Chaim Grade | |
|---|---|
 1968 dust jacket photograph | |
| Born | April 4, 1910 Vilnius, Lithuania |
| Died | 26 April 1982 (aged 72) The Bronx, New York |
| Occupation | Writer, Poet |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable works | |
Chaim Grade (Yiddish: חיים גראַדע) (April 4, 1910 – June 26, 1982) was one of the leading Yiddish writers of the twentieth century.
Grade was born in Vilnius, Russian Empire and died in The Bronx, New York. He is buried in Riverside Cemetery, Saddle Brook, New Jersey.
Grade was raised Orthodox-leaning, and he studied in yeshiva as a teenager, but ended up with a secular outlook, in part due to 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.[1][2]
He was praised by Elie Wiesel as "one of the great—if not the greatest—of living Yiddish novelists."[3] In 1970 he won the Itzik Manger Prize for contributions to Yiddish letters.[4]
- ^ Shepherd, Richard F. (July 1, 1982). "Chaim Grade, Yiddish Novelist and Poet on the Holocaust, Dies". The New York Times. Retrieved 20 April 2016.
- ^ Grade found most translators did not understand Orthodoxy and Orthodox use of Yiddish. Leviant, Curt (2011). "Translating and Remembering Chaim Grade". Jewish Review of Books.
- ^ Wiesel, Elie (September 1, 1974). "Even those who survived are partly lost". The New York Times Book Review (review of The Agunah). Retrieved November 21, 2018.
- ^ Diamant, Zaynvl (1986). "Chaim Grade". In Kagan, Berl (ed.). Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers [Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers] (in Yiddish). New York: R. Ilman-Kohen. OCLC 654533179. Article translated at "Chaim Grade". Translated by Joshua Fogel. 20 September 2015. Retrieved 2019-03-20.