Historical Biography, Jewish - Biography, World War II, Literary Biography

My Mother's Sabbath Days: A Memoir

Name: My Mother's Sabbath Days: A Memoir
Author: Chaim Grade
ISBN: 9781461629665

by Chaim Grade, Channa Kleinerman Goldstein (Translator)

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Overview

This tender and moving memoir by the great Yiddish writer Chaim Grade takes us to the very source of his widely praised novels and poems—the city of Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," during the years before World War II.

Centered on the figure of Grade's mother, Vella—simple, pious, hard-working—this is a richly detailed account of the ghetto of his youth, of the lives of the rabbis, the wives, the tradesmen, the peddlers, and the scholars. We see Vella, desperate after losing her husband, become a fruit-peddler, struggling to survive poverty and to remain true to her faith in the face of human pettiness and cruelty. We follow Grade as he walks in the footsteps of his scholar father, a champion of enlightenment; we see him entering marriage, and his mother finding some peace of mind in a marriage of her own—all of this in a world recalled with extraordinary physical and emotional intensity.

Then, World War II. The partition of Poland between the Soviet Union and Germany is followed by the new German invasion of June 1941. Grade—believing, as do so many others, that the Nazis pose a danger chiefly to able-bodied men like himself—flees into Russia. In his travels on foot and by train he meets a fascinating, kaleidoscopic array of characters: the disillusioned Communist Lev Kogan; the durachok, or simpleton, a young prisoner who, mistaken for a German spy, is shot when he jumps from a train; the once-prosperous lawyer, Orenstein, who virtually becomes a beggar, dies and is buried by strangers in a remote Central Asian village. With the war's end, Grade returns to Vilna—to find the ghetto in ruins, to learn that his wife and his mother have gone to their deaths—and he is left with nothing but memories. But it is here, amid the devastation of a people, that he finds the compulsion and the passion to commit to paper the world that has been lost.

About the Author, Chaim Grade

Chaim Grade, who died in 1982, was the author of numerous works of prose and poetry in Yiddish. Some of these have been translated into English including the novels The Yeshiva, The Agunah, The Well, and The Seven Little Lanes, a memoir of the Holocaust. His first work of prose to appear in English was the philosophical dialogue My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner. Born in Vilna, Lithuania, in 1910, Mr. Grade came to the United States in 1948 and lived in New York City with is wife, Inna. He received many prizes and awards, including the B'nai B'rith Jewish Heritage Award for Excellence, the Morris Adler Prize of the American Academy of Jewish Research, and the Remembrance Award of the World Federation of Bergen-Belsen Associations.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A luminous crown of the Grade oeuvre, this posthumous translation (the book was published in Yiddish 30 years ago) is a fitting kaddish to the Yiddish writer and the annihilated society of preWW II European Jewry. The first half is peppered with sharp but loving portraits of the Lithuanian Jews who inspired Grade's fictionepitomized by his mother, Vella, a pious, superstitious, humble yet self-righteous fruit peddler. As an omniscient narrator, the author offers chapters suggestive of his collected stories Rabbis and Wives, replete with midrashic saws and evocative images of a quaint, insular Vilna (``The moss-covered, hunchbacked roofs resemble the bent shoulders of bearded Jews jostling forward, the better to hear the words of a wandering preacher''). The memoir loses momentum as war intrudes and the author flees the Nazis. But it assumes a harrowing intensity as a guilt-ridden Grade, burdened by memories of his dead wife and mother, returns postwar to a gutted ghetto. (November 24)

Library Journal

In this poignant memoir (which won the prestigious Lamed Prize when originally published in 1955 in Yiddish), the noted author of Rabbis and Wives recalls in a series of vignettes his youth in Vilna, Lithuania; the invasion of the Nazi troops; his perilous escape to Russia; and above all his widowed mother, a pious Jew who sold produce on a street corner to support her family but never failed to keep the sabbath: ```My child, never forget that you are a Jew. Keep the Sabbath.' That was what she had said to me. I shall remember!'' The excellent translation retains all the life and color of the original. A memorable book in the tradition of Sholem Aleichem and S. Y. Agnon. Highly recommended. Marcia G. Fuchs, Guilford Free Lib., Ct.