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Wilno was an
important center of Jewish culture-not just a local center, but on a
world
scale. Yiddish was the dominant language there, and literature in that
language
had its main support in Wilno, along with New York, as the number of
peridicals
and books published there demonstrates. The city was better off before
World
War I, when it belonged to Russia and profited from its position as a
key
railroad junction and trading center. This came to an end when the city
was
transferred to little Poland, although in terms of culture, the
interwar period
was a time of blossoming. Something of the vitality of past years,
especially
1905-1914, also continued. Political parties that had been founded in
tsarist
Russia were still active, with their prime concern the needs of workers
and a
socialist revolution-most important of all, the Bund, a separate Jewish
socialist party, which wanted to be a movement of Yiddish-speaking
workers. It
was a counterpart of sorts to the Polish Socialist Party, which,
however, since
it was considered to be exclusively Polish, had relatively few
adherents in the
city. It would not be accurate to link the creation of the Jewish
Historical
Institute with the Bund, and yet in its aim of preserving the cultural
heritage
of the cities and small towns where Yiddish was used in daily life, one
can
detect the spirit of the Bund. The Communists were rivals of the Bund
and grew
stronger with the years; in 1939, they apparently had a majority of
followers.
Both these parties, in turn, were at war with the Zionists and the
Orthodox. This Jewish
Wilno recognized the attractiveness of Russian culture, but was
separated from
Soviet Russia by the state border. The border was quite close, however,
and
this produced a phenomenon peculiar to Wilno. Many young people,
dreaming of
taking part in the "building of socialism," crossed the eastern
border without appropriate documents, enthusiastically ensuring their
near and
dear ones that they would write from there. No one ever heard from any
of them
again. They were sent straight to the Gulag. Chaim Grade
belonged to the group of young poets called Yung Vilne. In addition to
Abraham
Sutzkever, I remember the name Kaczerginski. The attitude of this group
toward
the older generation, somewhat like Zagary's, inclined us to make an
alliance
with them. We were exactly the same age, and their "Young Wilno" used
to come to our readings. The poet
Grade was a descendant of an officer in Napoleon's army named Grade,
who,
wounded, and nursed back to health by a Jewish family in Wilno, married
into it
and converted to Judaism. Chaim's mother, who was very poor, was a
street
peddler whose entire stock fit into a basket. Grade devoted many moving
pages
of his oeuvre to that pious, hardworking, good woman. She appears
against the
background of a milieu which followed all the religious customs, and
whose
common characteristic was extreme poverty. Chaim's
youth in Wilno did not pass without political and personal conflicts.
His
father, Rabbi Shlomo Mordechai, an addvocate of Hebrew and a Zionist,
who held
strong convictions and was not much inclined to compromise, engaged in
heated arguments
with the conservative rabbis. He raised his son to be a pious Jew.
Chaim's
later history shows that he remained faithful to Judaism, in contrast
to the
emancipated Singer. As a poet, Chaim quickly achieved recognition and
local
fame, but he was distinguished from the majority of young people who
read Marx
and sang revolutionary songs. The Communists' attempts at attracting
him to
their side were not successful, and Grade became the object of violent
attacks.
Worse yet, he fell in love with Frumme-Liebe, who was also the daughter
of a
rabbi and from a family of Zionists who emigrated to Palestine. His
Communist
colleagues tried in vain to interfere with their marriage. These
details can be found in his four-hundred-page novel memoir called, in
English
translation, My Mother's Sabbath Days.
There he tells in detail
about his wartime experiences, beginning with the entry of Soviet
troops into
the city. His friends' enthusiasm contrasted with the stony sadness of
the
crowd at the mass in the Wilno cathedral, where he went out of
compassion. The
chaos of the German invasion in June 1941 separated him from his
beloved wife.
They were supposed to meet a couple of days later, but he never saw her
again.
She died, as did his mother, in the Wilno ghetto. A wave of fleeing
refugees
carried him to the East. After many peripatetic (once, they wanted to
shoot him
as a German spy) he made his way to Tashkent. After the war, he
emigrated to
New York. He always writes about the Russians with love and respect. He
insists
that he never encountered any signs of anti-Semitism in Russia. His
colleagues from the Yung Vilne group, Sutzkever and Kaczerginski, were
in the
ghetto and then joined the Soviet partisan troops. Sutzkever wound up
in
Israel, where he edited the only quarterly devoted to poetry in the
dying
language of Yiddish, Di Goldene Keyt
(The Golden Chain). In America,
the poet Chaim Grade developed into a prose writer, and like Singer,
who
attempted to recover the vanished world of the Jewish towns of Poland,
he
immersed himself in the past, writing about the shtetls of Lithuania
and
Belorussia. Singer engaged in fantasy and offended many of his readers;
Grade
was attentive to the accuracy of the details he recorded and has been
compared
with Balzac or Dickens. His main theme appears to be the life of the
religious
community, which he knows well, especially the problems of families in
which
the wife works to earn money and the husband pores over holy books. One
collection of novellas is even called Rabbis
and Wives. I became
interested in Grade thanks to my contact with his second wife, his
widow. After
his death in 1982 (he was seventy-two years old), she began
energetically
promoting his work and collaborating with his English translators. MILOSZ'S
ABC'S
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