The Yeshiva: The Jerusalem of Lithuania's Greatest Novelist-- Chaim Grade's--Greatest Novel
- Yiddish Shmoozers in Translation
- Jun 18, 2021
- 14 min read
Updated: Jan 9
PARTS 1-3 Saturday, August 7, 2021, 5:00 - 7:00 pm Pacific
PARTS 4-5 Saturday, September 4, 2021, 5:00-7:00 pm Pacific
ACCESSING THE BOOK:
While the book, The Yeshiva, is now out of print, you can find copies through your library and/or interlibrary loan. You can also download a digital copy here:
ENJOY THE ESSAY. SCROLL TO BOTTOM FOR DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

The cardinal points of North and South are mapped Jewishly in terms of prominent cultural stereotypes of the Litvak (North) and the Galitzianer (South). These character types correspond to distinctive regional dialects and also to can help us to map some of the diverse Jewish religious cultures and population centers highlighted for us by reading Chaim Grade's work at this time, against our previous readings as background.
CHAIM GRADE'S VILNA
The novel, The Yeshiva, is set in the city of Vilna and environs in the 1920s. Known in Russian and in Yiddish as Vilna, in Lithuanian as Vilnius, and in Polish as Wilno, the city was a major center of Jewish life within the Pale of Settlement. Its author Chaim Grade's life corresponds and responds to key themes and events in the city in the turbulent 20th century. Born in 1910, Grade's family, already poor, suffered even greater deprivation as an effect of the First World War. His father was an underemployed Hebrew teacher and maskil (free thinker); his mother barely supported the family by selling fruit. Grade and his two sisters were placed in an orphanage, where both girls died. Afterwards, his mother somehow managed to support Grade to attend yeshivas in Vilna, Olkeniki, Bialystock and Novaredok.
Anyone who has read The Yeshiva can recognize that this is very much an autobiographical work, with the character of Chaim Vilner standing in for the author. But do not mistake this book for the bildungsroman of a young writer. Grade's career and reputation as a young man was made as a poet. Grade left the world of the Yeshiva in 1932, returning to the city where--according to Joanna Lisek, in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, V. 333--he moved with his mother into "a tiny, windowless room, furnished only with two metal pallets and table, in back of a blacksmith's shop on Jatkowa Street in Vilna." He is said to have begun publishing poems that led him, in 1934, to join as a contributor to the Yung Vilne group of avant-garde Yiddish writers, earning him immediate recognition.

Again, according to Wisse, Grade's work expressed concerns about both universalism and particularism, a characteristic of his generation of Jewish writers. Two cataclysmic events colored their intellectual horizons with regard to the nature of Jewish collectivity and how Jews could or should belong in a nation state. The first event was the Russian Revolution of 1917. After the Bolsheviks ended the rule of the Tsar, there was uncertainty about both the actual and proper status that Jews should occupy in the new Soviet state.
The 1920s was a period of promise in Russia of full inclusion and non-discrimination for Jews as free individuals (citizens) and as not a religion but a nationality. The novel Zelmanyaners by Moshe Kulbak, read by the Yiddish Shmoozers, is the story of this period of intensive modernization for a Jewish extended family in Minsk. Historian Elisa Bemporad writes about the fact that Yiddish was one of three official languages in Minsk in the 1920s. Even the street signs were written in Yiddish. It was a brief period of inclusion (i.e. recognition and belonging) of Jews as an ethno-national collectivity. Importantly, from an official standpoint, this ethno-national categorization was not racial or religious but cultural and linguistic.
The other cataclysmic event on the Yung Vilne generation's horizon was the First World War. The idea of a Second World War and the Holocaust did not yet exist. But the First World War represented to the young writers the kind of moral horror associated later with World War II and its own forms of genocide. In Wisse's words, writers like Grade "confronted and lamented the destruction and degradation of humanity associated with the War."
Dwelling with the problem of universalism and particularism is the specific task of Jewish modernity. It was also the signal issue of American cosmopolitanism in the 20th century. It is what so many of the 20th century's great sociologists, historians, philosophers, and anthropologists have written about and are still writing about. The Jewish problem of assimilation is discursively and historically closely related to issues affecting all minorities (ethno-racial, sex-gender, able/disabled) with respect to ideas such as "equity," "diversity," and "inclusion." In the 1920s, in America, Jews and African Americans struggled with how to be citizens when institutionalized racism blocked their full participation. Think of Hank Greenberg's dilemma of whether to play for the Yankees on Yom Kippur. Think of Rosa Parks refusal to move to the back of the bus.
Yung Vilne rejected the Zionist nationalist approach to the problem of Jewish particularism by rejecting territorial solution taking place in Palestine. Instead, Yung Vilne identified with Yiddishist, Folkist and Bundist movements. The Jewish Labor Bund adopted an explicit policy of doi-kayt (here-ness), the idea that Jews belong and should participate in the countries where they find themselves. Across national boundaries, Bundists, Yiddishists and Folkists alike viewed the Jews as constituents of an imagined national entity united by language but without a territory and army. A place called Yiddishland.
LITVAKS, MISNAGDIM AND MUSAR
The term litvak has a special derisive meaning beyond denoting a person who comes from Lita, the region comprised of what is now Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and parts of Poland. The stereotype of the litvak portrays a spiritually narrow, overly rationalist skeptic. We met such a character in Esther Singer Kreitman's novel The Dance of the Demons in the persona of Deborah's mother. In fact, the stereotype of the cold, practical rationalist--and in this case, freethinking--mother stands in heightened relief against the pietistic Hasidic father who places his belief and trust in God's will. We also got glimpses of the litvak stereotype in Kreitman's brother's novel The Brothers Ashkenazi, in the unpleasant, sharp-dealing clothing dealer from Lithuania with his lisping accent. In fact, there is no end to the appearance of the litvak in literature and speech (even today) as one pole of a contrastive cultural type.
Here we will unpack where this stereotype comes from. The Jewish community was established in Lithuania in the 14th century, with the invitation issued to German Jews by the king. In the late 16th century, the community built the Great Synagogue in grand Italian Renaissance style, with a soaring interior made possible by a floor dug below ground level, complying with the rule that the building not stand taller than the Catholic Church. In 1812, after visiting the Great Synagogue on his march to Moscow, Napoleon dubbed Vilna "the Jerusalem of the North." The name stuck. The Great Synagogue's gated courtyard with its study houses (kloyzes) became a visual metonym for the city's Jewish presence and identity, as in the photo of the book's cover (above).
As readers know, the Great Synagogue and its courtyard are not actually a locale described in the book. While some action in The Yeshiva does take place among the poor of Vilna, giving us Chaim Vilner's (i.e. Chaim Grade's) background, most occurs in nearby towns (shtetls). The Valkenik shtetl, where the tormented teacher Tsemakh Atlas establishes a yeshiva, is only three stops away from the city by train. The severe teachings that Tsemakh Atlas imposes on the boys in the Valkenik yeshiva derive ultimately from Rabbi Israel Salantar, founder of the late-19th century Musar movement. The Novaredok yeshiva founded by Rabbi Yisroyl Hurwitz, in which Tsemakh Atlas studied and taught, was a place of radical Musar teachings of ethical introspection and self-abnegation.
This brings us to a discussion of the religious traditions associated with Vilna as a religious center and of Mussar's place within it. Vilna is the birthplace of the Misnagdim, the manner of Jewish study and observance that stands in direct opposition to Hasidism. The word Misnagdim means 'Opponents.' Opponents of what? Opponents of Hasidism. As we saw in the portrayal of the Bratslavers in The Family Mashber (and even more in its source material in The Tales of Rabbi Nahman), the Hasidic tradition started by ca. 1730 by The Baal Shem Tov in Ukraine invited Jews to participate in ecstatic prayer, dancing and other embodied expressions of joy.
The online source, The Jewish Virtual Library, puts it this way. The Baal Shem Tov sought to make the Kabbalistic teachings of the 16th century Rabbi Yitzchak Luria "accessible to even the simplest Jew, emphasizing prayer, love of God and love of one's fellow Jews."
He [the Baal Shem Tov] taught that even if one was not blessed with the ability or opportunity to be a Torah scholar, one could still reach great spiritual heights through these channels. http//www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/rabbi-yisrael-baal-shem-tov
It was the rebbe, as spiritual leader of the particular Hasidic community, who bore responsibility for supplying the framework of Torah to his followers.
Towards the end of the 18th century, rumors and accusations of sexual abuses and other forms of heretical behavior prompted a frightened reaction and then a full-scale kulturkampf against the Hasidim. The center of the opposition resided with Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the Vilna Gaon ('Genius'), the scholar and rabbi presiding over Vilna's Great Synagogue. According to the YIVO Encyclopedia, a majority of scholars agree that it was the Gaon who, among the opponents:
. . . galvanized the leading Jewish communities of Lithuania and Belorussia, such as Vilna, Brisk, and Minsk—in addition to Brody in Galicia—into a major battle with Hasidism. This battle was initially engaged through rabbinical letters of excommunication forbidding the establishment of Hasidic prayer houses, ordering the public burning of Hasidic literature, encouraging the humiliation and even imprisonment of Hasidic leaders, and banning contact with them or their followers.
A map of Misnagdic and Hasidic centers on YIVO's website makes clear the predominantly north-south axis of the schism between Misnagdim and Hasidim. Vilna is at the very top of the map. Bratslav and Uman, the last home and burial place of Rabbi Nahman, are at the very bottom. The intense schism between Misnagadim and

Thank you, Gelya, for bringing the world of Chaim Grade and pre-WWII Vilna back to life for us. (And thank you, also, for having emailed us the link to Dr. David Fishman's fascinating Zoom presentation, "The Wanderings of a Yiddish Writer During and After the Holocaust" earlier this week.)