Sons and Daughters
Sprawling and incident-packed ... It’s such an intimate and detailed portrait of Orthodox Jewish life in the old country between the wars ... A melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny ... So tightly written that the action moves at a crawl. If it were a car, only first gear would work. And perhaps I’ve buried the lede, but Grade died before this novel’s completion ... Grade’s female characters are wonderfully realized.
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Grade’s prose mimetically reproduces the way Jews thronged in their tight quarters. His major accomplishment, though, is at the level of the individual characters. They’re vortices of ambivalence, anxious and raw and at odds with themselves, hypercritical yet hypersensitive, repressed but not undersexed, subject to delusions of grandeur or abasement or both in turns ... Masterpieces.
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Quite probably the last great Yiddish novel ... Language lies at the heart of Sons and Daughters, a novel about a family struggling with the meaning of Jewishness in the twentieth century ... The book stops without resolution ... What disappeared was Yiddish, along with the secular, Eastern European Jewish future in which Chaim Grade and so many others placed their hopes. We can be thankful that it survives, in all its human complexity and passion, in the pages of his book.
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