Solomon Yudovin, 1920s, Center for Jewish Art
One of the hallmarks of Chaim Grade’s writing is how magnificently realized his characters are and how vividly he describes the towns, villages, and cities in which they live. This is because Grade was writing about the world into which he was born and where he spent his childhood and adolescence. Although he left Eastern European Orthodox Jewry both geographically and ideologically, this world stayed in his heart and in his mind. Grade believed that he survived the Holocaust (tragically, his mother and his first wife did not) so that he could, for future generations, memorialize in fiction a complex, many-layered world that pulsed with life before it was horrifically destroyed during World War II.
Here are a few suggestions for further reading for those interested in learning more about Jewish life in pre-World War II Eastern Europe.
Sons and Daughters by Chaim Grade, translated by Rose Waldman
From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938 – 1947 by Lucy S. Dawidowicz
This memoir by the acclaimed Holocaust historian chronicles the year she spent in Vilna (then part of Poland) studying history at the original YIVO Institute. Dawidowicz witnessed Polish antisemitism first-hand during the months before the German invasion that began World War II. She also recounts her work with survivors in displaced-persons camps at the end of the war.
Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Volume 8: Jews in Independent Poland, 1918 – 1939 by Antony Polonsky
The eighth volume in this award-winning multi-volume history of Polish Jewry gives historical background and context to the people, places, and events Grade so poignantly describes in Sons and Daughters.
A Vanished World by Roman Vishniac and To Give Them Light: The Legacy of Roman Vishniac by Roman Vishniac
In 1938, Roman Vishniac, under commission by the Joint Distribution Committee, traveled from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains, photographing Jewish communities in Eastern Europe as part of a fundraising campaign to support these poverty-stricken Jews. Unbeknownst to both the photographer and his subjects, Vishniac’s photographs became the final pictorial record of European Jewry and its communities, all of which would, in a little more than a year, fall victim to the Nazi onslaught.
Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories edited by Sandra Bark
Among other narrative through-lines, Sons and Daughters shows how modern times introduced new options for women who wanted to live lives different from those of their mothers and grandmothers. In this anthology of fiction centered on Jewish women in Eastern Europe and America in the early decades of the twentieth century, these women — and the ambitious and daring decisions some of them make regarding how they will live their lives — are brought movingly to life.
Deborah by Esther Singer Kreitman
Based in part on her own life experiences, this novel by the elder sister of I. J. Singer and I. B. Singer chronicles the life of a young woman growing up in a rabbinic family in early twentieth-century Poland who struggles against the strictures imposed upon her by her traditional upbringing.
The Life of Jews in Poland Before the Holocaust: A Memoir by Ben-Zion Gold
A former director of the Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel, Rabbi Gold, who grew up in pre-war Poland and immigrated to the United States in 1947, gives us a fascinating true-life version of the fictional world Chaim Grade created in Sons and Daughters.
The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
Using primary sources and archival photos and artwork, Petrovsky-Shtern has produced a deeply researched social, economic, and cultural history of the Eastern European shtetl in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Altie Karper was the editorial director of Schocken Books/Penguin Random House for more than twenty years. Authors with whom she worked include Aharon Appelfeld, Leela Corman, Mark Russ Federman, Kevin Henkes, Irving Howe, Francine Klagsbrun, Deborah Lipstadt, Arthur Miller, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Peter Sis, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Elie Wiesel, Lori Zabar, and Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg.
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