This tender and moving memoir by the great Yiddish writer Chaim
Grade takes us to the very source of his widely praised novels and
poems-the city of Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," during the
years before World War II. Centered on the figure of Grade's
mother, Vella-simple, pious, hard-working-this is a richly detailed
account of the ghetto of his youth, of the lives of the rabbis, the
wives, the tradesmen, the peddlers, and the scholars. We see Vella,
desperate after losing her husband, become a fruit-peddler,
struggling to survive poverty and to remain true to her faith in
the face of human pettiness and cruelty. We follow Grade as he
walks in the footsteps of his scholar father, a champion of
enlightenment; we see him entering marriage, and his mother finding
some peace of mind in a marriage of her own-all of this in a world
recalled with extraordinary physical and emotional intensity. Then,
World War II. The partition of Poland between the Soviet Union and
Germany is followed by the new German invasion of June 1941.
Grade-believing, as do so many others, that the Nazis pose a danger
chiefly to able-bodied men like himself-flees into Russia. In his
travels on foot and by train he meets a fascinating, kaleidoscopic
array of characters: the disillusioned Communist Lev Kogan; the
durachok, or simpleton, a young prisoner who, mistaken for a German
spy, is shot when he jumps from a train; the once-prosperous
lawyer, Orenstein, who virtually becomes a beggar, dies and is
buried by strangers in a remote Central Asian village. With the
war's end, Grade returns to Vilna-to find the ghetto in ruins, to
learn that his wife and his mother have gone to their deaths-and he
is left with nothing but memories. But it is here, amid the
devastation of a people, that he finds the compulsion and the
passion to commit to paper the world that has been lost.
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