Sons and Daughters

This magisterial family saga by Grade (Rabbis and Wives), which was originally serialized in the 1960s and ’70s in New York City’s Yiddish newspapers, chronicles the erosion of a small Polish village shortly before the outbreak of WWII. Village rabbi Sholem Katzenellenbogen has five children, each of whom is pursuing a different path. His oldest son, Naftali, has left the village to study philosophy in Switzerland. The middle son, Bentzion, puts himself through night school, hoping to become a businessman. Sholem’s daughter Tilza is married to a rabbi, while her younger sister, Bluma Rivtcha, struggles in a bad marriage and longs to become a nurse. She defends Bentzion’s career choice to a disdainful Sholem by claiming her brother simply wants to be an “independent person.” The youngest son, Refael’ke, becomes radicalized by Zionist agitators, a cause his grandfather rebukes (“What right do irreligious Jews have to demand a piece of the land flowing with milk and honey?”). Grade, who died in 1982, never alludes to the Holocaust, but its weight informs his elegiac portrait of a bygone life, in which each chapter feels like a fully realized story and the many characters are depicted in compassionate detail. It’s an enormous achievement. (Mar.)