Chaim grade

Chaim Grade in the Yung Vilne group (2nd from left, around 1929)

Chaim Grade (also Chajim Grade; born April 4, 1910 in Vilnius , Lithuania , then the Russian Empire ; died April 26, 1982 in New York ) was a Russian writer and poet and is considered one of the leading Yiddish writers of the 20th century .

Life

Chaim Grade received a traditional yeshiva - but also a secular education, studied for a few years with the famous Rabbi Karelitz (called Chazon Ish ), was a supporter of the ascetic Musar movement in his youth and served as rabbi in Białystok from 1923 to 1931 .

In the 1930s he was committed to political poetry and to bringing secular Yiddish literature together and new currents in world literature. From 1941 to 1948 he was the leader of a group of Yiddish poets known as Jung-Wilna , to which Sutzkever belonged in particular .

During the Second World War - Grade lost his wife Frume-Libe Grade and his mother Wella Grade Rosenthal in the Holocaust - he survived in the Soviet Union. In 1946 he moved to Paris , where he was actively involved in rebuilding Jewish life after the war. He traveled to the United States in 1948 as a member of the Jewish Culture Congress and then stayed in New York City for the rest of his life.

Works (selection)

• Yo. 1936 (political poetry)
• Musarnikeß. 1939 (epic poem, description of his experiences within the Musar group)
• Dojreß. 1945 ("gender", expression of his hatred of the Nazis and his love for the Jewish people)
• Plejtim. 1947 ("Refugees" collection similar to Dojreß )
• The mameß shabossim. 1955 (description of the pre-war Vilna; English under the title: "My Mother's Sabbath Days. A Memoir")
• Schulhojf. 1958 (story with a theme similar to the mames schabosim )
• Di agune. 1961 ("The abandoned woman", novel; description of the dispute between two rabbinical schools over whether an aguna , i.e. a woman who remained alone without a certificate of divorce or a death certificate from her husband, may marry again; the case of a woman whose husband fifteen years ago was First World War was lost)
• The mentsch fun fejer. 1962 (volume of poems, contains, among other things, praise for Yiddish poets who have already died)
• Di yeschiwe. 1967–1968 (novel, 2 volumes; English translation 1976–77)
• The brunem. (no year; novel)

filming

• The Quarrel (1991), based on the short story My Quarrel

literature

• John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 .
• Günter Stemberger : History of Jewish Literature. 1977.

Web links

• Chaim Grade talks away from Yiddish literature - Chaim Grade Speaks About Yiddish Literature, recording of a speech on Yiddish literature (in Yiddish) given in Montréal on December 7, 1958, ed. from the Yiddish Book Center, Amherst MASS (USA).