Chaim Grade, his last novel, Sons and Daughters, ten years in the writing, from the 1960’s to the 1970’s and serialized in Yiddish newspapers; the novel secreted away by Grade’s wife for decades following the author’s death in 1982; the manuscript thought lost and re-discovered among the 20,000 books and papers left behind; a translation from the Yiddish into English that took eight years; two years in the editing and a long-awaited publication, sixty years in the making.

“One of the great—if not the greatest—contemporary Yiddish novelists.” - Elie Wiesel

Chaim Grade’s long-awaited novel, Sons and Daughters (“Monumental” —Kirkus, starred review; “A melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny” - The New York Times), is explored in all its aspects by Victoria Wilson and Foster Hirsch in conversation with Rose Waldman, the novel’s acclaimed translator from the Yiddish to English, and Altie Karper, esteemed former editor, Alfred A. Knopf and publisher of Schocken Books.

Sons and Daughters is set between the First and Second world wars; a moving, haunting portrait of a tumultuous decade; a world coming to an end as it succumbs to the forces of modernity.

“The writer inside me is a thoroughly ancient Jew,” writes Grade, ”while the man inside me wants to be thoroughly modern. This is my calamity, plain and simple, a struggle I cannot win.”

The novel tells the story of an Orthodox rabbi of an imagined Lithuanian shtetl – the vanished Vilna of Grade’s youth, then the center of Jewish intellectual and cultural life - whose children, drifting away from the religious traditions he so venerates, are drawn to a more secular life of success, sexual expression, Zionist pioneering in Palestine and cultural freedom in the United States.

“Sholem Aleichem writes about that world like Mark Twain,” says Altie Karper. “Chaim Grade writes about it like Dostoyevsky. Hanging over the novel,” she says, “ is the knowledge that in ten years, these people will all be gone.”

“Quite possibly the last great Yiddish novel.” — Adam Kirsch

Join us and watch the seventh event in the Talk of the Town series of conversations with Victoria Wilson and Foster Hirsch that takes place monthly at the Salmagundi Art Club in New York City.