Sons and daughters

This magisterial family saga by Grade (Rabbis and Wives), which was originally serialized in the 1960s and '70s in New York City's Yiddish newspapers, chronicles the erosion of a small Polish village shortly before the outbreak of WWII. Village rabbi Sholem Katzenellenbogen has five children, each of whom is pursuing a different path. His oldest son, Naftali, has left the village to study philosophy in Switzerland. The middle son, Bentzion, puts himself through night school, hoping to become a businessman. Sholem's daughter Tilza is married to a rabbi, while her younger sister, Bluma Rivtcha, struggles in a bad marriage and longs to become a nurse. She defends Bentzion's career choice to a disdainful Sholem by claiming her brother simply wants to be an "independent person." The youngest son, Refael'ke, becomes radicalized by Zionist agitators, a cause his grandfather rebukes ("What right do irreligious Jews have to demand a piece of the land flowing with milk and honey?"). Grade, who died in 1982, never alludes to the Holocaust, but its weight informs his elegiac portrait of a bygone life, in which each chapter feels like a fully realized story and the many characters are depicted in compassionate detail. It's an enormous achievement. (Mar.)

Finally available in English, Grade's sprawling novel--originally serialized in the 1960s and '70s in two New York--based Yiddish newspapers--dissects a Jewish family in early 1930s Poland torn apart by religious, cultural, and generational differences. The head of the family, based in the tiny village of Morehdalye, is hardcore traditionalist Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen, who sees Yiddish poets--secular freethinkers divorced from the laws and language of the Torah--as the bane of his existence. To his offspring, his rigorous demands tie him to a "dead world." Escaping his harsh authority, one of his sons studies not the Torah but Kierkegaard in Switzerland, where he secretly marries a non-Jewish woman who won't allow their son to be circumcised. Another son spends time in America, which his father thinks is "akin to renouncing Judaism," before becoming a Zionist radical in the land of Israel. One of the rabbi's daughters, married to a cold-hearted soul considered "one of the Torah greats," rejects the subservient role of rebbetzin, while his other daughter rejects a semi-arranged marriage to another rabbi in favor of studying nursing in Lithuania. The recriminations never let up even as Polish youth gangs, embodying the terrors to come (Grade only alludes to the Holocaust), begin terrorizing Jewish merchants. "My greatest enemies are my own family," laments Sholem Shachne. In sustaining his densely detailed, closed-in, slowly advancing narrative over 700 pages, Grade embraces modernism on an epic scale. He planned a second volume, but died before he could write it--or complete this abruptly ending book. One can only imagine what Volume 2 would have added. But even unfinished, this long-awaited novel is a monumental achievement. A great Yiddish novelist's grimly foreboding and fiercely alive final work. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.