Chaim Grade

Chaim Grade (April 4, 1910, in Vilnius, Lithuania (at the time occupied by the Russian Empire) – April 26, 1982, Los Angeles, California, buried in Riverside Cemetery, Saddle Brook, NJ) was one of the leading Yiddish writers of the twentieth century.

Grade was raised Orthodox-leaning, and he studied in yeshiva as a teenager, but ended up with a secular outlook, in part from his poetic ambitions. Losing his family in the Holocaust, he resettled in New York, and increasingly took to fiction, writing in Yiddish. Initially he was reluctant to have his work translated.

He was praised by Elie Wiesel as "one of the great—if not the greatest—of living Yiddish novelists."

Life

Chaim Grade, the son of Shlomo Mordecai Grade, a Hebrew teacher and maskil (advocate of the Haskalah, the European Jewish Enlightenment), received a secular as well as Jewish religious education. He studied for several years with Reb Avrohom Yeshaya Karelitz, the Chazon Ish (1878–1953), one of observant Judaism's great Torah scholars. In 1932, Grade began publishing stories and poems in Yiddish, and in the early 1930s was among the founding members of the "Young Vilna" experimental group of artists and writers. He developed a reputation as one of the city's most articulate literary interpreters.