Chaim Grade

Who was Chaim Grade?

Chaim Grade was one of the leading Yiddish writers of the twentieth century.

Grade was raised Orthodox-leaning, and he studied in yeshiva as a teenager, but ended up secular, in part from his poetic ambitions. Losing his family in the Holocaust, he resettled in New York, and increasingly took to fiction, writing in Yiddish. Initially he was reluctant to have his work translated.

He was praised by Elie Wiesel as "one of the great—if not the greatest—of living Yiddish novelists."