The Best Novel of the Year Was Written in Yiddish — Seven Decades Ago

Chaim Grade’s ‘Daughters and Sons’ is a love letter to the galaxy of Eastern European Jewry on the eve of extinction.

Via the International Center of Photography © Mara Vishniac Kohn
'Grandfather and Granddaughter,' Roman Vishniac, Lublin, 1937. Detail. Via the International Center of Photography © Mara Vishniac Kohn

Isaac Bashevis Singer reckoned in his Nobel Prize banquet speech that Yiddish, the lingua franca of Eastern European Jewish civilization, had become, after Auschwitz, the language of ghosts. Chaim Grade’s novel “Sons and Daughters” shows it to be also the language of Lazarus. Translated by Rose Waldman, the epic, a rambunctious requiem, is set in the early 1930s but sprawls across borders and generations to arrive as a literary landmark in 2025.

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