GRADE, CHAIM

born April 5, 1910, Vilna, Russian Empire [now Vilnius, Lithuania] died June 26, 1982, New York, N.Y., U.S. Yiddish poet, short-story writer, and novelist who was one of the last surviving secularized Yiddish writers to have been educated in a European yeshiva (rabbinical seminary). His fiction reflects an intimate knowledge of the complexities and breadth of that vanished culture and tradition. In Vilna Grade gave up his religious studies to become a writer. He published poetry (Yo, 1937; "Yes") and was a member of Young Vilna, a group of avant-garde Yiddish writers and artists. He escaped to Russia after the German invasion in 1941, but he returned to Vilna after the war and discovered that his wife and mother had been killed and the culture in which he had been nurtured had been destroyed. Grade then moved to Paris, where he wrote searing poetry about the Holocaust, such as the book dedicated to his first wife, Mit dayn guf oyf mayne hent (1946; "With Your Body in My Hands"). In 1948 he settled in New York City. Most of Grade's subsequent works deal with issues related to the culture and tradition of his Jewish faith. The short story "Mayn krig mit Hersh Rasseyner" (1950; "My Fight with Hersh Rasseyner"; filmed as The Quarrel, 1992) tells of a post-World War II encounter of a secular Jew deeply troubled by the Holocaust with a devout friend from Poland. Grade's novel Di agune (1961; The Agunah) concerns an Orthodox woman whose husband is missing in action in wartime and who, according to Orthodox Jewish law, is forbidden to remarry, lest she enter into an adulterous union. Grade's other fiction includes a novella, Der brunem (1967; The Well), the ambitious two-volume Tsemakh Atlas (1967-68; The Yeshiva), and many short stories and poems. His poetry includes "Has" (1943; "Hatred"), "Musarnikes" (1939; "Followers of Musar," an ascetic religious sect), "Der mames tsvoe" (1949; "My Mother's Testament"), and "Elegiye oyf di sovetish-yidishe shraybers" (1962; "Elegy for the Soviet-Yiddish Writers"). Grade also published a memoir, Der mame's Shabosim (1955; My Mother's Sabbath Days).