Like Isaac Bashevis Singer, the author Chaim Grade has long been embraced as one of the 20th century’s pre-eminent writers of Yiddish fiction, a standing he reached through novels and poems that vividly evoked the Jewish world destroyed in the Holocaust.
But Grade (pronounced GRAH-duh) never achieved the crossover celebrity that the Nobel Prize-winning Singer did. The reasons are often traced by scholars to the painful shortcomings of his tempestuous second marriage.
Now the pitfalls of the marriage, a union marked by apparent affairs on both side, and the impact it had on Grade’s legacy are becoming clearer and more nuanced as a result of the cataloging and digitization of a vast collection of the Grades’ letters, manuscripts, photographs and books.
The materials were retrieved from the clutter of their Bronx apartment after the death of Inna Grade, his wife, in 2010, but only recently have been made available online by the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research in Manhattan and the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. The archive paints a pungent portrait of the couple in their own words, a relationship marked by recrimination and anger but also mutual dependence and tender affection.
Mrs. Grade, herself a writer of largely unpublished poetry and fiction, asserted in a 73-page poem she wrote that her husband had squandered his enormous talent.
To her mind, Grade’s work had — on its merits — eclipsed that of Singer, whom she called a “blasphemous buffoon” who had distorted the picture of Eastern European Jewish life with “acts of perverted sex” and unsavory characters wrestling with demons. She also took her husband to task because he “wasted my youth, my beauty, my strength, my genius.”
Grade, on the other hand, felt that Inna repeatedly undermined him.
“I finally know what others have known for a long time, that consciously or unconsciously your goal in life is to torture and scare me,” he wrote in a July 1970 letter, admonishing her harshly for what would appear to be just a prosaic disappointment of married life: postponing a trip to their summer retreat.
Yiddish scholars have long had their own issues with Mrs. Grade, who denied them access to the writer’s papers after his death in 1982. Several have said that her stance made it difficult for works by, and about, Grade to be published or republished in new editions or collections.
Mrs. Grade rationalized her rejections, scholars said, as the product of her conviction that none of the scholars or editors who would handle his work could do her husband justice. Ruth R. Wisse, the emerita professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard, suggested there was something more spiteful in the denial.
“She did everything she could to make sure his reputation would die,” Wisse said. “She was competitive with him.”
According to the Yiddish newspaper the Forward, Mrs. Grade told almost no one about his death and his graveside funeral was attended by just her and a friend.
YIVO archivists said papers in the archive indicate that both had carried on long affairs, he with women in lecture spots like Montreal and Buenos Aires, and she with an editor of a Yiddish newspaper. Yet even when they accused each other of faithlessness, breaking up was not an option. They were utterly entangled, the letters indicate.
“You still don’t understand that if I were more independent, I wouldn’t be making the spectacle I’m making now,” he told her in a 1970 letter.
Beyond the emotional knot, Grade relied on her superior facility with English. She was more capable in dealing with the publishing world and other outsiders. She seemed to become absorbed, intentionally or not, in the work of translating his novels and shepherding his career rather than writing her own fiction and poems, of which there are a few examples in the archive.
“There is love that comes through in the letters,” said Jonathan Brent, executive director of YIVO. “She was not the monstrous woman that people talk about. They were both loving and damaging to one another.”
Indeed, the archive features a photocopy of a Valentine’s Day card from 1971 that he had sent to his wife. In it, a verse by Grade in transliterated Yiddish alludes to both his affection and ambivalence. It opens with a warm salutation “Innochka, my dear love” and expresses the wish that their journey together of over a quarter century should endure until the totemic age of 120. Then it closes with these words:
May your little voice remain youthful and sweet
Your eyes like the beautiful sky — blue and gleaming
And sweet too should remain your poisonous bite.
If their relationship was complicated, so too were their early lives. Grade was born in 1910 in Vilna (now Vilnius), Lithuania, renowned for both its sophisticated Yiddish culture and its rabbinic scholarship. His father died when he was young. To get by, his mother sold apples in alleyways. He studied at yeshivas known for their emphasis on moral improvement but was drawn to poetry and became a vaunted member of a legendary leftist literary circle, Young Vilna, publishing poems that received attention in a distant Yiddish heartland: the Lower East Side.
The tensions between the rule-bound morality of the yeshiva and a more freewheeling, enlightened secular life, between those who hold God responsible for the world’s evils and those who blame mankind, were to become important Grade themes. They were explicitly distilled in his one post-Holocaust story, “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” reissued last year in a new translation by Dr. Wisse.
In 1941, Grade fled Nazi-occupied Lithuania for the Soviet interior, leaving behind his mother and his first wife, Frumme-Liebe (Klepfish) Grade. They, like him, believed the Nazis would not harm women. Both were killed, leaving Grade with a gnawing lifelong guilt.
In Moscow he met, Inna Hecker, the 17-year-old daughter of a Ukrainian ophthalmologist who had been murdered by the Germans for being a Jew. She was 15 years younger. They married in 1945 and three years later immigrated to New York as refugees. Grade turned to fiction in a series of novels including “The Yeshiva” and “The Agunah’’ and the wistful memoir “My Mother’s Sabbath Days,” that together resurrected the lost world of Vilna, its rabbis and intellectuals, its peddlers and underworld criminals.
Mrs. Grade studied literature, receiving a master’s degree from Columbia University. She co-translated works by her husband such as “The Sacred and the Profane” (originally titled “Rabbis and Wives”), which was a finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer for fiction.
The archive’s 136 boxes of letters, manuscripts and photographs illuminate some of this history, and it also contains 20,000 books from his library, audiotapes of conversations between the Grades and such artifacts as Grade’s shopworn Remington Hebrew/Yiddish typewriter, with the last page that he ever wrote stuck in the platen.
One of the galleys discovered in their apartment was a saga of a small-town rabbi’s family that had been serialized in Yiddish newspapers but never published in book form. Alfred A. Knopf is scheduled to publish the novel, “Sons and Daughters,” in 2025.
Scholars like Dr. Wisse and David E. Fishman, professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, wonder how much more could have been published by him and about him if not for Mrs. Grade’s resistance. Dr. Wisse, who lauds Grade for “the most precise evocation of the rabbinic world that existed before the war,” recalled that the literary critic Irving Howe received Grade’s blessing to include his poems in “The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse.” But after Grade died his wife withdrew the permission and the poems were never published.
The archive also contains a manuscript of an unpublished novel Mrs. Grade wrote, whose main characters are David Carency, a writer; his wife Ginna; and Samuel Usher, the publisher of a Yiddish newspaper. YIVO researchers said Usher is a thinly veiled version of a former editor of Der Tog, a popular Yiddish daily at the time.
“Ginna Carency, witty, sharp and rapidly acquiring encyclopedic knowledge, was not afraid of her husband’s mistresses,” the typed manuscript says. “She knew him well, perhaps better than he knew himself, and she knew that none of them will take him away from her but she felt that Samuel Usher, in spite of his age, could take her away from David Carency.”
Like Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Mrs. Grade wrote letters to countless figures voicing her grievances, many of which underscore the depth of her antipathy toward Singer. After an article appeared in The New York Times in 2004 pegged to Singer’s centennial that took account of his critics, including her, and praised Grade, she nevertheless sent the deputy culture editor at the time an 18-page long rebuke.
Three years after her husband’s death, she wrote Professor Fishman, Grade’s close friend, letting him know that her husband had regretted “the temporary relationship” and deeply lamented attending Fishman’s wedding and making a toast there.
“She was very jealous of anybody who had a relationship with him, anybody who got close to him,” Professor Fishman said.
Yet the archive indicates he tolerated her behavior.
“In some ways he was tormenting himself, a punishment for abandoning his first wife,” Professor Fishman said.
Still much about the relationship remains a puzzle. For a fuller explanation, Professor Fishman said, “you would need a great novelist.’”
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