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PURELY COMMENTARY

Chaim Grade Bequeaths

Continued from Page 2

well enough himself to undertake that
task.
It remained for the widow to pursue
that effort and she has herself added
immensely toward discussions involving
translations. Therefore two of her items
merit consideration: the review treat-
ment of the Grade novel. One is the
eight-page foreward to the novel. The
other is a three-page article "Chaim
Grade: Reminiscences" in the October
1986 Midstream magazine.
On several scores, Inna Grade re-
nders valuable services. With dignity she
pays tribute to her husband Chaim's
first wife Frumme Liebe, who perished
with her mother-in-law, who were left
behind when Chaim escaped the Nazi
terror sectors, believing the Nazis
wanted only the males and would spare
the women and children. It was part of
his tragedy.
He lived under communism until
after the war. In her forward, Inna
Grade provides a brilliant analysis of her
husband in the horrible period when ex-
periences among the Russians were as
degrading as they were depressing and
horrifying.
Piety is a central theme in the de-
lineation of the remarkable mother
character in the immense Grade
memoirs. Those who have been toying
with the Jewish mama theme in novels
in which the Jewish matriarch did not
fare well will benefit from the Grade
portrayal.
Here, mother emerges as the great
lady who, to support her family, rises to
great heights in her devotion, in creating
a Jewish home rooted in tradition, all

Psalms

Continued from Page 2

Detroit Mayor Coleman Young earns
an added note of appreciation for having
assigned our mutual friend Leonard Si-
mons to present a special dedicatory
proclamation to me. That's a dual cheer
from important greeters.
The scholarships to several causes,
the gifts to all Zionist and communal
causes, including Jewish National Fund
and the Jewish Association For Retarded
Citizens, the cheerful messages — all in-
spire understandable appreciation.
To the rabbis of our community — a
collective todah.
It's a pity that some of the messages,
from Israel's universities and national as
well as local agencies and leaders can
not be quoted and need to be limited to
collective reference.
The messages of cheer are multiply-
ing, and in the course of it one of the
most recent arrivals here for a rabbinic
post, Rabbi Norman Roman, added to the
involvement with Psalms, the Hymns of
Mankind and the personalized psalm, his
reference to Psalm 90. He expressed
satisfaction with The Jewish News Page
Two and drew for praise upon Psalm 90
as appropriate for the Natal Day.
I have often utilized the famous
phrase in Psalm 90, ki eleph shanim
b'einakho k'yom ethmol — for a thousand
years in Thy sight are like yesterday.
Therefore the application of it as a Per-
sonalized Psalm may find approval, as is
stated in Psalm 90.
Such is the elegiac of a "thousand
years ... in Thy sight," formulating the
work of our hands" in all generations.
The gratitude that accompanies these
assembled Thank Yous is approached
humbly. May they be accepted in that
spirit.

based on knowledge and study.
Those who would generalize, con-
tending that Jewish women did not
undergo Jewish training and therefore
were damned among the uneducated,
will find in Grade's tribute the woman
who learned what she was observing.
It is all, in the Grade story, that was
inherent in the rabbinic surroundings as
backgrounds in the noted author's Sab-
bath days in his mother's home.
Forced to sell apples on the Sabbath
and Holy Days to avoid penury, Mother
was the Zogerke who read the Tehinot
and Bible stories for the women who
craved for a spiritual voice as compensa-
tion for their own inabilities to read for
themselves.
Was Chaim Grade so naive when he
left his mother and wife in his confi-
dence that women would not be tortured
by the Nazis? On this score as well as
the Russian aspect, Inna Grade had a
revealing comment in her Forward. Inna
writes about Chaim, his first wife and
his mother Vella, offering the following
deeply-moving explanation:
During the year that followed
under the Soviets, Frumme-Liebe
and Chaim Grade lived in con-
stant expectation of arrest, be-
cause of her "clerical-Zionist"
connections and his various sins
in the Party's eyes. And then
came the beginning of what was
to become his ultimate tragedy —
June 22, 1941, the day of the
German invasion of Russia.
It was the prevailing belief in
the recently annexed Soviet ter-
ritories that the Germans posed a
danger chiefly to able-bodied
men, whom they would round up
for hard labor, but that they
would not harm older men or
women and children. Sharing
this belief, Chaim Grade and
Frumme-Liebe fled on foot. Soon
rumors spread of the Germans'
rapid advance, and to many it
seemed more perilous to be over-
taken by the Nazis than to re-
main and be found in one's own
city. Grade insisted that
Frumme-Liebe return to Vilna —
a decision he later considered the
most fateful of his life. He was
certainly not the only one to
allow himself to be deceived re-
garding the Nazis' intentions.
Even a person as well inforced,
as sophisticated in political mat-
ters as Zivia Lubetkin, one of the
leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto up-
rising, wrote in her memoir, In
the Days of Destruction and Re-
volt":
"During the initial years of
the war, when we were still un-
aware of the master plan to mur-
der the entire Jewish population,
there seemed to be a blossoming
of social and cultural life within
the Ghetto ..."
Such widespread unaware-
ness existed in the face of Hitler's
explicit statements of his plans in
"Mein Kampf" and his radio
broadcasts. People heard these
statements, heard them re-
peatedly, but could not bring
themselves to believe them.
A professor at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, Dr.
Yehiel Szeintuch, once asked a
Yiddish writer who had fled Po-
land for America on the eve of
World War II, what had made
him flee. The writer replied that
he believed every word of the Ger-
man Fuhrer, he beleived that he

Chaim Grade and Inna Hecker Grade.

would carry out his every threat.
But Chaim Grade, like his
friend Zivia Lubetkin, did not be-
lieve it. Even after the Holocaust,
standing on the ruins of the Vilna
Ghetto, he cried out his refusal to
accept that what had happened
could ever happen. To believe in
the possibility of evil, he felt, one
must carry within oneself a germ
of evil. The greatest problem of
his life was that he did not know
how to deal with evil — or, at
least, not with the kind repre-
sented by the Nazis. His rabbini-
cal background had prepared
him to be wary of the masked
Soviet evil, but it left .him help-
less in the face of the unmasked
Nazi evil. He knew that to protect
himself against the Soviet evil, he
had to be able to see through it.
But what to do about evil un-
masked, or rather self-
unmasking? The truth seemed
too monstrous to be true.
When Chaim Grade said
good-bye to Frumme-Liebe in the
village of Rukon, he had no way
of knowing it was a final parting.
A man from Vilna wrote me that
people were convinced the Ger-
mans would be defeated within a
week or two, so they fled with
their apartment keys in their
pockets. It was only after Grade
crossed the old Polish-Soviet
border on a military truck, ap-
parently filled with deserters,
found himself in Russia proper,
and saw the horrendous devasta-
tion caused by just two days of
war — only then did he realize
that he had left his mother and
Frumme-Liebe forever.
Tragedies and disillusionments
marked the Grade agonies in Russia.
This, too, is movingly attested to in Inna
Grade's evaluation of her husband's ex-
periences. As she evaluates it:
This experience marked for

him the end of the old way of life,
the end of the world into which
he was born, and his entrance
into the world of the unknown in
the vastness of Russia. "My
Mother's Sabbath Days" offers a
detailed decription of Grade's
flight into Russia, on foot and on
various transport trains. The
readers will meet countless shar-
ply etched characters, will viv-
idly share Soviet experiences,
will taste the Soviet reality as the
train progresses deeper and de-
eper into the country.
Of these encounters, two are
especially memorable. One is
with the tragically disillusioned
Jewish Communist Lev Kogan.
Kogan, a local Party secretary in
the Ukraine, had truly believed
that Communism would do away
with international hatred and es-
tablish a worldwide brotherhood
of peoples. To men like him,
Communism had appeared to be
the solution to all problems, and
this in their eyes justified its
cruelty. The beginning of his un-
doing comes with the Hitler-
Stalin Pact. Before then his wife,
like the rest of the Soviet popula-
tion, had been exposed to con-
tinuous anti-Nazi propaganda,
which she believed. But the
agreement with Hitler had shat-
tered her faith, and she con-
cluded that the anti-Nazi attacks
must have been a sham. She had
refused to leave with her hus-
band for the safer eastern
regions, convinced that the Ger-
mans would not wage war on
women and children. As Lev Ko-
gan's train moves further and
further into eastern Russia, he
realizes he has left his wife and
children to face certain death.
Also, it becomes clear to him that
the war slogan is not "for the
Communist World Proletariat,"

