PURELY COMMENTARY Self-Betrayal Continued from Page 2 over Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem but they could not win control of all the land. Israel lived within the borders of the armistice of 1948. But Arab terrorists, fedayeen, continued to harass it. I was on sabbatical in 1955-56. I came to Israel to help in the founding of Bar-Ilan University. I well remember the murderous incursions of the fedayeen at that time. The Sinai Campaign of 1956 gave Israel a breathing spell. During the two decades from 1948 to 1967, it in- tegrated over a million Jews from Europe's camps, Arab mellahs, as well as Zionist idealists who streamed from all continents. In 1967 Israel again found itself in mortal danger from Arab lands. In the Six-Day War it emerged alive after defeating Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian and Iraqi armies. It again survived after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when it was surprised and attacked by Egypt and Syria. It will survive the present unrest as well. But it is not easy to put up with the condemna- tion of so many nations whose national interest requires that they do not antagonize the 21 Arab states and the hundreds of millions of Moslems that range from the Pillars of Hercules to Paldstain and Indonesia, no matter how just the cause of lit- tle Israel. Meanwhile, the Arab in- habitants west of the Jordan have profited from the Zionist example of establishing a viable Jewish state. The Palestine refugees, referred to in the UN Resolution 242, have become a Palestinian national entity. They no longer want to be a pawn in the political play of other Arab nations. They want to govern themselves as an independent nation. We Jews understand their yearning and have offered again and again to negotiate with them for a solution of the problem of two people on the same territory, both of whom have a right to it. The problem is not between right and wrong but between right and right. It is at present insoluble because the PLO which claims to be spokesman for the Arabs has covenanted Palestinian sovereignty over all of the land and the re-exile of its Jews .. . This is a long excerpt from a very important outpouring of a deeply- sentimental statement to a friend who needed understanding and considera- tion of a tragedy that must not be con- tinually imposed on our people. It is a valuable plea for fairness to a people in distress. Jointly with it, the declaration by Isaiah 2,700 years ago is a compelling admonition to those who were address- ed by the Prophet as erring sons who 40 FRIDAY MARCH.18, 1988 betrayed their people. From Jerusalem to Detroit, deep sadness reverberates over the very sad occurrences in Israel. Violence compels self-protection, with the young Israeli soldiers reflect- ing defensively the rocks thrown at them. The media lent sensation to every negative aspect of a tragic confronta- tion. Now there are rebukes of Israel, portraying it viciously. Deplorably, Jews are among their fellow Jews' severest critics. It is so urgent that Jews should defend Jews and their communities. This is where Isaiah comes in, with his lamentation over betrayals. This is the appreciation of the value of a message just quoted from Prof. Sol Liptzin. Jewry and Israel are indebeted to Dr. Llptzin for it. Paperback Classics Increase Interest In Yiddish books F or more than 20 years prior to his death in 1982, Chaim Grade was regarded as the mentor of Yid- dish writers and as the virtual inspirer of the literary Yiddish classicists of his time. Many viewed him as the author who especially earned the right to the Nobel Prize in Literature. This was em- phasized when, in 1983, he was selected posthumously for the Pulitzer Prize. With the republication by Schocken-Pantheon of Rabbis and Wives and My Mother's Sabbath Days as paperbacks, renewed attention is given to the Grade classics. Originally published by Knopf, the paperbacked books are reminders that Grade, in his lifetime, already was admired by the chief Knopf editors. Publication of Grade's works in the English translations calls attention also to the identification with them of his widow, Inna Hecker Grade. She shared as translator of Rabbis and Wives with Harold Rabinowitz, and with Channa Kleinerman Goldstein in My Mother's Sabbath Days. The interest shown in the Grade works by Ashbel Green and Melvin Rosenthal, Knopf editors, is exemplary. Compelling interest is created in these republished works in the com- munities that have vanished, in the rab- bis and the faith they inspired under difficult conditions, in the adherence to legacies that have made the shtetel a home in which to continue the tradi- tions that were treasures. An understanding of them is a necessity when searching for explanations of what had occurred in the intervening years and the tragedies that are record- ed in Grade's My Mother's Sabbath Days. The portrayals of family life of East European communities now extinct become vital as studies of Jewish ex- periences of the early decades of this century. These are the emphases in Rabbis and Wives which deals with life in the Lithuanian community that has Chaim Grade is shown here after World War II witnessing the devastation in the Vilna historic synagogue as he described it in "My Mother's Sabbath Days: A Memoir." vanished as a victim of Nazism. My Mother's Sabbath Days is a memorial to Vilna. the reminders are of the devastation of the city that was famous as the "Jerusalem of Lithuania." This volume revives the memory of Grade's mother who represented the inspiration that was provided for scholars in the years when learning was a guideline and duty for the Jews in the shtetel. The horror experienced by Grade when he returned to Vilan after the war, the humiliating experiences at witnessing the destruction in the synagogue and environs, is among the memorable documents in Holocaust literature. At the same time, the tribute to scholars and scholarship lends historic and cultural significance to this novel. Novels, stories with reminiscenes, have much value in the Holocaust library. Grade's latter work is more than a novel. It is a lamentation akin to the scriptural dirge. It is an indict- ment of the cruelties that have be- smirched the sanctities of Jewish life. It is the heartbreaking tale of the worst in Nazism and its brutalities in the defilement of the Vilna synagogue. The extensive tribute to My Mother's Sabbath Days was expressed in these columns when the great novel was reviewed upon its appearance in English translation in the Dec. 19, 1986 Jewish News. The paperbacking of Chaim Grade works add appreciation to the role shared in them by Mrs. Grade in translating his works and in encourag- ing the publishing of them. Herself steeped in scholarship, a linguist who has mastered French and English as well as Yiddish the Slavic langauges, she has earned gratitudes for her efforts to assure that the scholarly works of her late husband, Chaim Grade, should re- main among the classics in world literature.