Rabbis and Wives

"These three novellas, set before the Holocaust , dramatise relationships between rabbis and wives, exploring the complex politics of family and community. The [English] translation first appeared when I was in high school, and I read an excerpt of this subtle and acutely insightful work in Commentary magazine . What really impressed me about his work was the understated way in which he painted a picture of a community and a culture that has been lost. Both Sholem Aleichem and Chaim Grade wrote in Yiddish. They wrote about this lost world, they were both very unsentimental and I admire that about them. But Grade showed me another kind of Jewish writing – slower, more formal and more analytic in its character studies. He’s a very restrained, understated writer, not funny in the way that Sholem Aleichem is. He’s much more sober. My grandmother used to say that Yiddish was very rich in its humour and its sayings. I cannot speak to that directly myself because I’m not a Yiddish speaker or a Yiddish reader. If you are interested in knowing more, I would point you to the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. It’s an amazing repository of literature written in Yiddish, saved from destruction by its director Aaron Lansky."