Chaim Grade was born in 1910 in Vilna, Poland. In his youth, Grade was a student of the Novaredok Musar Yeshiva and of Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz. He was also a founding member of the Yung-Vilne literary group, known for its leftist politics, secular Jewish thinking, and literary influence. After losing both his mother and wife during the Holocaust, he emerged as one of the most prolific and defining Yiddish voices in post-war literature. Besides publishing several volumes of poetry, he is best known for his two acclaimed novels, The Agunah and The Yeshiva.

In early 2023, YIVO and the National Library of Israel (NLI) completed the digitization of the Papers of Chaim Grade and Inna Hecker Grade. The collection helps to illustrate Grade’s literary development and impact on Yiddish literature, from his earliest poetic works written in Vilna and the Soviet Union to his prolific and accomplished prose work composed mainly in the United States.

Join YIVO and NLI for a panel discussion of Grade’s legacy with Ruth Wisse, Ofer Dynes, and Curt Leviant, led by scholar and translator Justin Cammy.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

About the Speakers
Ruth R. Wisse was Professor of Yiddish literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University from 1993–2014 and before that, helped found the Jewish Studies Department at McGill University. Currently a senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund and recipient of its Herzl Prize, she has written widely on cultural and political subjects for the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, National Affairs, and other publications. Her books include The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Literature and Culture, No Joke: Making Jewish Humor, If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews, and Jews and Power. In 2007, she was awarded the National Medal for the Humanities, and in 2004, an Honorary Degree by Yeshiva University.

Ofer Dynes is Leonard Kaye Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in Jewish Studies at Harvard University (September 2016) and held a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University (2016-2018). Before coming to Columbia, he was an Assistant Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he taught classes in eastern European Jewish literature and history and served as the head of the Program in Yiddish Studies. Dynes specializes in the literature and cultural history of Eastern European Jewry from the 18th to 21st centuries. He has a particular interest in the nexus of literature and political thought. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled The Fiction of the State: The Polish Partitions and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature (1772–1848). He has also recently co-edited a special volume of Prooftexts, entitled The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Literature in Europe,with Naomi Seidman (University of Toronto). Dynes is a co-founder and organizer of the Hebrew Lab Faculty Seminar, a New-York based workgroup for scholars in Hebrew Literature.

Curt Leviant has translated six collections of Sholom Aleichem’s works. Among his fifteen volumes of translations from Yiddish are novels by Chaim Grade, a memoir by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and collections of stories by Avraham Reisen and Lamed Shapiro. Some of Leviant’s 12 novels have been published in nine European languages, in Israel, and in South America. His novel, Diary of an Adulterous Woman, was an international best seller and was cited in France in 2008 as one of the “Seven Best Novels of the Year.” His most recent novels are the critically acclaimed King of Yiddishand Kafka’s Son, and Me, Mo, Mu, Ma & Mod. For his work with Yiddish and Hebrew literature, he has won several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Justin Cammy is professor of Jewish Studies and World Literatures at Smith College. An alum of YIVO's Uriel Weinreich Yiddish Summer Program and a past recipient of YIVO's Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar fellowship, he also serves as on-site summer director of the Naomi Prawer Kadar International Yiddish Summer Program at Tel Aviv University. Cammy is a leading expert on the interwar Yiddish literary group Young Vilna. His translation of Abraham Sutzkever's From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg (McGill-Queen's) won the 2022 Leviant Prize in Yiddish Studies from the Modern Language Association.