The Last Great Yiddish Novel Has Been Translated

In 2010, I was working at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research—the great nerve center for all things connected to Yiddish and East European Jewry—when the news broke that Inna Hecker Grade, the eccentric widow of the great Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade, had died. After dealing with legal complications, some of my colleagues were able to enter the Grades’ Bronx apartment, where they found flourishing urban wildlife and an enormous mass of papers, all in disarray. (The materials had to be moved to a special facility for disinfestation before they could be safely brought to the YIVO archives.)