Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters
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Book Talk
Presented by 92NY Bronfman Center for Jewish Life; co-sponsored by YIVO In Person at 92NY:Admission: $18 Zoom Livestream:Admission: Free
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Join us for a discussion of acclaimed novelist Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters, celebrating the long-awaited English translation of this Tolstoyan masterpiece that chronicles the final decade of a world succumbing to modernity.
Sons and Daughters introduces readers to the Katzenellenbogen family 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. This clash between the freethinking secular life and a life bound by religious duty — and the comforts offered by each — stands at the center of Sons and Daughters. Grade’s masterful novel brims with humanity and heartbreaking affection for a world, once full of life in all its glorious complexity, a portal into the history of Poland and Lithuania that the Holocaust would soon eradicate.
A true revival of a bygone era, the Yiddish text of Sons and Daughters was only recently made available online by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Native Yiddish speaker Rose Waldman brings the work to English speakers in a new edition with an introduction by poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch. Hear from Waldman, Kirsch, Chaim Grade scholar Justin Cammy, and editor of the novel, Todd Portnowitz in a conversation moderated by 92NY’s Rabbi David Ingber.