesn’t make the scenes, the story, and the characters any less vivid. I was especially taken with the way Grade assigns thoughts and feelings to the trees. It made me think of those trees today in the places where there were once shtetls. Do the trees remember the life around them that is now long gone?

Along with the beauty of Grade’s descriptions, there is harshness. Grade doesn’t hesitate to depict human pettiness and conflict within the family and the shtetl. And although he very much wanted to memorialize what he called the “great generation” he knew as a yeshiva boy in Vilna, a large portion of the book details the characters’ disagreements about how a Jew should live, and the conflicts between traditional and modern living. Toward the end of the book, there are chapters nearly entirely taken up with argumentation from Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen’s son, Naftali Hertz, and his younger daughter’s fiancé, Khlavneh (who some believe is a stand-in for Grade himself). These lengthy disquisitions make for challenging reading, and for me they just aren’t as interesting as the depictions of the characters’ lives.

Grade first published this in serial form in Yiddish newspapers and intended to adapt it into a novel to be published in two volumes. His work on the second volume was never completed, and it took years for others to transform the serialized writings into novel form. Even then, the book ends without a real completion point. The result is a flawed novel, one that I didn’t enjoy as much as, say, Grade’s Rabbis and Wives, or The Agunah, but one still worth reading.

3.5 stars, rounded to 4.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Story of a vanished world, posthumously published. This novel was serialized in Yiddish-language newspapers. The great Yiddish novelist left it unfinished. It has been translated and published many years after his death. The book is long due to its serialized origin (although the translator/editor has done her best), and contains many terms unfamiliar to most present-day readers, explained in a glossary. Happily, the large cast of characters is also listed and their relationships explained.

It was set in a shtetl (traditional Jewish village) on the border between Lithuania and Poland, between the two world wars. Anti-Jewish sentiment is increasing, and young people are rebelling against traditional ways. Grade has written himself into the story as a young poet who is marrying into a large, extended rabbinical family. He is somewhat nontraditional and is scorned as a "jargon writer" because he writes in Yiddish.

The reader can see the poet in Grade's vivid descriptions of his characters and their surroundings, and
knows what the characters do not, that only the rebellious children who have moved to Israel, Canada, Switzerland, and the United States are likely to survive. They survive at great personal cost, being severed from their family and community. This is a compelling story that is particularly recommended to readers who enjoy this genre of literature.

[Nicole · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was written for a Jewish audience and I just don’t care enough to figure out the nuance or the meaning of certain rituals or holy days or rankings of rabbis to figure WTH is the big deal with all these characters. I hate them all. With rare exception in this novel, I hate all of these characters. Either they’re cruel and vindictive or controlling or apathetic to the needs of their “loved ones” (whom they treat horribly) or living in a holier-than-thou plane that no one is good enough for, perpetually disappointed in everyone around them. Is this meant to give me a better understanding of Jews in Israel? Is this meant to present Jewish people in a warts-and-all-style? I don’t know. And I don’t care enough to find out. I get that this is from the 1960s/70s but yeesh. The patriarchal nature of EVERYONE, especially in the vein of religious superiority, pisses me right off and if this is the way Judaism is in Israel, I wish I didn’t know. Because it makes me angry. Women trapped in bad marriages, men telling everyone what they should do and how they should act, everyone judging everyone. It’s all awful and I hate it. AND it’s a 28 hour listen on audiobook. The one positive is that the translation is beautifully done; the writing itself is lyrical and lovely. Albeit far too long and meandering. I just hate everything.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

SONS AND DAUGHTERS by Chaim Grade has been called the great Yiddish novel. After working my way through it, I can understand the parallels with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, especially in length, breadth, and the epic scale of this nearly 800-page novel. It's a great work, no doubt, full of details that describe the struggle rabbis had not only with their sons and daughters, but also with their wives. Not unlike Herman Wouk's THIS IS MY GOD, SONS AND DAUGHTERS aims to persuade the Jewish population of the importance of maintaining traditions, to keep the Torah alive through constant study and dedication, and the novel traces how generations approach religion differently, choosing their ways to worship. But the novel is also a bit of a slog. The constant shifts between characters can grow confusing. The best way to read this is in large chunks, not small bits of time, because you find yourself backtracking to keep the members of the family straight, and the list of characters at the beginning is not much help. I recommend SONS AND DAUGHTERS if you are the sort of reader who loves plowing through WAR AND PEACE. This novel is not of that quality, but it is an honest, occasionally humorous account of a period long gone.

[Zachary Neugut · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a connoisseur of Yiddish books, this one might take the cake as my favorite ever. Because it was initially a serialized newspaper column, Section I feels a little scattered, though still solid, but Sections II through IV really build into some amazing literature. The themes feel similar to Tevye the Dairyman (which became Fiddler on the Roof) in that they focus on a father struggling with his children drifting from tradition in the modern world. I think Sons and Daughters is the stronger book because it makes the characters feel real and develops them over the course of the story. You can truly feel the father’s, and the grandfather’s, regret over not being able to control their children’s choices and the need to confront their emotions. You can also understand the children’s reasoning behind their choices—marrying a non-Jew, becoming a Zionist, becoming non-religious, going into business instead of the rabbinate—and their struggle to win their parents’ consent as well as the guilt they carry.

When it comes to the ending, I will not spoil anything, but I actually prefer the book’s original conclusion to the alternative ending Chaim Grade had intended, which is revealed in the epilogue.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone who enjoys Yiddish literature.

[Sylvia Abrams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook of Sons and Daughters narrated by Rob Shapiro. The story is one of the longest audiobooks at 29 hours. I loved the convoluted plot that illustrated so much about 1930's Poland and the plight of its Jews, especially those in small towns and shtetls. Grade centers the bulk of his novel around the relatives of Rabbi Shalom Schachne Katzenellerbogen, a pious rabbi and rosh yeshiva who cannot cope with the new ideas attracting his children and other young Polish Jews. The heart of the plot is the guilt of the oldest son, Naphtali Hirsch, who fled his yeshiva for Bern, Switzerland, earned a doctorate in philosophy, and married a Christian girl. Interwoven is the saga of Rabbi Schachne's father-in-law and his mentally deranged son. Connecting the threads is the repeated appearance of hunchback Zalia Ziskind, whose empathy for others overwhelms the course of his life. It is clear that Grade, himself, was tortured about the cost of leaving yeshiva learning and entering one of the modern professions or going to Israel as a halutz. Rose Waldman's translation flows; both the introduction and translator's note help the reader (or listener) contextualize the novel, Chaim Grade and Yiddish writers into Jewish literature.

[Alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me feel as if I was being welcomed back into the shtetl where my great grandmother was born in Poland. I only met her once, and only spoke to her of Poland once, and she did not have much to say about it, other than the Poles were cruel and she liked New York much better. While that is undoubtedly true, there was certainly much greater depth to her experience that she was unable to share. Her father was a rabbi there, we learned recently, though he was a seltzer delivery man in New York. I do not have any other living relations from Poland, though recently we leaned the locations of the mass graves where they are resting. May their memory be a blessing.
Chaim Grade was able to share this with me. This book is long, it is slow at times, it is philosophical and complicated and so, so Jewish. It is very beautiful, very bracing. I am almost in tears as I write this, for I feel it is very insufficient to try to review something as precious and rare and consuming as this. Suffice to say that it is worth a read, worth the time it takes, worth remembering even though the pain and oppression.
I am very grateful to the translator, Rose Waldman who put an unimaginable amount of work into this, and for everyone who helped to bring this to me.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was intrigued to find a Yiddish author whom I was not familiar with and if Eli Wiesel was a fan, then I figured it was worth trying. I loved the writing style and how it helped me form pictures in my head of both the village and the characters. Apparently this book comes from a serialized novel that was printed in the Yiddish paper. And, it reads like that. I confess that I have not finished it. I felt like it could have ended after the first few hundred pages and been enough. Or that it could be published in a few volumes.
It's fun to read because it is kind of like The Real Rabbis of ___ Town. You get a lot of juicy details and Grade keeps bringing in characters and new foibles.
The Yiddish words were either familiar to me or defined by context so if you're a Jewish reader, this will probably be fine for you. A non-Jewish reader, I'm not so sure. Unless they live in New York City, perhaps?

All in all, this is a fine addition to the genre of Yiddish storytelling. But, again, I would prefer it to be broken up into volumes.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. It's a keeper!

[Emily Robinson]

I had read that Yiddish literature takes a different cadence and structure than most western literature, and I definitely felt that in this novel, though I'm not certain if that is because of its intrinsic nature, or just because it was originally serialized.
Grade he captures a world that has all but disappeared, and does that while wrestling with himself. Was he still the Yeshiva boy even in his middle and older age, even as he chose to live with in the world? He is clearly well read and educated in Chumesh, Gemara, and philosophy.
I think ultimately he's arguing within his own natures in this book, because I don't quite know what message to take away from the novel. There is a longing for the old ways, but a harsh criticism of them as well, as no one who is living by the old ways seems to be happy. To be fair, no one living an emancipated life seems to be happy in this novel either. It does seem as if he is saying 'to live is to suffer' which sadly doesn't seem to be an unreasonable outlook on life for someone whose family perished in the Holocaust, and had to start life anew in a new country after his was destroyed.