“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 Katzenellenbogen’s 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; he’s been lost to a phi­los­o­phy degree in Switzer­land (and maybe even a goy­ish wife?). And now the rabbi’s youngest, Refael’ke, wants to run off to the Holy Land with the Zion­ists.

Orig­i­nal­ly seri­al­ized in the 1960s and 1970s in New York – based Yid­dish news­pa­pers, Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daugh­ters is a pre­cious glimpse of a way of life that is no longer — the 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. It’s this clash, between the free­think­ing sec­u­lar life and a life bound by reli­gious duty — and the com­forts offered by each — that stands at the cen­ter of Sons and Daugh­ters. 

With char­ac­ters that rival the home­spun philoso­phers and lov­able rouges of Sholem Ale­ichem and I. B. Singer — from the brood­ing Zalia Ziskind, par­a­lyzed by the suf­fer­ing of oth­ers, to the Dos­toyevskian demon Shab­se Shep­sel — Grade’s 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.