Английски език
From one of the greatif not the greatestcontemporary 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 Katzenellenbogens 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; hes been lost to a philosophy degree in Switzerland (and maybe even a goyish wife?). And now the rabbis youngest, Refaelke, wants to run off to the Holy Land with the Zionists.
Originally serialized in the 1960s and 1970s in New Yorkbased Yiddish newspapers, Chaim Grades Sons and Daughters is a precious glimpse of a way of life that is no longerthe 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. Its this clash, between the freethinking secular life and a life bound by religious dutyand the comforts offered by eachthat stands at the center of Sons and Daughters.
With characters that rival the homespun philosophers and lovable rouges of Sholem Aleichem and I. B. Singerfrom the brooding Zalia Ziskind, paralyzed by the suffering of others, to the Dostoyevskian demon Shabse ShepselGrades 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.
