My Mother's Sabbath Days
by Chaim Grade
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Description
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 show more 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. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
rated this as high as i did becaue i learned so much about the life of grade and those of his communities during world war II. ipad book that was confusing because he travelled so many places during this time, and of course the past never left him. even though he disappointed his mother by not becoming a Torah scholar, the commandments of Judaism were not far from his thoughts. he cared deeply for both his wife and his mother who perished in the holocaust. i did not rate it higher because i felt there were many people he unfairly denigrated.
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Author Information
23+ Works 681 Members
Grade was born in Vilna, Poland, where he received a thorough education in the talmudic academies of the region. He began writing poetry in 1932 and soon won literary recognition. He escaped the Nazi onslaught as a refugee in the Soviet Union, only to return to Poland after the war to find his mother and wife killed and his hometown destroyed. His show more later work, both poetry and prose, reflect the tragic Holocaust theme and is dedicated to the re-creation of a world that is no more. His characters are deeply rooted in Jewish tradition and the lore of his native land; his poetry is forceful and dramatic, with the pathos of national and personal tragedy. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Some Editions
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- My Mother's Sabbath Days
- Original publication date
- 1955
Classifications
- Genres
- Biography & Memoir, Fiction and Literature
- DDC/MDS
- 839.0933 — Literature & rhetoric German & related literatures Other Germanic literatures - Yiddish Fiction 1860-
- LCC
- PJ5129 .G68 .Z46613 — Language and Literature Oriental languages and literatures Oriental philology and literature Hebrew Other languages used by Jews Yiddish
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 121
- Popularity
- 268,140
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.25)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 4
- ASINs
- 3
