Sons and Daughters

A Novel

De: Chaim Grade, Rose Waldman - translator, Adam Kirsch - introduction

Narrado por: Rob Shapiro

From “one of the great—if not the greatest—contemporary Yiddish novelists” (Elie Wiesel), the long-awaited English translation of a work, Tolstoyan in scope, that chronicles the last, tumultuous decade of a world succumbing to the march of modernity

“A great beard novel . . . Also a great food novel . . . A melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny . . . [Grade’s] fretful characters vibrate as if they were drawn by Roz Chast [and] Rose Waldman's translation seems miraculous to me.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“It is me the prophet laments when he cries out, ‘My enemies are the people in my own home.’” The Rabbi ignored his borscht and instead chewed on a crust of bread dipped in salt. “My greatest enemies are my own family.”

Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen’s world, the world of his forefathers, is crumbling before his eyes. And in his own home! His eldest, Bentzion, is off in Bialystok, studying to be a businessman; his daughter Bluma Rivtcha is in Vilna, at nursing school. For her older sister, Tilza, he at least managed to find a suitable young rabbi, but he can tell things are off between them. Naftali Hertz? Forget it; he’s been lost to a philosophy degree in Switzerland (and maybe even a goyish wife?). And now the rabbi’s youngest, Refael’ke, wants to run off to the Holy Land with the Zionists.

Originally serialized in the 1960s and 1970s in New York-based Yiddish newspapers, Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters is a precious glimpse of a way of life that is no longer—the rich Yiddish culture of Poland and Lithuania that the Holocaust would eradicate. We meet the Katzenellenbogens in the tiny village of Morehdalye, in the 1930s, when gangs of Poles are beginning to boycott Jewish merchants and the modern, secular world is pressing in on the shtetl from all sides. It’s this clash, between the freethinking secular life and a life bound by religious duty—and the comforts offered by each—that stands at the center of Sons and Daughters.

With characters that rival the homespun philosophers and lovable rouges of Sholem Aleichem and I. B. Singer—from the brooding Zalia Ziskind, paralyzed by the suffering of others, to the Dostoyevskian demon Shabse Shepsel—Grade’s masterful novel brims with humanity and heartbreaking affection for a world, once full of life in all its glorious complexity, that would in just a few years vanish forever.

©2025 Chaim Grade (P)2025 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“A great beard novel . . . Also a great food novel . . . A melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny . . . [Grade’s] fretful characters vibrate as if they were drawn by Roz Chast. Nearly everyone is about to smack someone . . . Grade has so many gifts as a writer. Like a rabbi, he is a distributor of beneficence . . . he has folk wit as well as intellect . . . he can write about a hairy little soul with as much sensitivity as a great one. He is a custodian of traditions, yet in close, chafing contact with this flippant world . . . Rose Waldman’s translation of Sons and Daughters seems miraculous to me. The language is crisp and clean; it is also bright, like a painting that has been restored.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“[Grade’s] ambition is biblical. I don’t think the word overreaches. . . . The risk writers run when they set out to memorialize is that they’ll produce memorials, not literature. Grade didn’t do that. His novels jam almost too much life into their pages. That’s not a criticism, because the streets of prewar Jewish Eastern Europe also jostled and overflowed; Grade’s prose mimetically reproduces the way Jews thronged in their tight quarters. His major accomplishment, though, is at the level of the individual characters. They’re vortices of ambivalence, anxious and raw and at odds with themselves, hypercritical yet hypersensitive, repressed but not undersexed, subject to delusions of grandeur or abasement or both in turns. On the whole, they’re good people. They scheme and bicker and get on one another’s nerves, and yet they have deep family feeling, and few of his protagonists wholly free themselves from a yearning for contact with the divine. The dominant emotion in a Grade novel is tortured loyalty.”—Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic

“An epic, an elegy, as unfinished as the Jews, and one of the world’s great books.”—Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus

Great writing/disappointing performance

The novel is both great for what it tells us about a lost world that is currently slipping from living memory. It also tells us (albeit indirectly) about the Yiddish readers who were reading it in the 1960s and 70s. But the performance was substantially sub-par. It is clear that the reader is unfamiliar with Eastern European pronunciations of Hebrew. It as a complete distraction. Admittedly, sometimes the mispronunciation we’re laugh out loud. So there was that

A mostly lost culture, partly preserved

There is a book called ‘ There Once Was a World’ that describes Jewish shtetl life in its myriad aspects and serves as an excellent introduction to what it was like to live in Eastern Europe in Jewish society before the Holocaust. Another book ‘The Destruction of the European Jews’ by Hilberg details the size and scope of this civilization and the events leading up to and through the murder of most of the people who formed this world. Sons and Daughters breathes life into this now mostly lost society ( bits survive in Israel the US and other places) and with a rich and nuanced mix of family, cultural conflicts and human warmth in all our love and flaws that remains rivetingly relevant for our current generations. Grade’s contemporaries, his audience during his lifetime, are gone. However his aim of opening a portal to life before the end has succeeded. This book is an emotionally, intellectually and spiritually engaging set of interlocking stories of a family that kept my attention and continues to keep me in its realm. This is the kind of book that can connect all kinds of people to the beauty and the most angst of Eastern European Jewish and related life.

Tender and thoughtful

Tender, thoughtful bittersweet novel about Jewish life and identity in small town Poland pre Holocaust.

A compelling picture of a lost world

Be sure to listen to the translator’s note at the end. There is an outline of an ending.

Unforgettable book

A jewish masterpiece on time lost. A wonderful saga on a family living in Poland in the 1930’s before the complete distraction of this world. Witten with love and criticism, a work of literary art reminding the great Russian authors. Professional translation and great narration (wish he would have pronounced the Hebrew words more accurately) but this is my only comment. I have listened to this book for over 3 weeks is a raw and did not want it to end. The story of my unknown ancestors. A memorial to a world no more exists