"DEAD BLOSSOMS"

LAND, LANGUAGE & MEMORY IN CHAIM GRADE'S

RECONSTRUCTION OF JEWISH VILNA

by

Blake A. Jordan

A thesis submitted to

Sonoma State University

In partial fulfillment ofthe requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

in

English

r. Ann E. Goldman

Dr. Catherine Kroll

Date

i Copyright 2011 By Blake A. Jordan

11 AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION OF MASTER'S THESIS

I grant pennission for the reproduction ofparts ofthis thesis project without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorb the cost and provide proper acknowledgment of authorship.

DATE: __fd_!" ~'~J ~-~I~I___ Signature

Street Address

City, State, Zip

iii "DEAD BLOSSOMS" LAND, LANGUAGE & MEMORY IN CHAIM GRADE'S RECONSTRUCTION OF JEWISH VILNA

Thesis by Blake A. Jordan

ABSTRACT

This thesis explores two ways that Lithuanian-born Yiddish writer Chaim Grade (1910­ 1982) deconstructs Jewish history and tradition in order to restore a sense ofpermanence and center to a community that was destroyed during the Holocaust. The:first way he accomplishes this is through the rich texturing ofland and the natural environment in his narratives. While the relationship between Jews and land throughout the centuries has been a fractured one, Grade's points to their coexistence, both on a historical and spiritual leveL In essence, Grade shows that the natural world should not be subordinated to the world ofrabbinic study. Additionally, the parallelism found in Grade's writing between nature and women, as well as his featuring of numerous female protagonists, demonstrates the need for women, as well as nature, to achieve equality within the patriarchal tradition ofJewish culture. The second way that Grade invests Jewish Vilna with a sense of permanence is by its reconstruction through the material power of memory and language. Moreover, his decision to write exclusively in Yiddish, in a style reminiscent. of social realism brings his readers closer to the culture he desires to keep alive. Additionally, Grade's choice, save for his memoirs, to write only about his native Vilna and environs as they were before the Shoah, sidesteps the recent tendency of Holocaust writing to dwell in genocide to the point ofdesensitization. Instead, his intimate portraits ofthe community in between the two world wars allow his readers to appreciate what Eastern European Jewish life was like before it was destroyed. Finally, the social equality evoked by Grade's writing about the natural world, along with the unavoidable fact that Grade's world no longer exists, allow for the re-imagining ofa Jewish homeland that does not negatively affect the rights and land ofothers, thereby avoiding the perpetual cycle ofpolitical and cultural violence that has come to characterize the Zionist project.

Chair:

MA Program: Englisli Sonoma State University Date: o/,.e/H

iv ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to express my appreciation to the following professors for their immeasurable talents and unflagging commitment to their students. You have helped me acquire the confidence and skills to achieve success here at SSU and to stand me in good stead for my upcoming academic adventure on the other coast:

To Anne Goldman, I thank you for your peerless ability to understand just what I want to say, even if I don't know it yet myself. Your tough love and sound, straightforward advice has guided me through this project's many stages and helped me produce a thesis that I am proud of.

To Cathy Kroll, I thank you for your wisdom and support both as professor and as teaching mentor. I will continue to be inspired by your egalitarianism and indefatigable work (and play!) ethic.

To Chingling Wo, I thank you for pointing me in new directions and helping me to see the "problem" in everything. I will miss our weeknight dinners and conversation.

To Bob Coleman, I thank you for your smile, your sneer, and for motivating me to be my authentic self. May we meet again someday in the Land of Happy Readers.

Most importantly, I thank all four of you for introducing me to some damn fme books.

v DEDICATION

For Samantha, who set me on this path ...

& for Christy, who helped me complete the journey ...

VI TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 A Jewish "Inhabitancy": Deconstructing the Sacred and the Profane 10

Chapter 2 Towards a Reconstruction of"Center": Rebuilding Community with the Materials OfMemory and Language 45

Epilogue Grade's "Diasporic Consciousness" 69

Works Cited 75

Vll 1

Introduction

When I was introduced to the work ofLithuanian-born writer Chaim Grade

(1910-1982), I had just gotten married to Samantha, a Jewish woman whose strong connection to the left-leaning, Yiddish-speaking, secular Jewish tradition became a vicarious source of pride for me. Our move to Cotati, California, the town in which her great-aunt and great-uncle spent time amongst the Socialist chicken ranchers in Petaluma, only highlighted the distance I had from my own maternal history, partly due to my grandfather'S (and his parents') deliberate severance of old world ties, as well as the unfortunate and irrevocable fact that I had never thought to ask either ofmy mother's parents where they came from while they were still alive.

Therefore, there was a confluence of two events that made me particularly receptive to the work ofChaim Grade, whose longer fictional works reimagine, in minute detail, the people and places of Eastern European Jewry. First, I had developed an interest in the politics and literature of human-land relationships, particularly those developed in communities no longer extant (e.g., Native American, pre-imperial Britain).

At the same time, I was realizing that my own roots, my own ties to family, land, and space, were fated to remain a mystery. Getting to know Samantha's family, observing

Jewish-isms that had only infrequently been invoked by my grandmother-and which had all but disappeared since her death-spurred the desire in me to rediscover, or re­ imagine, if you will, where my origins really lay.

In a sense, Grade's work, a unique blend of social realism, lyrical poetry and compendium of Jewish custom, has provided me with an imaginary ancestral homeland, a touchstone for what quite possibly may have been my great-great-grandparents' way of 2 life. Where I once had no picture ofwhat Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement was like, suddenly, in passages like this, I was given a remarkably clear picture ofits quotidian existence, framed in a dialectical juxtaposition ofthe sacred and the profane:

In the hallway ofthe synagogue a porter stood praying every morning in a threadbare coat with patched elbows and a rope around his waist. From his pious face with its pitch-black beard looked out a pair ofbig, lusterless eyes filled with the fear and humility ofone who felt he was only a guest in this world. The porter held a tattered prayer book in his hands as he listened through the open doors to the services going on inside the beth midrash. Each time the Porush [Rabbi Weintraub, a Talmudic scholar] passed the porter on his way into the beth midrash, a sickening odor hit him in the nose: the reek ofrotten sauerkraut and the salty stench of empty herring barrels left out uncleaned to dry in the sun. Rabbi Y oel Weintraub once asked the porter why he prayed in the hallway and not inside. "The people tell me they can't stand being next to me," the porter answered, and from his eyes shone the damp darkness of the cellars where he handled pots ofkraut, and all but immersed himself in the brine of the herring barrels ("Laybe-Layzar's Courtyard" 135).

Standing in the hallway ofthe synagogue, the porter is kept by his odor from entering the place of worship. The passage thus implicitly references the stratification ofthe participants ofJewish worship, where one's wealth and one's sex determines where one sits. In addition, the porter's exaggerated connection to the material world of olfactorily­ offensive victuals permeates his most sincere effort to be a part of the spiritual world of his neighbors.

On the heels ofa passage which invokes the profane, the reader is given a picture ofthe sacred, written by someone who spent a portion of his childhood as a Yeshiva student, and therefore knows the minutiae of this world quite well:

The worshippers did not notice [the porter] slip in because at that moment they were engrossed with eyes shut in the heartfelt recitation of the Shema, "Hear, 0 Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is One." Reb Heskiah, the locksmith, enunciated each word with greater care than the rest. All the worshippers accentuated and prolonged the "EHAD!"­ "One"-but Reb Heskiah rose above the rest with a stubborn, chilling 3

exultation [ ...] Reb Heskiah struggled to clearly pronounce "Veshinantom"-"thou shalt teach them." He was dissatisfied with his "sh," it sounded more like an "s." And when he reached "Vedibarto Bom"-"and thou shlat speak of them"-he did not like his pronunciation of the "m." Reb Heskiah paused a moment and mentally leafed through the Code for a ruling on what was to be done. He repeated the phrase "Vedibarto Born" so many times that he began to sound like a bell pealing: "Born! Born! Born!" (136).

On one hand, it could be said that whereas in the first passage, we see a portrait of humility, in this second passage, we see hypocrisy and excessive pride. Reb Heskiah, if he wasn't so concerned with his own vocalization ofprayer, would probably be one of the folks who desired to keep the porter out. Yet, in my reading, Grade is not celebrating the porter while critiquing the locksmith. Rather, he is presenting two individuals who are participants in a larger social and cultural tradition. Whether full of ego or deprived of one, these characters just "are," and Grade shows that there is a place for both of them.

Ifthere is one human failing that Grade shows here, it is the pronounced individualism and segregation that is enacted between members of society. The worshippers not only

"[ do] not notice" the porter, but also ironically and demonstratively recite in unison,

"One," while the porter remains outside, thereby demonstrating the lack of community manifested even in the most ostensibly tight-knit ofcollectives-the Jewish ghetto. In hindsight, then, perhaps Grade is arguing that despite the rich, centuries-old cultural traditions of Eastern European Jewry, it was the lack of a common grounding in their daily lives which denied Jews a position of strength in the face of violence throughout the ages.

Grade's biography points to his own unwitting participation in this phenomenon.

In 1939, Grade said goodbye to his wife and mother and escaped from his native Vilna just as the Nazis were entering the city. Grade traveled deep into the Soviet Union, 4 where he spent the duration of the war in refugee camps. Like many other Jews in his position, Grade fled because he assumed that the Nazis would only take able-bodied men.

The Nazis were not so discriminating, however, and Grade returned home to find spiderwebs instead of souls. The once flourishing Jewish ghetto of Vi Ina was in ruins- his mother, his wife, his entire community all vanished, all destroyed. In 1948, Grade relocated to New York City, where he devoted his remaining years to the literary recreation, in Yiddish, of his native Virna and environs as it was in the years between the two world wars. While Grade remains well-known amongst Jewish literary scholars, the popularity of his work-perhaps due to its limited dissemination in English translation- has never risen to the level attained by Sholem Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose lively portrayals of the shtetl, or small Eastern European Jewish town, gained them worldwide fame (and Singer the Nobel Prize).

In much of his postwar poetry, Grade writes about the fragile existence of a vibrant Jewish community extinguished by the Holocaust. The poem, "The Miracle," in particular, illustrates Grade's ruminations as he walks the empty alleys which made up the Jewish quarter of the city:

Sometimes I cross a street and ask: Did I just walk over a covered grave? [ ...] Sometimes I stand before my house, forgetting That this is my house, and my heart howls out. Because everything I build is built on a miracle, And may become topsy-turvy in a flick of an eyelash (qtd. in Ross-Daniel 42).

In the wake of the Shoah, the streets of ViIna have become a body-less cemetery, and yet, to Grade, the presence of those who once lived there is mysteriously tangible. On the other hand, the living Grade becomes a stranger in his own home, his own town. By 5 emphasizing the hair's breadth that separates the material and metaphysical, the living and the dead, Grade observes in "The Miracle" that there is no stability in this existence-that human life, community, and even civilization can be upended without wammg.

Grade provides another poignant metaphor for the instability of Jewish life in his memoir, My Mother's Sabbath Days, which begins with a chapter entitled, "The Garden."

While the central figure of the first half of the memoir is Grade's mother, Vella, a fruit and vegetable peddler, the titular garden refers to an effort by the young Grade to plant flowers on the roof of the courtyard where he and his mother live. Fellow peddlers and neighbors react to Grade's project by taunting Vella about her little "gardener," who is not only acting "like a regular peasant" (i.e. Gentile) but also committing sacrilege by watering the plants on the Sabbath, a forbidden act according to Jewish law (6).

Fittingly, then, it is the janitor ofthe courtyard, a Gentile, but also an alcoholic, who helps Grade care for the plants. One drunken evening, in an act that symbolizes the tenuous everyday existence of Jews living amidst Gentiles, the janitor destroys the plants in a fit of rage. Upon finding his planter boxes the next morning, Grade is heartbroken.

He laments: "Ofmy garden not a trace remains. The broken wooden boxes with the crushed plants have been removed, the scattered soil has been swept away" (12).

The story of Grade's garden foreshadows the destruction of Vilna. Its language parallels the eerie efficiency with which Nazis cleaned cities of their Jews, as well as the violence that was perpetrated upon them, body and spirit. The word "scattered" suggests not only the dispersal of Jews throughout the globe, but their inability to come together in a time of crisis. Under such grave conditions, it is no wonder that the young Grade 6 considers it "a matter of life and death that [his] planting succeeds" (7), and that in retrospect, he may be shouldering the responsibility for the safety of his community­ like his plants-by himself. At the same time, Grade is demonstrating how important it was for him to be connected to the natural, as well as the spiritual, world. Throughout his memoir and fictional novels, Grade repeatedly mentions the lack of green in the ghetto versus the lush forest and riparian ecology that surrounds the city. Therefore, it is clear that Grade seeks not only to employ the garden as a metaphor for a people who have disappeared, but also to represent a connection to the land that Jews of the ghetto and the shted were generally prevented from engaging, and which thus becomes its own metaphor for the ultimate lack of grounding and materiality of the Jewish culture caused by the Holocaust.

In a passage that takes place some days after the destruction of the rooftop garden,

Grade deepens the plant metaphor. Young Grade discovers forgotten nasturtiums blossoming beneath his bed, where he had placed them when there was no more room on the roof for planter boxes. Grade's mother attributes the blossoms to a miracle from God:

"Because you didn't water them on the Sabbath, they grew even in the darkness" (15).

The young Grade demurs, noting to himself that despite their blossoms, the nasturtiums are spindly and yellowish-like a Rabbi's beard-not green and vibrant. "But they look dead," he says to his mother (15). These oxymoronic "dead blossoms," as it were, serve as metaphor for the Jewish people of Vilna in crisis, in a place where, to paraphrase one of Grade's stories, nothing green can grow.

In her preface to Sabbath Days, Grade's wife Inna Hecker Grade puts this contradiction into historical perspective with a quote from the book In the Days of 7

Destruction and Revolt, written by Zivia Lubetkin: "During the initial years of the war, when we were still unaware of the master plan to murder the entire Jewish population, there seemed to be a blossoming of social and cultural life within the Ghetto" (xi).

Indeed, during the 1930s, Vilna was a flourishing Jewish community with dual notability.

Dubbed "the Jerusalem of Lithuania" because of its importance as a center of Jewish faith and study, it was also a vibrant cultural center that the poetry movement "Yung Vilne"­

The Young of ViIna-which included Grade, called home. From the distance of his memoirs, Grade acknowledges the Vilna Jews as moribund, while at the same time they retain figurative blossoms which indicate the capacity of their faith and culture to endure.

The juxtaposition of streets and graves, buildings and eyelashes, blossoms and decay points to an existential tension that saturates Grade's work. On one hand, Grade writes about a community ofJews who, as part ofthe larger global community of Jews, have for centuries been defined by their exilic existence. The Vilna Jews, in particular, having been removed and exterminated by the Nazis, would seemingly exemplify the impermanent nature of the Jewish people and their culture. Furthermore, their cultural history, unable to be re-established after its near-annihilation-the language it spoke and the many sects ofJewish faith it nurtured-has inevitably begun to fade from memory, due to a combination of immigration, assimilation, and the passage of time. And yet, this is not the illustration of the community Grade paints for his readers in the work that follows the publication ofhis memoirs. Instead, through fictional narratives which take interwar Vilna as their setting, Grade meticulously reconstructs the memory of his community, imbuing it with a sense not ofits ephemerality but ofits permanency, thus enabling it to keep blooming even in the darkness. 8

This thesis contains two chapters, both of which use Grade's texts in order to deconstruct stereotypical notions of the connection between Jews and the places they inhabit. Chapter One explores the ways in which Grade writes about land and the natural environment around him. Because the Jewish experience is one of exile, and because

Jews are often thought of as city dwellers, the notion ofJews writing about nature or land may strike some readers as unconventional or even odd. However, this chapter will show that Grade's writing demonstrates how the land itself is as meaningful a space for Jews as the socially constructed and sanctioned spaces ofthe Jewish faith, and thus exhibits possibilities for what Robert Marzec calls "inhabitancy": that is, Grade's narratives engage an ontological relationship between Jews and land which belies the stereotypical disconnection between the two, and which shows that the natural, or profane, world is as spiritual of a realm as that of the sacred. Additionally, Grade demonstrates a parallelism existing between humans and nature which allows him to critique how the Jewish laws have placed women, like the natural world, in a subordinate position; therefore, Grade's deconstruction ofJews and land is brought to bear on the relationship between men and women in a patriarchal culture.

Whereas Chapter One looks to the writing ofland as a manifestation of the Jewish desire and capacity for permanence, Chapter Two looks at Grade's metaphysical recovering ofhis community through language and memory. Grade's choice to recreate in minute detail the people and places of his childhood, and to write solely in Yiddish, the language of his community, is unusual amongst writers who have survived the Holocaust, and yet it participates in a long tradition ofusing Yiddish as a reconstructive and redemptive tool for Jewish survivaL In addition, the emphasis that Grade places on 9 language and landscape further allows him to create a sense ofpermanence. Moreover,

Grade's almost single-minded devotion to recreating the Jews ofViIna pre-Shoah stands in opposition to the more recent phenomenon of fixation upon the memory and images of the carnage and catastrophe ofthe Holocaust. Therefore, I will show how Grade's work allows us to deconstruct the Holocaust by decentralizing what have become its standard ways ofrepresentation. In this way Grade's writing bypasses the unavoidable political agenda of Holocaust remembrance by privileging the stories ofthe destroyed rather than the story oftheir destruction.

Finally, through the perpetual juxtaposition of the permanent and impermanent nature ofJewish existence, Grade's fiction exhibits what Jewish scholars Jonathan and

Daniel Boyarin call "diasporic consciousness," the aspiration for a people to be able to connect to land and place without infringing on the rights of others to that land and place.

By pointing to possibilities for a Jewish "homeland" which transcends the Zionist project, Grade's writing allows his readers to experience what might otherwise be considered impossible--the ability to possess a sense of inhabitancy while remaining anti-territorial. 10

Chapter 1

A Jewish "Inhabitancy":

Deconstructing the Sacred and the Profane

"But what I want is to work the land, not to be a rabbi" -Gavriel, "The Oath,"

In My Mother's Sabbath Days, the young Grade's flower boxes represent a need for a connection to place and at the same time serve as metaphor for the destruction of place.

Within the context of another time, setting, or cultural milieu, this metaphor may interest readers purely for its poetic sensibility in relating to a tragic event. However, the courtyard's cynical response to the boy's undertaking connotes further historical and cultural significance: it reflects a view of the relationship between Jews and nature which assumes that being close to the land is a privilege, or, alternatively, judging by the derision cast by Grade's neighbors, a menial task, reserved for non-Jews. To a large degree, this phenomenon has transferred to the literary realm, and so Grade's articulation that the young Chaim sees maintaining his plants as a "life and death matter" places him in opposition to this trend. Through a close examination ofthe ways Grade writes about natural world in his novels, this chapter will show that, despite his orthodox background,

Grade sees no barrier existing between nature and spirituality, and therefore is critical of a religion that explicitly distances itself from the natural world.

* * *

The work of Chaim Grade provides a compelling counterpoint to recent ecocritical analysis of the way nature is depicted in Jewish literature. In his oft-cited essay, "No Trees Please, We're Jewish," Andrew Furman declares, "Jewish-American 11

th fiction writers in [the 20 ] century have, by and large, created a literature that either ignores, misrepresents, or, at its most extreme, vilifies the natural world" (Furman 115).

Furman's essay, which remains one of the earliest and only attempts to explore Jewish literature through an ecocriticallens, in part attributes a disconnection between Jews and nature to the tradition ofrationalism (i.e., "text-centeredness") ofthe post-Enlightenment rabbinical tradition (Furman 118). In addition, Furman asserts, because ofthe fractious relationship Jews have had with land, due to the nature of exile as well as laws that prevented Jews from owning land throughout Eastern Europe, something of an antagonistic attitude toward the natural world arose in the European rabbinic world which still find echoes in the modem Jewish-American literary tradition (Furman 119).1

Apparently these echoes reverberate longer and louder than those which stem from the ancient agricultural roots of the Jewish people. Soviet kolkhozes and Israeli kibbutzim notwithstanding, Furman's own article evidences an historical mental block pertaining to the close relationship Jews have had with land. This is despite well-known biblical verse such as the two creation myths found in the book of Genesis, which continue to be invoked both by those who seek to protect the environment and by those who would justify its plunder. In the first myth, God gives man "dominion" over the earth-that is, the plant and animal kingdoms exist for humans to use however they see fit (Gen. 1.26); in the second myth, man is entrusted with the obligation ofbeing

"steward" of the earth-in this scenario, the natural world is there to be tended, not there for the taking (Gen. 2.15). Complicating these are the two myths ofthe creation of

I "Recent" Jewish cultural history belies this claim. Aurora Levins Morales writes, regarding Jewish agricultural ventures of the 19th and 20 th century, "to have land, to farm became one of the most emotionally powerful images of Jewish freedom" (37). Therefore, Grade's plants are, in Morales' words, a "symbol of resistance" (37) that represents the endurance of the Jewish people in face of violence and persecution. 12 humans, also found in the book ofGenesis. One, which precedes the claim to dominion, says that humans were created in God's image (Gen.l.27); the other states that humans were "'formed out of the earth' to which they return at death" (Tirosh-Samuelson 378,

Gen 2.7). These two myths demonstrate that humans' moral obligation to the earth stems not only from the way they interact with it, but whether they-body as well as soul-are considered to be a part of the earth. Nevertheless, these passages are but one biblical treatment ofnature. Literary scholar Betty S. Hilbert points out that the book of

Deuteronomy is "suffused with the theme of connection to the landscape" and thereby illustrates that humans possess "intricate connections to the earth and to one another"

(Hilbert 29). This latter element is of central importance to my reading of Grade, as it establishes that human-human relationships-between men and women, and between rabbis and laypeople-are mirrored in human-nature relationships?

Grade's attempt to reconcile the natural world with the Jewish faith predates recent discussions ofJews and environmentalism by quite a few years. Settling the questions that arise due to the disconnection between Jews and land-within and beyond the literary realm-has regained importance in the modem era of environmental crisis.

Indeed, scholars such as Jeremy Benstein, and Lynn White before him,3 argue that the

2 This is echoed in the historical connection between feminism and environmentalism. Carey Glass Morris writes, "Ecofeminists argue that it is no accident that so many women are prominent as environmental activists. They see the women's movement and the ecological movement as intimately connected, because historically the Westem world view has involved the domination ofwomen and the domination ofthe environment in a similar way" (74). Yet, in spite of the historical nature ofjust this kind ofpractice, Jewish scholar and eco-feminist Hava Tirosh­ Samuelson argues that the Jewish faith is compatible with a social justice model ofecology based on biblical teachings that allows for a relationship between humans and land that profits all humans, as well as the land itself (Tirosh-Samuelson 382). This will prove especially relevant in my discussion of the connection between nature and women in Grade's work, which I see as echoing this claim.

3 See Lynn White's article, "The Historical Roots ofOur Ecologic Crisis," ref. in Hilbert 30. 13

"desacralization" ofnature in monotheistic religions that has taken place since ancient times is in part responsible for humanity's present environmental predicament (Benstein

147). Recent scholarship on the fabled opposition between Jews and nature tends to center around-or at least mention-a passage from the Mishnah, which, as part ofthe

Talmud, the central text ofrabbinical Judaism, consists mainly of scholars' opinions on

Jewish law.4 The passage, depending on the translation, which is not a given in a tradition based on interpretation of ancient texts, goes something as follows: "Rabbi

Ya'akov says: One, who while walking along the way, reviewing his studies, breaks off from his study and says, 'How beautiful is that tree! How beautiful is that plowed field!'

Scripture regards him as ifhe has forfeited his soul" (qtd. in Benstein 147). While there is no one set interpretation ofthe passage's meaning, the general consensus seems to be that the rabbinic tradition has centered itself so much around the culture of study and the book, that any mental energy spent toward the outside world is perceived as time kept from honoring God through further study. Nevertheless, for modem Jews concerned with environmental stewardship and rescue, it has become incumbent upon scholars to reckon with passages such as these, which hint at more than a passive lack of interest toward the natural world.

The widespread acknowledgement and affirmation of the Mishnah verse suggest that, to a certain degree, the rabbinic texts, largely written in the medieval era ofJewish urbanization, and which continue to be the basis for orthodoxy today, have eclipsed the ancient-pagan and biblical-agrarian roots ofthe Jewish people. Moreover, the relationship between humans and nature has been cast as the conflict between monotheism versus paganism, where the "celebration" or "worship" ofnature rather than

4 Tirosh-Samuelson, Benstein, and Vogel each reference the Mishnah verse. 14 specifically God himself is akin to paganism, which represents a dangerous potential threat to the primacy of Jewish law (Furman 120). Perhaps ironically, in this scenario, even Zionism was long frowned upon in certain orthodox quarters for its "back to the land" philosophy (Benstein 159). It is therefore not surprising that, as Furman's argument shows, the Jewish-American literary tradition has tended to overlook the close ties Jews have had to the American frontier and farmland, not to mention their interaction with land in the old country. 5

An ecocritical analysis of the way Jewish-American literature largely ignores ancient and modem connections between Jews and nature is further refracted by the assimilation of Jews into American culture. Furman's essay, which focuses on a literary tradition fueled by mass migration to the slums of the Lower East Side, followed by the suburbanization and bourgeoisification of assimilated Jews in the second half of the 20th century; therefore, Grade, as a Yiddish-speaking emigre, becomes a unique link between

"shtetl-based,,6 authors of the old country, like Sholem Aleichem, and the second- and third-generation, post-WWII Jewish writers like Philip Roth, the latter of whom typifies

5 As second generation Jewish-American Ellen Rifkin has written, "I was also never encouraged, then, to picture the landscape or other aspects of the physical environment in Eastern Europe. The hills that surrounded Polish shtetlekh (towns), the streams that ran through Russian derfer (villages), and the parks and rivers flowing beyond crowded neighborhoods in Vilna or Warsaw, had no existence for me, because no one had ever suggested that they were important to Jewish people who made their lives in those very places. If! thought about those taykhn (rivers) or beymer (trees), they were significant only as a backdrop for relentless poverty and persistent faith" (23). When seen in light of the considerable agricultural experience of Jews in America­ as well as old-world ties to field and forest-Rifkin's childhood understanding of Jews and their land seems like cognitive dissonance. While the majority ofJewish immigrants to the United States settled in Manhattan and other urban areas, from the early 1800s to the mid-20th century, over 100,000 American Jews participated in agronomic enterprise, on over 1,000,000 acres of land (Weintraub 18). This is in addition to farms set up in Soviet Russia after the revolution, as well as those set up by Jews who immigrated to places as divergent as Israel, Eastern Africa, and South America. However, Weintraub's comprehensive bibliography ensures that the Jewish agricultural experience is destined to remain more than a mere footnote in American history. 6 This refers to the small-town Jewish life exemplified in cultural iconography like Fiddler on the Roofand The Fixer. 15 the city-dwelling or suburban Jewish-American author. Because of the strong urban tradition of these latter -day J ewish-American writers, a critique of the separation between

7 Jews and land is not generally within their purview • Therefore, rather than trying to explain why Jews and land don't mix-in order to advocate for the latter-through a purely ecocriticallens, the recent mixing ofthe schools ofpostcolonial studies with ecocriticism becomes a useful tool to examine the work of Chaim Grade, as "postcolonial ecocriticism" seeks to look at the relationship between humans and land in a much more mutual sense.8

Analysis of Grade's work through the lens of postcolonial ecocriticism may also indicate that it belongs in a different category than that of the stereotypical late-20th century Jewish-American writer. Due to Grade's status as exile and emigre, as well as a marginalized cultural figure-he continued to write solely in Yiddish decades after its core speakers were wiped out-Grade emerges as a Jewish-American literary figure who can be read in light of Ursula D. Heise's admonition that ecocriticism's traditional bent towards "localism" is ofneed of expansion, in order to take into account the burgeoning fields of transnational and globalization studies (Heise 383). Admittedly, the majority of

7 Notable exceptions are Socialist writers/auteurs such as Arthur Miller, in Death ofa Salesman, Jules Dassin, in Thieves' Highway, and especially I. B. Schwartz, in Kentucky, an epic poem about Jewish immigrant farming in America. More common is the ambivalent, even "condescending" (Dubrovsky 18) attitude of writers like Abraham Cahan, who came to America to be part of a New Jersey agricultural colony, but found that he preferred city life; his ambivalent take on Jews and land can be found in his autobiography and the short story "Tzinchadzi ofthe Catskills," the latter of which contains the line, "I was gazing at the mountain slopes across the ear-shaped valley, unable to decide whether they were extremely picturesque or extremely commonplace" (221). 8 Unlike some ecocriticism, postcolonial ecocriticism, according to Cara Cilano and Elizabeth de Loughrey, refrains from dwelling in the "ideologies of purity", i.e. the deep ecology movement (84); it furthermore resists the reification of nature in such activities as birding-a hobby that Furman practices and discusses prominently in his article--which do not denote a mutual relationship between humans and their environment, and may even smack ofbiocolonialism. (Furman 131-132). 16

Grade's work, set in one very specific region of Eastern Europe, is nothing if not the very definition of"localism," ifnot local to New York City, where he lived. Nevertheless, as an exile above and beyond the general diasporan Jew, he may be, in the words of Aihwa

Ong, "vested with the agency formerly sought in the working class and more recently in the subaltern subject [ofpostcolonial studies]" (qtd in Heise 382). In other words, the way Grade writes about Jewishness vis-a.-vis land lends insight into a mindset about the human experience shared by other Jews ofhis generation who were either eliminated or exiled from Eastern Europe by violence, poverty and political turmoil. Furthermore, since there exists very little in the way of a literary tradition with regards to Jews who practiced an agrarian lifestyle, Grade's perspective provides us with a different lens to understand a relationship between humans and land which has dramatically shifted through the ages-by the evolving of religious faith, by war, and in the modem day, by assimilation into an American culture which has distanced itself from the natural spaces ofits own agrarian roots. Lastly, Grade's privileging of female protagonists, traditionally pushed to the boundaries ofJewish faith, can be seen as an externalization of his own alterity within the Jewish-American literary tradition.

Postcolonial ecocriticism brings to literary criticism a new vocabulary for speaking about the relationship between humans and land. Therefore for the purposes of reading this relationship in Grade's texts, I would like to define and characterize Grade's

"natural space," to borrow a phrase from Henri Lefebvre (30), as a space that is often generalized as "nature," but which Grade demonstrates is not separate from the humans who occupy it or cohabitate with it. While natural space may manifest itself and be alluded to in any number of ways in Grade's work (e.g. land, weather phenomena, the 17 cycles ofthe season, non-human animal species), in this chapter, all of these are to be recognized as a space ofwhich humans are a part. To this end, I look to the recent work ofTimothy Morton, who, in Ecology without Nature, has deconstructed the idea of nature, allowing us to see it beyond the human and nature binary, and thus identifying what we typically think of as nature as being a cultural construction.9 Similarly, for a sense ofwhat I mean by terms like "nature," "land," "the natural environment," (which I employ in a relatively synonymous fashion, but for purposes ofnuance), I look again to

Lefebvre's term for the space inhabited by humans in the early days of civilization before the desire to "accumulate" (327) led to the act of"production" ofnew types of space for this purpose. While his "absolute" "natural space" may represent an implausible ideal or a bygone era, his theories of socially constructed "spatial practices" remain relevant to the constructions of space that Grade challenges (33-42). In fact, Lefebvre's critique of the post-structuralists' fetishizing of space by subsuming it into the mental sphere rather than the social sphere, could also be directed toward the rabbis, whose emphasis on monotheism and rationalism strips nature of its connections to everyday life (5).

In general, my intention is to show that Grade's vision of the relationship between humans and land allows for possibilities outside its colonization either by the mind or by might, which necessarily results in a loss of subjectivity of either or both. Robert Marzec, in An Ecological and Postcolonial Study ofLiterature, posits that the roots ofwords such as "cultivation" and "agriculture" conjure an ontology of land that evokes the taming or enculturation ofwildness; since these terms are associated with Britain's enclosure era, this understanding of land goes hand in hand with the subjectivity of the farmer being

9 This can be applied to other binaries that Grade critiques in his work, including gender. 18 given over to a landlord, and later to the colonizer and imperialist. lO Therefore, Marzec suggests the term "inhabitant," whose etymological roots stem from the Latin for "to be," in order to characterize an ontology of land where "the self and the land are not thought ofas unrelated entities. Rather, they can only be considered from their relation to one another: the inhabitant is that person who is constituted by dwelling and having dealings with and cohabitating with a particular people" (Marzec 13). Once again we see the parallel (oflack ofbarrier) of a relationship between humans and nature and between humans and each other. Likewise, the sense of "inhabitancy" in Grade's writing not only stems from the detailed, affectionate pictures he paints of the community in which he was raised, but also in the connections he draws between this community and the land itself. * * *

Ifthe young Chaimke's garden, in My Mother's Sabbath Days, hints at the need to be actualized by connecting to the natural world, Grade addresses the Mishnah passage from the standpoint ofits accompanying cultural ambivalence toward agronomy (the

"cultivated field") more directly in the "The Oath," the third and final story in The Sacred and the Profane. In this novella, a landowner and cultivator has a change of heart on his deathbed, insisting that his children favor spiritual over material pursuits. To this end,

Gavriel, his teenage son, begrudgingly vows to his dying father that he will give up studying farming to devote himself to the Torah. But this is a promise upon which

Gavriel cannot deliver, since "he had taken up agriculture and dreamed ofbecoming a

10 The British enclosure movement, which brought an end to an open field farming system, culminated in the early part ofthe 19th century; it represented the loss ofcommon usage rights to the land, and, according to Marzec, set the groundwork for British imperialism (Marzec 2). 19 landowner and cultivator, as his father had once been" (228).11 What follows in "The

Oath" is a protracted battle between the book and the land which ends happily for everyone. Gavriel moves to his uncle's farm while his mother marries the rabbi who had been entrusted with Gavriel' s spiritual education. On one hand, the happy ending underscores Grade's desire to be an impartial observer ofJewish life,12 and it could be argued that the tension between the sacred and the profane that drives his work undermines a more cogent (if not radical) critique of the rabbinical tradition. But it is not my belief that Grade was interested in choosing sides. Instead, through this example, he shows that Gavriel's connection to the earth is as spiritually legitimate as the rabbi's connection to the Talmud. 13

However, one particular scene in "The Oath" does pose an implicit critique of the way the rabbi-and by extension, the rabbinical tradition-views the land, one that is unmitigated by the equanimity of the story's conclusion. A postcolonial ecocritical reading of the scene will elucidate my argument by showing how Grade recognizes the difference between a top-down view ofland (the rabbi's) and one from the bottom-up

(from the farmer's perspective). Gavriel is sitting with Reb Avraham-Abba during one of their many tension-filled sessions. Several baskets offruit, the summer's bounty, catch

11 Lest this seem contrary to the history of Jews' inability to put down roots, it should be noted that with the Russian Revolution came the dismantlement ofthe Pale of Settlement, giving Jews the opportunity to own real estate and participate in agriculture. It would appear from "The Oath," that prior to this, there were rare instances where Jews were allowed to own land in what was then considered Poland. 12 As one biographer notes, regarding Grade's short story, "My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseneyner," "In typical Grade fashion, the story presents no victor, but calls for reconciliation between Orthodoxy and Jewish secularism" (Reichek 89). 13A spiritual component ofthe relationship between Jews and land is not without precedent. Rabbinic scholar Richard Samson explains that the Bible states, "God is the owner ofthe land of Israel and the source ofits fertility, while the Israelites working the land are God's tenant farmers" (qtd. in Tirosh-Samuelson 380). 20 the eyes of both student and teacher, and their thoughts poignantly reveal their divergent views toward a relationship between humans and land. The narrator explains that to

Gavriel, "The fruit seemed to him like a joyous greeting from the fields and forests, and he could gauge the time of the season by the kinds of fruit in the baskets" (252). Gavriel's understanding of the natural world comes from that world itself; the fruit is, in effect, telling their own story, and thus possess a subjectivity to which Gavriel defers in order to be able to receive messages about the land and the cycles of the seasons.14 Gavriel

"gaze[ s] with longing": not to eat the bounty so much as to participate in its tending and harvesting. The narrator describes the various fruits and vegetables in rich detail, their presence or absence telling the story ofthe seasons, a story Gavriel is able to "read" as if it were scripture meant for interpretation:

The blackberry season was long past, and so was the season for red raspberries and the hard green gooseberries. The transparent white currants had also disappeared, and the yellow honey-sweet cherries and the soft, mirror-smooth black cherries became rare visitors. Now juicy ripe plums beckoned him with their dark-purple skins and deep-red fleshy bodies. The vegetable gardens were having their say, too: the first young potatoes with their cherubic rosy skins were soon followed by the large, bulbous potatoes; radishes with notched heads as tough as bark; sparkling white heads of cabbage; and green cucumbers-thin and twisted, some wide and swollen. Next to last year's wreaths of onions, lying on the wooden stands in their thin brown skins, this year's fresh green ones winked with their long white heads crowned by their stubby roots (252).

The human qualities invested in the harvest go beyond mere personification, and aren't merely suggestive ofthe well-worn theme ofnature's seductive powers. Grade implies, if

14 In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams looks to the Romantic-era British poet John Clare (who, with his finely tuned recreations of his boyhood home could be seen as a kindred spirit to Grade) as being the epitomizer of a "green language" which does not divide humans and land into a subject/object relationship, but instead invests both with subjectivity (132-134). In my view this was important to Clare because he recognized that both humans and land had their SUbjectivity stripped from them during the enacting of Britain's enclosure movement. I think Grade, threatened with a similar loss of subjectivity in both his person and his homeland, is doing something akin to Clare here. 21 rather whimsically, that the land itself has a communicative power to those who would listen. Likewise, Gavriel' s "inhabitancy" is exemplified in his ability to be attuned to and to understand this communication.

No sooner is this most unstill still-life explicated than the Rabbi muses on the same baskets, albeit in a way that betrays his top-down perspective toward nature:

Each time Reb A vraham-Abba raised his eyes from his book and looked out the open door at the fruits and vegetables outside, he would once again reflect that only he who makes a blessing over the fruit and knows that nothing grows by itself has the double joy ofthe blessing as well as the fruit (252).

According to the rabbi, only when the land is mediated through the Jewish faith, can it be understood and enjoyed properly. The role ofnature is cut in half, and while it must be conceded that the rabbi obliquely notes the role of the farmer, at the same time he eviscerates this role. The bounty becomes God's gift, rather than the land's or the farmer's. Moreover, the rabbi's "double joy," which comes not only from the eating but from the blessing-i.e. the naming and controlling through religious ceremony- ironically diminishes the role the farmer has played in the harvest. Like a landlord or colonizer, the rabbi divests both the tiller and the soil of its subjectivity.

Surely Gavriel, as both tiller and digester ofthe soil, also enjoys "double joy."

But the rabbi does not see this because Gavriel' s joy is not mediated though religion nor the patriarchal language ofthe faith ("he"). Finally, the rabbi's meditation on the produce is necessarily terse. Whereas to Gavriel, the bounty is lush and seductive, for the rabbi, no fancy descriptive language is needed where simply the words "fruits and vegetables" will do. And if for Gavriel, these fruits and vegetables reveal larger truths about the natural environment, for those adhering to the Mishnah verse, nature is only to 22 be looked upon as it fits into the schema of Jewish faith; any further recognition would be heretical. Further, the rabbi's privileging of rational thought over the caprices ofthe land is shown through the word "knows"; to the rabbinical tradition, nature is something knowable, which is preferable to letting nature let itself be known through its own actions and appearances. Giving the land a voice, as it figuratively possesses, when, to Gavriel's ears, it "tells a story," puts it on par with humans, and thus invests it with the power to perform an act of creation that, in the rabbi's view, associates it too closely to God himself (or that occurs independently of God). In doing so, Grade counterbalances the strictures ofmonotheism that do not see the natural world as an act of creation as valuable as humans, a move that is critical to understanding Grade's desire for permanence to be rooted in the land.

IfFurman's assessment is correct-that the separation ofhumans and nature in modem-day Jewish religion, stems in part from enlightenment-era rationalism-then this kind of"knowing" is analogous to the nomenclature rooted in that same era, which made the mysteries ofnature conform to European logic, allowing colonial-era botanists to privilege their own "knowledge" ofthe land over that ofthe indigene. In this way, the

Mishnah and its enforcers become tantamount to a colonizing force, one that diminishes the knowhow of farmers and casts them as a heretical other. This "othering" is further complicated by Gavriel's agronomic interactions with alluring female gentile peasants and non-Kosher Jewish farmers. Grade provides two ways of looking at these

"distractions" from Talmudic study. At first the narrator conflates sexual desire with the desire to work the land: "Gavriel. .. didn't know what to look at first: at the bent-over forms ofthe peasant girls-their breasts like pumpkins, their broad behinds bobbing in 23 the air, their fleshy feet set finnly on the ground and far apart-or at the transplanting work they were doing" (270). Likewise, when Gavriel is eventually drawn to the girl, the scenario is painted in a familiar association of women with temptation and sin, as the girl he likes is "coarse and shameless ...daring and shapely" (273). However, the passage ends with Gavriel ashamed not for submitting to desire but for not doing what comes naturally: "He was upset at himself for being so shy, for allowing the Talmud and his upbringing to prevent him from doing what all the other boys in the field did without a second thought" (274). Here the boys in the field are not condemned for choosing sex over the sacred, but rather their appetite is incorporated into their concomitant desire and natural instinct to fann.

Therefore, Grade breaks down social and religious constructs toward nature, women, and sex. On more than one occasion in The Sacred and the Profane, Grade invokes the practice ofyoung Jewish men "cavorting" with girls by the river or in the woods (e.g.,"The Rebbetzin" 3). This libidinous ceremony, which notably takes place outside of the non-natural setting of the ghetto, is not vilified by the author. Instead, in

"Laybe-Layzar's Courtyard," it is the unyielding Reb Heskiah who demonizes the activity as salacious: he muses that "in the nearby woods they committed the very abominations for which Jerusalem was destroyed" (186). The reader sees, however, that

Reb Heskiah's disdain stems not from prudishness, but from his own lack of connection to the natural world (and those who would couple in its spaces):

Reb Heskiah trudged back, lost in thought ...and found himself standing at the gate ofhis courtyard .. .In the narrow streets that led to the town garden, the leafy trees rustled in the windswept summer dusk. People crowded into the paths and alleyways ...children played ...But Reb Heskiah saw and heard nothing. (171) 24

A vibrant scene juxtaposing the activities ofnature and humans remains outside the purview ofa Jew who is more concerned with the fixed nature of the law than his own bustling surroundings. Above all, by highlighting Reb Heskiah's inability to see and hear,

Grade cautions against a religious practice where sensual experience is anathema to spirituality .

In looking at Grade's implicit "response" to the "cultivated field" half ofthe

Mishnah, in "The Oath," we have seen that Grade posits that ghetto Jews seek to derive a sense ofpermanence not just from their connection to faith, but to the land, as well. But what ofnature's more aesthetic attributes? What role should nature's beauty, such as the tree mentioned in the Mishnah, play in a Jew's daily life? With the inclusion of nature imagery amidst Grade's otherwise realist prose, Grade seems to be implicitly arguing that a portrait ofhis community that concentrated solely--or even prevalently--on the sacred world would be depriving that community of a true sense of inhabitancy. Moreover, despite offering some details ofthe historical background and geographical backdrop of each story, which places them firmly between the two world wars-the era of shifting geopolitical borders following the Russian Revolution---Grade's work underscores a sense ofplace heightened by frequent injections ofnature imagery, as shown in this passage from "Laybe-Layzar's courtyard":

The forest lay still, steeped in quietude; only an occasional beam of light managed to pierce the vault of the branches, quivering like a tom violin string...Through the beams shone the hanging clusters ofgold-green needles, and on the thick autumn spiderwebs draped over the bushes the raindrops flickered in the sunlight like radiant jewels. (211)

Grade's purposeful enhancement of the space of Eastern European Jewry through an accentuation of its natural spaces appears to contradict Zionist founder Abraham Joshua 25

Heschel's dictum that Jews "lived more in time than in space" (qtd. in Shandler 46), which refers to the exilic aspect of Jewish life and has become a truism (and thus a primary motivation for finding and establishing a homeland). Instead this passage suggests a firm connection between time and space, exemplified by the simile of the quivering violin string, which produces waves possessing amplitude as well as frequency.

In addition, the ephemerality ofboth sunlight and rain is juxtaposed with the deep-rooted nature of the forest, showing that natural space is not merely a phenomenon of the past, but something that is renewed and added to each day.

However, in recreating a world more vibrantly colorful than the monochromatic milieu ofthe ghetto, Grade goes beyond presenting natural beauty where there might not seem to be any; rather, he digs out connections to the natural world that are already there and shows them to his readers. In particular, the collection of novellas, The Sacred and the Profane, is dappled with lyrical allusions to a sensate world of flora and fauna, farmland and forest, as well as the phenomena ofweather and the cycles of the seasons.

Therefore, a passage like this is one of many which demonstrate that Grade's Jews ineluctably coexist with the natural world around them:

A single speckled patch of sunlight danced playfully on a stiff black rabbinic hat that lay on a bench against the room's eastern walL Artfully, the patch of light sprang onto a lectern and lost itself among the large pages of an open Talmud, like a bushy-tailed squirrel disappearing into leafy branches. A moment later, it reappeared and leaped onto the shoulders of the Porush, Rabbi Yoel Weintraub, the scholar-recluse who stood in front of a bookcase, peering intently into a tract of rabbinic law (122).

Here the reader is given a glimpse of representatives ofboth the sacred and the profane cohabitating, despite the latter's apparent ignorance of the former. The sunlight traverses three synecdoches for the orthodox Jewish religious tradition: the black hat, the Talmud, 26 and the rabbi. And yet, the sunlight is hardly an antagonistic force; in fact, it perfonns its dance without disturbing the rabbi, a kindhearted man whose liberal interpretations of the law belie the "stiffness" ofhis own hat, and who would likely be more pennissive than most toward the behavior of this lambent intruder. While the reader is unaware of the Rabbi's personality before reading this passage, any possible tension is eased as the uninvited guest "loses itselr' in the central text of the rabbinical tradition, as ifto suggest there is a place for it there, a comfortable home for it to rest in the midst ofits dalliance with the rabbi, and even within the traditionally darkened beth medrash, the locus of rabbinical study. The narrator's comparison, using simile, of sunlight to a forest creature, also provides an example ofGrade seeing beyond a binary of humans and nature (as phenomenon) through an expansion of his metaphorical palette. Here sunlight acts like a squirrel, where elsewhere, human figures are compared to trees, birds, radishes and onions, while the towns they live in are said to be "no bigger than a fig" ("The

Rebbetzin" 15).

The possibility for cohabitation between humans and nature suggested by the above passage is underscored by Miriam Sivan's response to Funnan's argument that trees in the work of Jewish~American writer Cynthia Ozick are merely pagan~signifiers, and thus lie in opposition to the monotheistic faith. Instead, trees, Sivan states, "possess an existence which stands parallel to the human dramas being acted out beside, and together with, them" (Sivan 73). In Grade's work this claim can be amplified to include the natural environment as a whole. Therefore, one of the most effective ways that Grade puts forth the idea that Jews, including their spiritual leaders, are connected to nature whether they realize it or not, is a nod toward their parallelism. For example, the 27 following passage alludes to the ritual of davening, or swaying, which accompanies the act of prayer performed by Jewish men:

The trees outside became a congregation unto themselves and recited the Psalms in their leafy, windswept tongue. The rustling of the leaves on the twisted branches drifted out to the shores ofthe Neman, where the wind­ whipped waves and swaying treetops lamented together with the synagogue ("The Rebbetzin" 34).

Moreover, the trees act as liaison between the synagogue and the Neman River, a major waterway running through the city ofHoradna (the main setting of"The Rebbetzin"), showing not only amity between river and rabbis, but a connection between sacred and natural spaces that extends past the confmes ofthe Jewish ghetto.

Other parallels are more nuanced. The relationship Grade establishes between the religious and natural calendars points toward the spiritual and natural spheres not merely as parallels-which suggests a harmonious overlap or imitation--but rather as coterminous, i.e. both existing within the same boundary oftime and space, but each possessing agency. Ifthe natural world is a symbol ofthe less pious, as we see in this example, it also operates upon its own terms:

Even the summery days oflate Tammuz and the early Av refused to join in the mourning for the Temple. The peddlers on the Jewish street stood with baskets brimming with fresh vegetables ...Beckoning from the fruit baskets on the wooden stands were meaty plums and honey-sweet yellow apricots... [The old men] mumbled the Shehehiyanu and slipped the sweet fruit between their beards and mustaches, forgetting, or only pretending to forget, that new fruits may not be eaten during the period just before Tishah B'Av" ("Laybe-Layzar's Courtyard" 185).

Rather than implying that the sacred is being subordinated by nature (as the old men barely are able to get the words ofthe blessings out while they eat fruit), Grade shows instead that the ritual of eating, of interacting with the natural world, has the potential to be a sacred act unto itself, as practiced and cherished a custom as any religious 28

ceremony. IS Conversely, there are times that the natural calendar seems to be trumped by its Judaic counterpart:

In the gardens of the city and along the river, the early fall had already singed the tips of the le"aves and the edges of the plants. A bright, fiery yellow invaded the green thickness of shrubbery and trees. But in the crowded streets and courtyards of the Jewish neighborhood, where nothing green grew, the coming of fall was heralded only by the sound of the shophar at the morning service" ("Laybe-Layzar's Courtyard" 196).

Yet, with the passage's acute lyrical emphasis on natural elements-"bright, fiery yellow," "green thickness" cannot be said that Grade is privileging the Jewish New

Year, when the shofar is typically sounded. In fact, the narrator is obliged to remind the reader ofthe greyness of the ghetto, its distance from beauty, as if to show, through the use ofthe word "only," that its detachment from the natural environment results in a diminished potency of its religious pronouncements. And yet, in spite ofthis, a clear parallel is established between the densities of nature ("green thickness of shrubbery and trees") and humans ("crowded streets and courtyards").

Therefore, it is my beliefthat the surfeit of examples from The Sacred and the

Profane making reference to the existence of nature on the outskirts of the city points not towards a separation between humans and nature, but serves as an illustration of their closeness. As Sivan expresses in her analysis ofOzick's trees, but which can equally be applied to the presence of nature in Grade's writing as a whole, "This then is the Judaism which at its core grasps that there is no necessary split between nature, as embodied in

15 Grade may be obliquely responding to a critique levied against of the constituents ofVilna­ for not being good enough Jews-by visitors to the Vilna ruins in the wake of the Shoah (My Mother's Sabbath Days 350). Since Tisha B'Av historically commemorates the destruction of temple and events where Jews were removed from regions or had property confiscated, its mentioning here may obliquely be pressing for its association with more recent catastrophe. It should also be noted that major events of the Final Solution were often aligned with religious holidays. For example, the deportation of Jews from Warsaw commenced on the eve ofTisha B'Av. (Blass n.p.). 29 the tree, and humanity (Sivan 75). Important here is the use of the words "necessary" and

"Judaism," for, as we have seen, it is the religion itself, as well as its followers, that

Grade seems to want to show is not only capable of co-existence with the natural world, but innately connected to it. A striking example comes at the end of the chapter of

"Laybe-Layzer's Courtyard" that began with the impish sunbeam:

When services were over and the worshippers dispersed, a secretive quietude pervaded the empty sanctuary, as if in the hard-planed and polished wooden fixtures there still resonated the mysterious silence in the depths of the dense forest (126).

The chapter is bookended by allusions to the natural world: it begins with sunlight and ends with the forest. Here the natural sanctuary of the forest and the man-made sanctuary ofthe synagogue are fused together. While the wood has been cut down and shaped by human hands for human purpose, it has not been divested of its origins. This suggests that the forest, its trees, its wood, are not merely a product of the creator that is for human use, but that nature, as God's creation, is central to human spirituality. The socially constructed space of the synagogue, though "hard-planed and polished," is imbued with its natural, forest origins, thus implying that Jews indeed have roots to the land they occupy, and thus a sense ofinhabitancy.16

16 Through its tangible connection to the wild space of the woods, this-to use Henri Lefebvre's term-" representational space" (42)-a space that, though socially constructed, is closest to a lived, poetic space-is still closer to what Lefebvre has classified as "natural" or "absolute space." Moreover, there is a purity in this particular space that gives it a sense ofplace, which spatial theorist Yi-Fu Tuan describes as a space having "felt value" (4), of being a location of "pause" (6), which in this case appears to occur even in, and perhaps especially in the absence of humans. Tuan writes that "the ideas "space" and "place" require each other for definition. From the security and stability ofplace we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa" (6) The place-ness of the synagogue stems from its comforting, if confining, walls, whereas the expanse of the forest connotes open, potentially fearful space. The mutuality ofthe relationship is exemplified by the quoted passage from Grade, which seems to be positing that while the synagogue is enhanced (space made place) by its origin in natural space, the natural space of the forest can be enhanced through its use by humans. 30

As is typical with Grade's work, nature is not a passive force here. The "silence," the "quietude," is belied by its mentioning, and seeks to remind us that what may be casually dismissed as stillness or silence ofnature-that is, the forest-is often accompanied by a symphony of sound. Therefore, nature is not merely something replicated or represented through art, nor that which acts merely as a muse for the artist, but is its own spirit necessarily infused with that ofthe artist's (or rabbi's) world. Like a pianist who is reminded ofthe "living" quality of his instrument-being made of wood, and thus subject to the elements - the leaders and followers of the faith, Grade suggests, must bear in mind their eternal connections to the earth. If Grade pushes for a connection between the ghetto and the forest by highlighting their seemingly impregnable distance, then, by noting the absence ofpeople in this passage, Grade thus critiques the lack of connection between the spiritual and the land. To this end, it bears reminding that, like the fixtures in the synagogue, "the book" also has origins in the forest, which means that the central article of the faith, the text, is necessarily connected to the wooded world which surrounds it.

In his frequent use ofthe forest as setting and metaphor, Grade employs what I believe is something of a trope found in Eastern European Yiddish literature ofthe 20th century. 17 The forest's presence serves as reminder that Jews were not only confmed to dismal urban ghettos and the sparse landscape ofthe shetl. Generally, in this capacity the forest represents a positive space. If it offers a place for sensual, even what some may consider sinful, activity (i.e. fornication), the forest that surrounds Grade's Vilna is also a

17 See Joseph Opatashu's In Polish Woods and Chava Rosenfarb's Bociany. In addition, Ellen Rifkin, in writing about the Yiddish poet Rachel Korn, notes, "The forest embodies most acutely the ambivalent relationship ofJews to the Polish earth; When Cossack horses storm past the village, the woods provide sanctuary, but the crackling of a single dry twig beneath their feet can betray them" (28). 31 looming, yet comforting presence for characters that live in the midst ofthe concrete alleys ofthe ghetto. In this way it serves an analogous function to the Catskills or

Peakskills north ofManhattan, where New York City Jews began to spend their summers in the 20th century. The Grades themselves were part of this tradition. As Morton

Reichek explains in his profile ofGrade: "Each year he spends the Jewish High Holy

Days in the Adirondacks, where he and his wife rent a cottage for several months. Says he: 'For me this is a strong emotional experience, to run away in the woods'" (84). It must be noted here that Grade's vacation aligns with Rosh Hashanah, showing that despite his respect for the faith, it served his soul better to be in the woods during these times rather than in synagogue.

As he engages this trope, Grade also expands on the theme ofthe synthesis of religion and land referenced in the sanctuary passage in this one from "The Rebbetzin," which establishes a parallel between family trees and their woodland counterpart:

The sprawling family of the venerable Horadna Sage...had become a dense primordial forest. With the passage ofgenerations and the inevitable bolts oflighting, the great oaks are broken, the tall pines are twisted, and pieces ofbark lie beside the smoothed trunks that look like forlorn, ragged, old people. Instead offresh green grass, a silvery moss spreads out and blankets the dried creeping vines. At the same time, at the forest's edge the fresh saplings ofnut trees, alder, and birches are already rustling. Their bark sparkles with a dark silver luster as they whisper confidences to the centuries-old trees, their stately ancestors in the impenetrable thicket. Yet even the sun never reaches the inner sanctum of this wood. A tranquility reigns there, a hush and a darkness even at noonday. So did the family ofRabbi Alexander Ziskind grow and proliferate while the main trunk, his children and grandchildren, shriveled. Sarah-Rivkah grew up pale and sickly, as if she were paying the price for her saintly great-grandfather's fasting and asceticism (54).

There is a clear parallel here between the sickly, shriveled children and Grade's spindly nasturtiums; in both scenarios the fortitude that comes with tradition is juxtaposed with 32 the phenomenon of that same tradition's fragility. In addition, the connection between the pagan-like imagery of the forest and the rabbinical family is quite striking, and yet is born out through historical and cultural practices. Simon Schama, in Landscape and Memory, alludes to the relationship of the forest to Jewish culture and history when he reflects on the meaning behind holidays he participated in as a youth: "behind [Tu bi-Shevat, a sort ofJewish Arbor Day] lay a long, rich and pagan tradition that imagined forests as the primal birthplace ofnations" (Schama 6).18 Schama reminds us that the significance of the forest in Jewish life began in ancient times and continued through the 20th century, when many Polish Jews made their living as wood-cutters. 19 Hence, to Isaac

Deutscher's pessimistic comment about Jews and nature vis-a-vis the impermanent nature of the Jewish experience: "Trees have roots ...Jews have legs," Schama responds: "some

Jews have both and branches and stems too" (Schama 29). Ofcourse, the Shoah took from Jews their roots, branches, legs, and all. To this end, Schama himself refers to the

Holocaust as a "murderous uprooting" (Schama 6), and must admit that the ambivalent experience of the Jews toward their Eastern European homeland, as articulated by

Deutscher, must be applied to the forest as well. Whereas Grade mentions, in his memoirs, the safety the woods offered in hiding woods from the invading Germans (e.g.,

Sabbath 264-265), Schama writes about male Jews being taken into the forest to be shot in 1941 (Schama 70).

18 While Tu biShevat, also called "the new year of the trees," is considered a minor holiday in the orthodox tradition, the more spiritual Kabbalists have created a seder to observe the occasion. Secular scholars have also pointed at that this celebration, which is not directly mentioned in the Torah, has its origins in tree-worshipping practices of pre-biblical Israel (csjo.org; Knobel). 19 I see this as analogous to ancient agrarian roots being resumed through agricultural colonies founded by diasporic Jews the world over in the 20th century 33

The ambivalent relationship between Jews and the forest expressed by Schama is acutely represented in Grade's novels. In The Yeshiva (1967), it is in the forest where the semi-autobiographical character, Chaikl Vilner, finds the sacred and profane doing battle within his heart:

Day by day Chaikl spent less and less time studying Talmud with the rabbi. He roamed about in the forest and taught himself to blow a twisted, golden-yellow, honey clear, ram's hom [...] He blew the tekiah once; the echo resounded for a long, long time, stretching out through the forest until finally silence reigned again and the green outbranching thickness hovered with suspended breath. He blew shevarim, imagining that in this green and secret place he had awakened a monster, half man, half beast, who had lain here in hiding for generations and now was answering him with a primordial mouth (116).

Chaikl blows the ram's hom with gusto, and its connection to its pagan, primal origins come to the fore. Each offering from the shofar, with its biblical precedent, is followed by a response from the forest, which resonates once more, in its "silence" and

"thickness.,,2o Therefore, rather than moving toward an apostasy, Chaikl, like Grade himself, finds himself constantly in the middle oftwo worlds: "But I still don't know where my place is--whether in the Yeshiva or in the world. Am I a freethinker or a religious, he wondered, or like some kind of amphibious creature." (218) Chaikl's dilemma demonstrates the uncompromising barrier that has been established between the sacred ("the Yeshiva") and the profane ("the world"), and thus it can only be concluded that Grade not only fmds an "amphibious" existence to be preferable, but through the example above, that we already live in this manner, ifonly we have the wherewithal to see and hear that it is so.

20 The recurring use ofthe word "thickness," ifadmittedly in translation, reminds this reader of Clifford Geertz's "thick description," suggesting that Grade emphasizes how intricate and inalienable are the connections between Jews and the natural world. 34

Nevertheless, as a male, Chaikl is at least permitted to mediate between these two worlds. A woman in the Jewish tradition finds herself without such options, neither being able to attend Yeshiva nor possessing control over her place in the world.

Therefore, for Merl, the title character of The Agunah (1961), the forest becomes a space ofresistance to cultural norms. In the Jewish culture, an agunah is a woman whose husband's death cannot be verified after he is presumed lost or killed in battle, thus preventing his wife from remarrying. Near the end ofnovel, Merl retreats from the human society that has rejected her petition to remarry and finds herself in the natural world ofthe forest, upon which she had already been gazing from her window. When a squirrel, a crow, and the snake-like gnarled roots of a tree invite her to leave a world where she has little power (210-212), she commits suicide.21 Hence, while through a communion with nature she is granted autonomy, she is at the same time disconnected her from life. Here the fraught relationship Jews have with land is paralleled. The message is, stay with the land and die, or be cut from the land and live a life of exile. The echoes ofGrade's own dilemma ofrunning from the Germans in WWII ought not to go unnoticed here. Sandy Alexandre has argued that the phenomenon oflynching in the

American South can be read as a reification of the difficulty blacks faced in owning land, as white farmers, losing land to black farmers, displaced their problems onto the lynched

Negro ("Out: On a limb" 76). Grade offers a similar reification of the groundlessness of

Jews-the Agunah's hanging is symbolic ofthe "murderous uprooting" articulated by

Schama, perhaps-yet I am tempted to read the Agunah's actions as also symbolizing a

21 While suicide is forbidden by Jewish law, there is precedent for suicide as resistance to violence, such as was caused by the York Castle murders and Nazism; in the bible, Saul and Samson both took their own lives (Jacobs n.p.). Given Grade's personal history, the Agunah's suicide is in the tradition of this resistance, and thus can be perceived not as a moral crime but as martyrdom. 35 deep communion with nature, especially amongst women. The white farmer may push the Negro off the land through the act of lynching, but nature here beckons the Agunah to be a part ofit: "Mer! imagined that the forest had seized her, enchanted her, as though she had been born here in a cave and nourished by roots and grasses [ ...] She stood rooted" (211). Thus, rather than being seen as leaving the ground by hanging herself, she instead becomes part of the tree. In fact, Mer! becomes part of the forest in a way that she and her husband perhaps always had been: in her final moments in the woods, she imagines her husband, who was a carpenter, beside her, possessing wooden legs from his war wounds, and referring to her as a "wild goat" (210). Merl's connection to nature is underscored by what are now familiar themes in Grade's work: the forest "nourishes"

Mer! as it does Gavriel and un-pious Jews, and her husband's replacement limbs, like the fixtures in the synagogue, have their origins in the forest.

Moments like these contradict a traditional view of the indifference of nature, instead quite beautifully showing the connection humans have with nature, as Mer! returns to a landscape that nurtured her since youth, if only figuratively (read: nature has nurtured humans since time immemorial). However, Grade may also be referencing historical events here. Regarding Poles killed at Giby, in the Puszcza, the most ancient forest in Europe, Schama writes, "their memory had now assumed the form of the landscape itself. A metaphor had become a reality; an absence had become a presence"

(Schama 25). Certainly the final moment of The Agunah connotes an assimilation with the natural world that is strikingly contrary to stereotypical Jewish (sub)urban assimilation: "the rebbetsin thought she saw the agunah's face in the moon ...And the moon, radiant with the light of distant worlds, beamed into all comers of the rabbi's 36 house" (265). Grade's impartiality, which allows the reader to deconstruct the Jewish relationship toward nature, is once again apparent here. Like the squirrel who danced playfully around the rabbi, the moon "beams" rather than invades. There is a feeling of forgiveness, as one "distant world" communicates with another, and the Agunah, driven to suicide by her lack of autonomy in a patriarchal world, is through her connection to nature granted access to the private home of the religious figure who prevented her from fulfilling desires that would have made her happy. It acts as one more example of the presence ofthe natural world being felt in the domain ofmonotheistic faith. * * *

The "nourishing" of the female soul by traversing a location outside ofthe home (i.e. locus of cultural tradition) has precedent in other JewishNiddish-centric literature. In

Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, young David's mother Genya buys a picture of cornflowers which reminds her ofher home back in Austria. The familiar landscape is not only a link to the past and to the land, but specifically to the place where she had a love affair with a

Gentile whom she was prevented from marrying. When we consider the violent behavior ofGenya's husband, it is fitting that that upon purchasing the picture and explaining it to her son, Genya's behavior noticeably changes: "David had hardly ever seen his mother so animated, so gay before" (172). In much the same way, in Grade's work, a woman's connection to the land changes her outlook on life, and provides her with agency. For example, in "Laybe-Lazar's Courtyard," two women, Nehamele and Gracia are brought from their homes in nearby villages to the Vilna Ghetto. Both women experience suffering there: Nehamele is the victim of a philandering husband, while Gracia is 37 mourning the loss ofher dead son. A stroll through town allows Nehamele to experience a reverie which takes her away from her miserable situation:

Nehamele walked through the streets ofthe town with darkened, hollow eyes. Not until she crossed the bridge to the other side of the Wilejka and walked through Poplawska Street did her eyes clear, and then she became fined with childlike joy and wonder at the thickly verdant trees. In the stone-and-wood world ofLaybe-Layzar's courtyard there were no trees, not so much as a blade of grass [ ...] Nehamele, gazing at the light­ green vines on the gates ofKopenica street, reflected that she hadn't realized how happy she had been when she lived there (145).

If"Darkened" and "hollow" are adjectives that could be used to describe Grade's destroyed community, then they also highlight his female character's connection to the marginalization of the natural world. As with the agunah, a transformation takes place when Nehamele transcends the boundaries of the ghetto, into a wooded area. She becomes alive in the midst ofher old neighborhood darkness turns to clarity, and the weight ofyears is lifted from her.

For Gracia, a gardener's wife who has moved to the city due to a disagreement between her husband and his two brothers, a sense ofdisplacement stems both from her son's recent death and, like Nehamele, from the unforgiving surroundings ofher present environment:

Gracia wanted to escape ...she closed her eyes and thought back to her maiden days when she used to walk alone through the vast forests around Zaskowicz [ ...] Gracia did not want to open her eyes and look out onto the barren earth ofLaybe-Layzar's courtyard, where, she knew, the only greenery was the mold on the plastered walls (211-212).

When she looks at the lifeless courtyard, Gracia is reminded ofher own condition of being without child; on the other hand, the forest environs ofher previous home represent not only lush natural growth but the place where her child is buried. Furthermore, the presence of something "natural" in her new home-mold-symbolizes decay as much as 38 growth. Periodically, Gracia imagines she sees her dead son flying-a little bird, she calls him-through the Vilna sky, far from his grave in Zaskowicz. As much as it is wish fulfillment that her son is still alive, the act of flying represents her sublimated desire to escape the courtyard, and also shows how uprooted she and her family has become since moving to the ghetto.

Conversely, Perele of "The Rebbetzin," the first story in The Sacred and The

Profane, raises eyebrows when she not only uproots her husband and herselfto move to the town wherein resides a man who had jilted her years earlier, but chooses an apartment that is much too large for the pair and requires an inordinate amount of furnishings.

While this example is not related to the natural landscape, it nevertheless further emphasizes the anxiety of displacement that comes from being a woman in a patriarchal religion, as exemplified in Nehamele, and Gracia; like Genya in Call it Sleep, the desire ofGrade's female characters to seek inhabitancy in their surroundings is evinced through their connection to the past and to a sense of place.

If the story of the agunah is an oblique self-indictment-the phenomenon of the

"deserted wife" parallels Grade's own life events during World War II-it is also an implicit critique of the status of women in the Jewish faith that echoes Grade's critique of the place of nature and land in the Jewish faith. If the pleasures ofnature are eclipsed by the sacred realm, so are the pleasures and sovereignty of woman's own nature, of her own flesh. Grade is particularly sensitive to nature paralleling women, and providing a space for feeling to become action. The natural world mirrors Merl's spirit as an individual whose choices could render an outcast. Therefore when Merllooks out the window at the "forest settlement," she sees nature as "solitary," shameful in its 39

"nakedness"- exposed to the view and judgment of others, much like Levi the rabbi's daughter, Tsirele, a mirror character who cannot help the urge to run around naked, much to her father's chagrin (191). As she masturbates, Merl thinks ofTsirele, of her abandon and nakedness (196). The world outside mimics her moans, as a storm rages. Even before her suicide, she merges with the land: "[the storm] wanted to smash her window and drag her naked out of the house, through the gardens, over the lake, to the mountain near the forest settlement where she had spent the summers of her youth-and cast her down to earth there, and cover her with pine needles and rotted leaves" (197). Likewise, in "The Rebbetzin," the natural world reflects Perele's suffering: "Perele would watch the lowering clouds and feel them closing in on her heart, nearly smothering it" (14). The act oflooking out the window, which hearkens back to the "lady in the tower" tradition of medieval literature, also illustrates the need for both women to free themselves from the confines of their home, the courtyard, and the practices ofthe faith.

When Grade associates women with nature, he shows that the patriarchy ofthe

Jewish faith looks upon women much like they do upon nature. We've seen how the act of blessing fruit is of arguably more importance than that fruit being blessed; likewise, as

Carey Glass Morris notes, "The need to regulate women is articulated as the need to control their unruly female sexuality because ofits threat to the spirituality of men" (75).

This directly relates from the Mishnah quote. According to the Mishnah, any more time or energy spent to appreciate its beauty would be superfluous and as potentially blasphemous as for a man to look a woman who is not his wife straight in the eye, also forbidden by Jewish law. In My Mother's Sabbath Days, Grade's mother wonders for which of her husbands she will be a footstool in heaven (378). This is in reference to an 40 old Yiddish saying which fairly sums up the ultimate role and purpose ofwomen in the

Jewish faith. Becoming a husband's footstool in heaven, while it conjures up a homey usefulness, also puts the wife in a position ofbeing trod on, as if she were an extension of the ground come to meet her husband's feet while they comfortably rest for eternity.

The argument for a valuing of the land necessarily connects with the argument for valuing women beyond their duties as domestic servants who operate largely outside the sphere ofmen. Therefore, a rebuttal to the patriarchal nature ofthe Jewish faith is formed through writing which betrays Grade's closeness with his mother, and shown through the recreation of a past life in which female characters are given agency that extends past that ofa footstool in heaven. Grade's world is necessarily not the "World ofMy Fathers," nor does it take place "In my Father's Court,,,22 but instead is framed as how it was seen through his mother's eyes. As Grade's widow states, in her introduction to My Mother's

Sabbath Days, "Grade always felt that he [...] had taken from his mother his artistic, poetic nature, his all-encompassing ability to love that enabled him to endure all, to survive, to create" (xv). His use of Yiddish, what is referred to as the mama [ashen, or

"mother tongue" ofthe Ashkenazi Jew, further underscores his closeness to his mother and desire to not only see through her eyes but speak through her mouth.23 Finally, when

Chaikl, ofthe Yeshiva, wanders through the forest he finds himself thinking ofthe

Mishnah quote:

He wiped away a clinging veil ofcobwebs from his damp face and thought ofthe saying in the Ethics a/the Fathers: 'Whosoever breaks off his Torah study to say, "How lovely is this tree" places himself in peril.' No matter how this statement was interpreted or glossed over, he still

lh 22 Famous 20 -century volumes about the roots ofJewish-American (Ashkenazi) culture by Irving Howe and I. B. Singer, respectively. 23 Anita Norich reminds us ofthe historically "feminine" connotation ofthe Yiddish language (779). 41

couldn't understand how a Talmudic sage could have said it (The Yeshiva, Vol. 2, p. 117).

Once again Grade implicitly critiques the patriarchal law ofthe Jewish faith, and the way it marginalizes nature, by showing Chaikl's perplexity at the line from the Mishnah, here significantly deriving from a text called "Ethics ofthe Fathers." In addition, one cannot help but envision the presence ofGrade's mother in this scene, as the act ofpushing away cobwebs echoes the final scenes from My Mother's Sabbath Days, where Grade summons the courage to visit his mother's house, and is bewildered by the spiderwebs in the doorway (388).

Grade also questions who are the normative subjects ofJewish literary and cultural tradition by making women the main characters in novels that deal primarily with issues of faith. This is no more apparent than in the novella, "The Rebbetzin," which questions the legitimacy of the patriarchal tradition by featuring a rabbi's wife who is well-versed in Jewish law. The story is no "YentI," however. Unlike Isaac Bashevis

Singer's canonical, moving story ofa young girl who poses as a boy so she can study the

Talmud, Grade's Perele must live in the shadow not only of her father, a great rabbi, but in the shadow of the great scholar who calls off their engagement because of her shrewish nature. Although she marries a kind, intelligent man who becomes rabbi of their small town, Perele yearns for something more; and while she is certainly a schemer-she convinces her husband to move to the town ofthe man who had broken off their engagement, and ultimately lobbies for her husband to take the man's place upon his death-this is no mere power play. To my mind, it brings attention to what it must be like for a woman in the Jewish faith who refuses to accept her limited role, and yet, the

Rebbetzin has often been read as a one-dimensional character, a virago who is only out 42 for herself. For the reader to see Perele as only a latter-day Lady MacBeth, despite her machinations, evinces the degree to which the patriarchal attitude is still alive and well in the Jewish establishment.24

The "audacity" that the Rebbetzin displays toward tradition, her transgression against the propriety necessitated by patriarchal practices, is mitigated when one recognizes that, regardless ofher true intentions, a woman would not be allowed into this realm if it weren't for such actions. As it is, her entrance into the scholar's home in order to care for him when she perceives his own wife as incapable ofdoing so is predicated not on her knowledge ofJewish law but on her chutzpah and prowess in the domestic realm. Nevertheless, her act, ifnot perceived as graceful by its onlookers, still has an heroic air about it. When she informs her "utterly confused" husband what she is doing, she responds to his stammering-which belies the power ofspeech with which the

Jewish faith invests him-by reminding him "that she wasn't asking his opinion" (99).

After her husband voices concern about how it might affect her Sabbath duties, she pushes them back onto him, responding matter-of-factly, but with no apparent disrespect:

"'I certainly hope to be back to light the candles. But if! am delayed there, you'll have to find your food yourself,' replied the mistress of the house as she left, lifting her dress slightly as she stepped over the threshold, as if she were walking over a puddle of water"

24 The reticence to accept the female as part ofthe sacred was evidenced recently at an event I attended commemorating the lOOth anniversary ofGrade's birth, held at the YIVO institute in New York city. Following a keynote speech by Ruth Wisse, a Harvard professor and leading Jewish scholar, which discussed the role ofGrade's mother in his work, Drew University's Allan Nadler turned to the less endearing subject ofGrade's wife, Inna, sometimes called the "black witch" by those who knew her. The participants and audience at the Grade talk were audibly gleeful at oblique, derogatory references to Grade's recently-deceased widow, and murmured assent to the speaker's connection between her and the title character of"The Rebbetzin." The none-too-sly comparison culminated in an unambiguous description ofthe Rebbetzin's character: "She's evil!" 43

(99). Traversing a boundary both physical and cultural-and appropriately, in tenus of this chapter, assigned a natural, aquatic metaphor by the narrator-Perele shows that ifa woman can be adept in the domestic sphere and as well-versed in the holy texts as her male counterparts, she becomes a force to be reckoned with. Indeed, when her husband takes over as rabbi, the townspeople bypass him, taking their troubles and queries straight to Perele (114).

Nevertheless, if a connection can be made between the way the Jewish tradition looks at both women and nature, it has been argued that even if steps have been made to make women more equal in Jewish faith and practices since the latter part ofthe 20th century, a similar re-assessment and re-positioning of the natural world's role in Judaism has not followed. "Feminist philosophy has failed to make its mark on the discipline of

Jewish philosophy," eco-feminist scholar Hava Tirosh-Samuelson notes. Despite being successful in righting wrongs of inequality in Jewish practice of faith, the move for gender equality has been "rooted in women's lived experience and sensibilities rather than theorizing about ecology" (Tirosh-Samuelson 375-376). Grade's own internalization ofpatriarchy-his assumption that the Nazis would only come after able­ bodied men-is one of the wrongs that he attempts to correct in his writing. However, through his metaphor ofplants, Grade demonstrates the ability to advocate simultaneously for humans and land. By drawing clear connections between the natural world and the feminine, Grade's narratives perfonu what feminism and the faith have been unable to do-promote equality within Judaism for both women and nature. * * * 44

In looking at nature symbolism in Jewish-American literature, Miriam Sivan has concluded that "humanity can ...develop a moral vision through a relationship to [trees]"

(Sivan 82). In the work of Chaim Grade, this "moral vision" relates obliquely to the loss of humanity in WWII, but also directly to textual examples like Chaim's garden,

Gavriel's farming with gentiles, women finding agency in nature, and the natural world as sacred realm. As The Yeshiva's Chaikl Vilner declares to his students: "Man is even more profound and interesting ifwe look at him as a part ofcreation and not as its ultimate purpose. He is just a little room in that great structure ofcreation, and we must get to know the entire structure" (261). In this way, Grade's work invokes the second creation myth of Genesis-humans are made from the earth and thus meant to understand its workings. Therefore, Grade's fiction deconstructs the centrality of human experience within the Jewish religion by emphasizing a sense of inhabitancy predicated on the establishment of a deeper connection between humans and the larger natural world around them. 45

Chapter 2

Towards a Reconstruction of "Center":

Rebuilding Community with the Materials of Memory and Language

"I was born in Vilna. I can't leave Vilna. I lived five years in Russia, two in Paris, now 25 years here, but I am still in Vilna"-Chaim Grade, in an interview with the New York Times, Oct. 28, 1974.

Kenneth Kann begins his oral history of the Jewish chicken ranchers ofPetaluma,

California, with a brief tour of the Jewish cemetery. While Kann's project clearly celebrates the phenomenon of the Jewish chicken rancher, the opening reflection also aptly, if unintentionally, sets a tone for the book, which underscores the moribund nature ofa community whose way of life would not last beyond two or three generations. The chicken ranchers themselves saw their cemetery as proof oftheir ties-and the quality of those ties-to the region, making a clear distinction between themselves and the Jews of

Santa Rosa, who came in the earlier wave of Central European Jewish immigration:

The Santa Rosa Jewish people came to establish a business, they made money or they didn't, and they moved on. It was more of a transient community. In Petaluma the Jews set in roots. There was a feeling of permanence. They had a Jewish Cemetery that went back to the 1860s. Petaluma is where they lived and Petaluma is where they would bury their dead. That is permanence! (Kann 160).

While no doubt the Petaluma chicken farmers would like to look beyond the cemetery as evidence oftheir "permanence," there is some truth to its being the most visible legacy of this community. It is a tragic irony that a people so closely tied to the land might ultimately have little to show for it beyond the plots they will inhabit for eternity.

This irony would no doubt not be lost on Merrill Black, a Jewish woman who grew up in a Bronx apartment building in the 1950s. In 1995, she was interviewed by the 46 journal Bridges for its special issue on Jews and Land, in which she described the vague associations a brick-and-mortar childhood like hers had with land: "The only piece of land my grandmother ever owned was her plot in the cemetery [ ...] It was this big thing to her that she owned this piece ofland to be buried in" (Bridges np). It is worth noting the pride taken in land ownership-even ifin death-taken by Black's grandmother.

And yet, it is a delayed gratification; the idea presented here is that a Jew, if not close to the land during life, should at least end up with her own plot of land, an echoing of a sentiment central to the Jewish ethos by dint of a history of exile and nomadism.

The desire for an urban New York Jew to inhabit land in a meaningful way, even if only in death, is also depicted in Arthur Miller's Death ofa Salesman. Moments before Willy Loman drives off recklessly to his death-effectively committing suicide- he attempts to plant a garden in his backyard.

Willy: Where the hell is that seed? Indignantly: You can't see nothing out here! They boxed in the whole goddam neighborhood! Biff: There are people all around here. Don't you realize that? (127)

Ifthe garden is traditionally as read as an attempt to overcome the rootlessness of

American immigrant life, as well as to remain in touch with one's connection to the natural world, its proximity to death also bears remarkable similarities to Grade's juxtaposition of growth and decay. In fact, the dimly-lit, cramped mise-en-scene, as described by Willy and his son, is suggestive of an individual already buried, and the timing of the scene evinces the need for Willy to prepare his own gravesite, to cultivate a plot ofland that will give him the sense of permanence so desired by Black's grandmother. 47

I have included these examples in order to posit that the cemetery plot has provided for Jews a rare, if final, opportunity for permanence through a sense of earthly, material inhabitancy and established a connection to something greater than oneself.

More recently, it has come to represent an essential location and tool for mourning of which many survivors of the Holocaust were deprived. Therefore the cemetery provides us with a felicitous location to yoke the discussion of inhabitancy found in Chapter One and the more existential concerns of this chapter. In the years following the Holocaust, surviving Jews ofEastern Europe suffered from something called "missing grave syndrome" (Kugelmass and Boyarin 12). The lack of a visual or material representation of the suffering that transpired in their former communities or at concentration camps left gaping holes in their psyches as they found themselves without the cathartic experience that burial and gravesite visiting provides for the living. To rectify this, in a few cases, graves were erected at certain sites to memorialize the tragedy that occurred there. More common, however, was the production of "memorial books" (yizker-bikher). These books, similar to those compiled at a funeral by friends and family in honor of the deceased, were dedicated to a particular town or city and comprised of stories by those who lived there.25 The proliferation of "memorial books"-referred to by Kugelmass and

Boyarin as "substitute gravestones"-evinces the need for and the efficacy of memory and language to fill an emptied space. Given that many Jews regard gravesites as a possible location for land ownership-due to their history of exile and forced nomadism-Grade is not only able to reimagine but give permanence to the destroyed community ofhis youth through the act of writing their collective memory in their own language.

25 Several of the yizker-bikher include literary contributions by Chaim Grade. 48

The phenomenon ofthe emptied space is perhaps the most troubling aspect of

Grade's garden, the metaphor for his lost community, of which "not a trace remains."

Likewise, in the poem, "the Miracle," Grade describes the unsettling feeling that the land beneath his feet might be a grave. The final section ofMy Mother's Sabbath Days expands on this theme ofgraves and graveyards, as Grade details his return to the ruins of what he calls "the seven little alleys," the miniature city within in a city in which the

Jewish community of Vi Ina existed. Grade spends days walking through the streets of the ghetto, which, in the absence of human life, take on the qualities ofthe corpses that have vanished from the scene. To Grade, the "paving stones" feel like "a pavement of heads" (367), and therefore we see that the act ofwalking over graves in "The Miracle" is a figurative act, referring not to walking over buried dead, but over dead streets imbued with the memory of their former occupants. He laments that these ruins remain for all to see: "A corpse is supposed to be covered," he writes, ''yet here you lie so nakedly exposed" (367). Here we see an antecedent for the naked forest which Mer! gazes at from her window; except, instead of inviting Grade to join in its exhibitionism, it merely highlights his survival and thus his separation from it. Moreover, the visible, exposed corpse reflects a lack of a proper space for the dead to inhabit, which confounds Grade.

"I cannot tear myself away from my narrow streets," he writes, suggesting that he feels the obligation to cover the naked streets himself-their "narrowness" bringing to mind the skeletal bodies ofthe victims-to restore their dignity through proper burial (367).

The "you" is a collective "you," referring to both the ruins and the community that no longer exists, a collective corpse unable, in life, to defend itself against invasion, and which, in death, remains defenseless against the gaze ofthe survivor. For Grade, it 49 represents a second time that he is helpless in the face ofhis community's vulnerability, but it presents him with the desire and opportunity to control what others "see" when they observe or, later, read about this community.

Grade's eyes see a corpse in the street, a collective body stripped ofclothes, life, history, dignity. While Grade laments the lack ofproper burial for the dead, he also writes about the alley itself, about the emptied space that remains. In his description of the relatively small area that has been divested of its inhabitants, it is ambiguous whether it remains large for him because ofthe memories that he has of it, because of its august sense ofplace, or because ofthe massive lack ofprobity it signifies. Where bodies, through their interactions and traditions, once created a sense ofplace, now the empty space, in the absence of so many lives, performs what the bodies cannot, the telling of tragedy that has occurred:

In the end [the alleys] will be razed and all that will remain ofthe Ghetto will be a space even smaller than some poor peasant's plot. Any small city park, a children's playground, will seem larger than the cleared space of all seven of my alleys together. But for me, my seven narrow alleys, you are larger than that half of the world across which I have wandered. Your emptiness says more to me than all the cities and countries I have seen. And when they will tear down your rubble and I shall depart-as I surely will depart this blood-soaked earth-yet shall I roam forever about your vanished ruins week in and week out, year in year out, just as now I do not weary ofdragging myself, for days on end and half the nights, over your crooked cobblestones. (348).

While the "emptiness" of the alleys refers most immediately to the annihilation of thousands ofsouls-the phrase "blood-soaked earth" grounds the reader in recent events-the passage also suggests that Grade also sees an "emptiness" that reminds him of the community as it was when it was alive. In this way, he will "roam forever" not merely by dwelling in the past, but by continually recreating this past in his novels. His 50 wandering during the war has condemned him to wander forever in this place as poet as well as survivor.26

For the reader, Grade's description ofthe emptied space ofthe ghetto is ambivalent. While he insists that he will not "weary" ofwalking the streets, the language and meaning of the quoted passage--with its references to the Shoah, the ruins ofVilna, the emptiness and wandering-is emotionally taxing even to the reader. Grade describes a place that is paradoxically both capacious and claustrophobic. On one hand, it takes a toll on him physically as well as psychologically: "The narrow alleyways enmesh and imprison me...their emptiness hovers in my brain, they attach myself to me like seven chains of stone" (335). These are the alleyways that speak volumes-that, while empty, still reverberate with the memory ofwhat has been lost. Yet, on one of his midnight walks, Grade laments that its sense of place has vanished. "All that is left is walls, roofs, pillars" (333), Grade notes, frustrated that there are no humans or spirits, good or evil, to help him make meaning of the tragedy. Unlike the poet H.D., who, following the bombing ofBritain, took solace in the retention of walls (4, 58), Grade still seeks out what once existed between these walls, underneath these roofs.

26 As I have discussed the binary ofpennanence and impennanence in order to deconstruct Jewish ideas ofland, I find it necessary to explain other contradictions at play, specifically space and place, in order to deconstruct the loss of community as Grade sees it. In my reading of Grade, space is the "seven little alleys," a location needing to be filled, something that will be razed for future spaces/places, something small in terms of square footage yet something capacious enough that Grade will ''roam forever" inside its boundaries. In this space corpses exist uncovered, unburied. While Grade seems obsessed with this space, he is also lamenting its loss ofplace. Place is pregnant with memories oflived experience, with disputes between rabbis, with young people joining revolutionary groups, with candles being lit and blessings recited over food. Space is the physical reality of the alleys; place has become what needs to be reconstructed through memory and language. Grade's work pushes himlhis readers towards a point where space and place intersect: a communal, collective center that is at one time a real, physical location and a cultural imaginary. 51

Therefore, as Grade winds through the alleys, he invokes the people who are lost, their everyday acts and living moments, hoping to see them reprised in the midst of nothingness:

I am waiting for the moon to rise and to spin, from its cold rays, the silvery beard of an old Jew who will lean his head out a window toward me. Or perhaps, fluttering down a broken staircase will come a young Jewish girl in a white nightgown woven of moonlight. With her long black hair unbound she will run out from her hiding-place, embrace me, and cling to me (336).

Here Grade desires for the people ofhis community to be somehow rematerialized, to return to him as the sun and moon return in cycles, to be able to be touched and held, even consoled by him. In his novels, Grade stresses the inherency of the human-nature relationship: in The Agunah, the moon acted an intermediary between Merl and the rabbi, just as, in "Laybe-Layzar's Courtyard, the sun brought the natural world into Rabbi

Weintraub's reclusive place of study. But this cannot happen in a location that has been relegated to the status of space. "But the moon avoids the ghetto," Grade writes, evoking this sense ofplacelessness. As discussed in Chapter One, to Grade the natural world is deeply connected with place-it what makes his spaces, places. Therefore, the moon that would illuminate these folks is absent; it finds no home in this empty space. Moreover, the colors here are monochromatic and more suggestive of an old photograph-reflecting a distanced, previous existence-than the vital, rich tapestry of color with which we have seen Grade infuse his native Vilna in his fictional works.

The phenomenon of a sense ofplace being derived from the very emptiness of the space it occupies is familiar in Holocaust studies. As Ulrich Baer has noted about photos ofHolocaust sites taken after bodies/corpses have long been removed or decomposed,

"each photograph makes the implicit and melancholic claim that the depicted sight is 52 preserved in spite of, and as ifto underline, the disappearance ofthe actual referent' (his italics, 53). It is the very lack ofhuman remains that makes these sites photographical, worthy spaces of meaning making. To this end, Baer offers that "prior to all efforts at commemoration, explanation or understanding, I would suggest, we must find a place and a position from which we may then gain access to the event" (43, qtd. in Whitehead

276).27 Grade's walks through the alley represent his search for such a place and position in a space that, like the photos, has been divested of its "placeness," but which still resonates with its memory.

Grade is given the opportunity to grapple with the reconciliation of space and place when he runs into a shoemaker in his shop that he knew before the war. It is fitting that a shoemaker remains, not only because of its connection to Grade's walks, but because the connection between shoes and the earth is paralleled by workers and the spaces oftheir toil. As Maurice Halbwachs writes, "great upheavals may severely shake society without altering the appearance of the city. Their effects are blunted as they filter down to those people who are closer to the stones than to men-the shoemaker in his shop; the artisan at his bench ..." (131-132). Balberishkin, the shoemaker, is in a privileged position ofbeing able to return to his work and distance himself from the memory of recent tragic events. At first, the shoemaker pretends he is not the person

Grade knew, claiming "I didn't want to remember that I'm the Balberishkin who once had a wife and two children." The shoemaker abdicates his sense of place, perhaps because for him, maintaining a connection to place, when so tied to the space around him, is as difficult as it is for Grade to meander through the abandoned ghetto, in all of its

27 Similarly, Whitehead notes that "Geoffrey Hartman's contribution to trauma theory lies in his detennination to give traumatic memory a place" (her italics, 292). 53

"placelessness." A poet makes meaning ofplace, while an artisan is grounded in the space that he constructs for himself or that has been constructed for him.

However, the shoemaker is pulled back into himself, so to speak, when Grade mentions that he had seen the shoemaker's son in Russia. Grade becomes angry when the shoemaker proceeds to repeatedly asks him about his own son: "There are people who care only about themselves," Grade thinks to himself. "The catastrophe struck everyone, but they can think only of themselves and their own families" (351). This admonishment may strike the reader as odd, considering that, when there are only a handful of survivors, it would seem only natural to both dwell in the "I" rather than the collective, as well as to want to maintain a distance from a lost community that only reminds them oftheir tragedy. Yet Grade sees the alleys as apart from him as "you," as the collective corpse of the community he has lost. Furthermore, he recognizes this as a marked difference from the philosophy he observed in himself and his community before the Shoah. He thinks to himself:

Ofcourse I should rejoice for everyone who's survived; yet I do not rejoice, or at least not as much as I grieve for every Jew who hasn't survived. If I had found them all alive, I would have rejoiced with each one individually, but now those who have been saved are strangers to me, as I am a stranger to myself. Each of us, it's true, had lived for himself, not for the community; but it was good to live for oneself when, on the other side ofthe wall, there was always a neighbor" (341).

In these last lines ("it was good to live"), Grade alludes to being less alive, less a part of the community than those who are dead, which resonates with his sense ofthe alleys being able to speak. If Grade's survival hinged upon his acting as an individual, his life post-survival loses its meaning if only he as individual remains. He cannot truly exist outside of the collective of the community; as he said many years later, he cannot exist 54 outside ofVi Ina. When the shoemaker asks Grade if any ofhis belongings remain, the latter blows up at him:

"I don't want any memento. I'm not looking for that," I cry out, feeling as though my skull is splitting like a cracked earthenware pot. "I never left the Ghetto; even though I spent years in Asia and in Moscow. I never left the Ghetto ofViIna and 1 don't need to move back into it as you do. I shall never forget the Ghetto, and therefore I don't need any memento" (352).

Here Grade distances himself from his own possessions, from himself even, concerned only with the memory of a community, whether he is present in it or not. Therefore, while his language is unavoidably subjective here, it is Grade's emphasis on collective memory, which will enable him to recover not just himself, his own family, his own places, but the community as a whole. It has been written that we live in an era ofthe materialization ofmemory,28 and yet memento, which embodies the notion ofmemory as material object, is too small, too personal and too acutely material to be ofuse. The

Ghetto itself, the people it held and the stories is what looms in Grade's mind and is the memory that is materialized in his prose. In this way Grade's novels themselves should not be diminished or diminutized as mere "mementos."

Grade's emphasis on the collective over the self is an ethical part ofthe reconstruction of history, as articulated by Tim Woods, writing about Kurt Vonnegut's

Slaughterhouse-Five:

Memory thus becomes not only a subjective internal construction ofpast events, but a necessary imaginative component in the telling of a larger collective history and in the development ofpersonal identities that defy attempts to forget and to bury the wartime past. Memory is thus a key for the ethical representation ofthe past, and literature as a mechanism for collective memory which opens up the past up to scrutiny, can act ethically by resisting dogmatic, fixed, closed narratives" (Woods 346).

28 See Kerwin Lee Klein's "On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse," a survey and analysis of this postrnodern cultural and intellectual trend. 55

Woods is both praising memory for its ability to create subjecthood, and censuring those who would objectify history and its players, thus pointing toward the advancement of the subjectivity of the memory itself. In the first half of this quote, Woods is echoing

Edward Said, who wrote that land, for the exile or colonized subject, "is recoverable at first only through the imagination" (Said 225). The act of writing, of artistic production, is vital for those who have had their land taken away from them. But Woods' statement, in pointing out the danger of history being told only from certain points of view, points to the necessity of the purveyors and writers of memory to retain the subjectivity of the history and people they are writing. To this end, Martin Buber wrote: "[The world] cannot be surveyed, and if you wish to make it capable of survey you lose it" (31).

Grade's "surveying" of the community of his childhood belies this admonition, but only because his philosophy toward collective memory is predicated on Buber's own IIThou philosophy, which says that we cannot properly make meaning of a world in which we view purely from our own standpoint (what Buber calls the IIlt mentality, in which everything apart from ourselves is "othered").

Initially, however, writing seems the farthest thing from Grade's mind, showing that he suspicious of its virtue or efficacy of his own voice. When it is suggested to him that his old writings may still exist, he responds, "believe me, I have no need now of those manuscripts" (366). Perhaps the materiality ofpersonal artifacts-ofmementos­ may be jarringly frivolous, even disrespectful to the blankness of the ghettoes. They may even point to a complicity in the tragedy itselr,29 Nevertheless, I believe Grade's initial

29 Theodor Adorno writes, in "Cultural Criticism and Society," "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," suggesting that cultural criticism and barbarism are intrinsically wrapped up in one another. Adorno's admonition is underscored by Hayden White's assessment ofthe role of the literary arts, or "poetizing," has on the culture around it, that it "is not an activity that hovers or, 56

impulse is to lose faith in the need for and/or usefulness oflanguage to make meaning in the face of the complete and utter destruction of his community. While this may represent knee-jerk hyperbole (like the claim following 9/11 that the tragedy marked the

"death of irony," for instance), it is reasonable to say that not only might the traditional

means by which humans understand or express feeling fall short in the wake of the

Holocaust, but that such an event is beyond comprehension or representation.3o And while, referring to the work of Marita Sturken, Kerwin Lee Klein writes that "memory is

the mode ofdiscourse typical ofthe "postmodem condition" (138), he also states, referring to the work ofMichael Roth, "memory can rescue history from the ironists"

(141). Therefore, memory, rather than language or metaphor, is a useful starting point

for the reconstruction ofGrade's community.

Nevertheless, it becomes incumbent upon Grade to determine what kind of

language he will use in order to put his memory into words. In the first chapter, I showed

how Grade, like John Clare before him, gives shared subjectivity to people and land. For

the social realism of his novels, Grade abandons the "I" altogether, which, along with a

shifting offocalization, as in the example ofGavriel and the rabbi, gives a subjectivity to

his characters, the objects ofhis memory. As Barthes writes, in his "Historical

Discourses," on the lack ofthe "I" in realist genre, "Elimination ofmeaning from

'objective' discourse only produces a new meaning; confirming once again that the

transcends, or otherwise remains alienated from life or reality, but represents a mode ofpraxis which serves as the immediate base ofall cultural activity" (from 1966's "The Burden of History," qtd. in Young 4). By the same token, Grade's decision to write, however obliquely, about this tragedy, shows that literature, if a contributing factor to the destruction, is also useful for rebuilding. Perhaps this is what gives the poet H.D. hope when she stares at walls amongst ruins. 30 To this end, Alvin H. Rosenfeld has written that "there are no metaphors for Auschwitz" (qtd. in Young 90). 57 absence of an element in a system is just as significant as its presence" (Barthes 154 qtd. in Young 9). The "new meaning" manifests itself in the retrieval, the reconstruction of a sense ofplace from which Grade has in essence recused himself. Grade's choice is both ethical and strategic, to reconstruct a center that, tragically, to paraphrase Yeats, "could not hold."

In retrospect, Grade's imagination of a particular center for the Vilna Jews can be seen as part of the historical debate of what the center ofYiddish culture and literature

should be in the 20th century. In the 1920s, Ukrainian-born writer Dovid Bergelson was pushing to move Yiddish writing away from a center he felt was harmful to the culture.

Like Grade, Bergelson imagined a literary landscape which he did not occupy at the time ofhis writing. Bergelson's vision of a Yiddish literary landscape was dual-purposed.

His first goal was to rescue Yiddish literature from what he felt was the ubiquitous setting

ofthe shtetl, the small town of Ashkenazi life made famous by the T evye stories of

Sholem Aleichem. Despite writing from swinging post-WWI Berlin, Berge1son

envisioned the Yiddish literary experience set in the agricultural steppes ofRussia. In

this way, Bergelson was participating in a contemporary trend ofJews, in their newfound

freedom granted through immigration or the Soviet Union's relaxation ofland ownership

laws to include Jews, seeking out land to tend and live upon. Therefore, we see that

while Grade was certainly aware and sensitive towards this desire-as evinced by the

story ofGavriel in "The Oath"-it was an ideological drive shared by an earlier era and

by a region that was relatively distant from Grade's own setting ofVi Ina and environs.

Therefore, more relevant to our discussion of Grade's strategy in recreating

community is Bergelson's second concern that Yiddish literature was dependent upon 58 stock characters and situations that, according to Alison Shachter, "obscures the distinction between the social reality of Jewish life and its representation in Yiddish literature." She continues, "[Bergelson's] mimetic model is culinary. The writer roots through the ingredients ofhis kitchen (space) and cooks up a literary work (landscape).

The literary work is not a reflection ofreality, but is composed of its ingredients"

(Schachter 10). This raises a question for Grade's mimesis: is he, as Bergelson might worry, creating something of an "ideal" Yiddish landscape out of a trite, eternalized space? The question seems Platonic in nature. Certainly, because Grade's landscape must be imagined, it cannot be a "reflection of [what Grade's reader perceive as] reality."

However, Grade's re-established community still feels very real, as Grade's attempt at mimesis generates detailed portraits ofpeople and places that go beyond stock characters and scenarios that are the bane of Bergelson. In this passage from "Laybe-Layzar's

Courtyard," Reb Weintraub thinks back on his former position as rabbi ofa small Polish town, where he found himself becoming permissive in his interpretation of the law in the midst ofabject poverty:

Had he only been a rav in a wealthy community, he probably would have had no compunctions about declaring an improperly slain or internally blemished cow not kosher, no matter how fat, or in issuing a ban on a wayward butcher. He would have chastised the wagon drivers for driving into town after sundown on a Friday. But it had been his lot to serve in Zaskowicz, which had never been a wealthy town even in the best of times. Its Jews had to barter with the Polish peasants in the rural areas, exchanging soap, thread and pots for bristle, rags, and live chickens. When the Polish government outlawed even this poor-people's enterprise, the bottom fell out for the Jews ofZaskowicz. The laborers sat all day without a stitch ofwork to do; the shopkeepers gazed out to the horizon, but there was not a customer in sight. The peddlers loitered around the marketplace like lost souls drifting in the netherworld; they were forbidden to enter the Polish hamlets. And it was these poor wretches who came to ask the Rav, may they or may they not, and the Rav must answer, no, they may not, it is forbidden. Rabbi Y oel Weintraub had not quarrel 59

with the Almighty, God forbid, with His laws or His Torah; but let someone else be the one to say no, not he. (123)

Perhaps the reader can see why Bergelson might have wanted to move away from this setting, which, while imbued with Grade a sense ofplace and dignity, does not seem to advance the Yiddish culture into the 20th century. We see the familiar trope ofexistential groundlessness, as Jews are confmed to their own town, a place where little can be accomplished. Its rural areas are not for farming, but merely for the stereotypical Jewish activity ofhaggling. But even this seemingly inert space, in Grade's hands, is abuzz with movement and life, though admittedly a hard one. It was Auerbach's assertion that Emile

Zola advanced the mimetic model to heretofore unequalled heights, by his depiction of the lowest of the rung of society not in a strictly comical way, but with a serious and moral tone (Auerbach 510). Similarly, Grade's poor Jews are pitiful, but not grotesque.

There is empathy in Grade's depiction, because, to paraphrase Auerbach speaking of

Zola, Grade knows how these people thought and talked (515). The rabbi rises beyond the level ofa stock character because ofhis flexibility toward the book; moreover, he takes into account all the myriad social, economic, political, and spiritual concerns ofthe community. Therefore, he stands in contrast to the rabbi in "The Oath." One could imagine Rabbi Weintraub and Gavriel coming to an understanding about the spiritual importance of nature's bounty. Finally, despite its provincial nature, the reader witnesses the shted as part ofa larger geopolitical framework, and thus may have even satisfied

Bergelson as a legitimate representation of Yiddish life.

Iffor Bergelson, in the years prior to WWII, the desire was to move the Yiddish

Jews out ofthe Shtetl, then for Grade, the shtetl and ghetto milieux become viable once more. Bergelson's intention was to "make modem Yiddish culture relevant in the urban 60

centres ofthe fonner Pale (i.e. Grade's Vilna), the quintessential Jewish space ofEastern

Europe" (Schachter 16), yet this desire to create ways for imagining Jews outside ofthe

shted diminishes in importance when the shted existence is voided. It is therefore

essential (and only possible) for Grade to recreate, to reimagine the community ofhis past, rather than forge a vision ofthe present or future, due to the irrevocable, unfortunate

fact that Yiddish Vilna is no more, and that the remaining days and memories ofthe

survivors are also fInite in number.

Whereas Bergelson (and Grade) had a distinct setting in mind for the evolving

Yiddish literary tradition, Meylekh Ravitsh, a Galician-born poet and essayist who

eventually immigrated to Canada, thought that such a setting was better left unarticulated.

Ravitsh reflected upon the dubious nature of place in Yiddish literature when he wrote,

"It has become clear to me that a literature that has no centre must seek its centre

precisely in its centrelessness" (qtd. in Schachter 12). To Ravitsh, "centrelessness" was a

presciently desirable quality, anti-nationalistic in an era that was witnessing the rise of

Fascism. Ifnationalism led to an annihilation of a way of life for Jews and others, then

centerlessness becomes a powerful and important-if ironic-way ofpositioning oneself

in the midst of loss, as Baer has suggested, in order "to gain access to the event" (Baer

43). Writing under a different set of circumstances, admittedly, Grade engages this same

question in a complicated manner, as he affixes his Jews to an essentially singular center

that obviates an expression of nationalism, not only because of the insularity of the

community but also because of the simple fact that the center exists only in memory first,

and in the written word, second. Furthennore, we have seen in the anti-territorial fashion

that he writes about land-as a natural space in which all humans can and should fmd 61 spiritual fulfillment-and in his proclivity to see things from both sides, that Grade is not promoting any kind ofnationalistic ethos.

Still, the reconstruction ofa center remains ofparamount importance to Grade's fiction. The story ofyoung Grade's garden underscores the fragile sense of place, the difficulty to achieve inhabitancy not only in a Ghetto but amongst a world that has been historically ambivalent (to put it mildly) toward Jews. The examples of Grade's female characters-Nehamele and Gracia-show that maintaining one's own center, geographically and spiritually, is a key to their subjectivity. We see through these examples that even when Jews have access to permanence, in the insularity ofthe ghetto, desire and anxiety highlight a displacement from natural and familial zones that are

central to the heart ofJews. Grade's self-prescribed fate to walk the alleys "forever,"

recasts him as a modem "wandering Jew." Like the peripatetic Sol Nazerman in The

Pawnbroker, who cannot even sit still for very long, and who does not feel apiece with

his surroundings-his very metier is about transient people and possessions--Grade

evinces the difficulty one experiences in grounding oneself after a tragedy. At the same

time, A.S. Zaks, in his 1917 book Khoreve veltn (Ruined Worlds) writes, "An individual

can ultimately find a place to exist and come to feel at home ...The whole, however,

cannot transport its traditions and customs to another place" (qtd. in Kugelmass &

Boyarin 8). While Grade settled in New York City, it is Vilna that remains his home.

Because Vilna cannot come to New York, literally or even in terms of its essence--most

of its inhabitants are gone~Grade remains in Vilna. By Grade remaining in Vilna, Vilna

can continue to exist for Grade's readers. In his ability to keep Vilna as home, as well as 62 to reimagine his community in a meaningful way, Grade contradicts Bergelson's accusation, as characterized by Allison Schachter, that such a feat cannot be achieved:

But emigre writers cannot preserve the life of afolk that has no homeland and no home. Such writers do not even know who their folk are. Thus they cannot fulfill the social responsibility of representing and preserving their people's historical way of life. The only modes of representation open to them are the story's distorted mimesis, its mirror images and doppelgangers, and its modernist expressionism. (17)

Bergelson is articulating Grade's and others' very complaint toward Isaac Bashevis

Singer, whether it has merit or not, that the latter did a disservice to the Yiddish tradition with his modernist, fabulist storytelling, that he was not truly in touch with hisfolk.31

Grade's faithful, rather than distorted mimesis, evinces the very opposite capacity than

Bergelson details; furthermore, as a survivor of the Shoah, Grade is condemned to know who his folk are, burdened with the responsibility of "representing and preserving [his] people's historical way of life" for the remainder ofhis existence.

Yet, Grade's narrative strategy comes only after a cataclysmic event that, again, made rules like Bergelson's irrelevant, and which complicates Grade's purpose even further. Even as Grade wrote his novels, Yiddish-speaking American Jews were reaching middle and old age, so much that it is today generally considered to be a moribund language. However, language itself, and Yiddish specifically, becomes a central component of how Grade re-materializes the community destined to remain only

31 In 1980 when Grade received an honorary degree from Yeshiva University, its president, Norman Lamm, seemed to be criticizing Singer as much as applauding Grade when he noted that it was "a time when literature, even Yiddish literature, often wallows in the mud of cynicism and frivolity, in the scatological swamp of amorality; when it heralds the fascination with the demonic and with sexual weirdness" (Newhouse 2). Perhaps a parallel can be made between Lamm's criticism of Singer and Auerbach's reading of Hugo-the latter whom he felt dwelled too much in the sublime and grotesque to be called a true realist (468). 63 an idea, a memory. Grade's exclusive use of the "vernacular" language-he never wrote

32 a word in English, despite apparently possessing an eloquence with its spoken form _ becomes not only a way of making material an element ofhis community that the

Holocaust all but killed off, but also becomes a purposeful, concrete way of centering the community-of, in the words of Dalia Ross-Daniel, "reconstructing their [particular] psychical and social void," especially in an era where Yiddish is not the primary language spoken by Jews. Ross-Daniel has pointed out the historical connection between language and construction of Jewish community, which is especially relevant with regards to Grade's respect for the collective subject: "Yiddish became the linguistic tool endowed with [the] capacity for nurturance and charged with the task of reconstructing the missing collective self... [it] emerged as a healing and redemptive literature"; this was needed throughout recent centuries, she asserts, following periods of violence against

Jews, "whole communities were left once again with the task of reconstructing their psychical and social void" (Ross-Daniel 42). Therefore, in light ofBergelson's protestations, Ross-Daniel would argue that Yiddish has an intrinsic capacity to continually represent and re-represent the folk-the "collective self"-who speak it.33

However, the fact remains that the currency ofYiddish over Hebrew in the

Ashkenazi world has almost completely flip-flopped, potentially divesting Yiddish of its present and future power to reconstruct a center for the descendants ofEastern European

Jews. Thus, ifYiddish is not associated with poverty and misery, it may be still

32 "Grade's Heart Is Still in Vilna," New York Times, Oct.28, 1974 33 Ellen Rifkin seems to be responding directly to Bergelson when she writes, "Yiddish has been healing for me. It was (and is) the language of whole people, three-dimensional individuals, and not stereo typic pious figures whose lives were split between misery on the one hand and prayer on the other" (Rifkin 28). 64 associated only with Bubbeh and Zaideh. 34 Anita Norich goes so far as to say that as the

Jewish cultural language has switched between Hebrew and Yiddish, it renders their

"perceived centrality to Jewish culture" to the state of being "no more than a trace, a gesture" (Norwich 781).35 In light ofthis sentiment, Grade's plants, "of which not a trace remains," become a metaphor for a people's language and memories, as well as for their bodies.

When one thinks of how Hebrew, not Yiddish, became the language used by

Israel (arguably the current "center" of Jewish culture), then Grade's insistence on the use ofYiddish to reconstruct a center for his community becomes more significant. In fact, both choices show the importance ofthe connection between language and place (as

Grade has also shown with humans and land) to a people whose are not historically associated with either.36 While no doubt family and religion are ofutmost importance to

Grade in his recreation of his lost community, with his devotion to his mother and the religious practices of his father being central to his oeuvre, language and place are

34 One ofthe most intriguing ironies found in Kann's oral history of the chicken ranchers is the gap that emerged between Eastern European immigrants and their children. While the parents repeatedly lament that their children did not follow in their footsteps, the children complain that their parents were so involved in their agronomic, social, and political commitments that they did not take the time or effort to instill them with the Yiddish culture and language to which they held on so tightly. In turn, they did not pass it on to their own children, the third generation Jewish­ Americans. 35 Norich should be reminded, however, that the word "gesture," from the pen of Helene Cixous (liTo fly/steal is woman's gesture, to steal into language to make it fly"), is invested with much more potency than Norich's synonymous "trace." 36 John Myhill, a scholar of Jewish sociolinguistics, has identified four "variables" that groups define themselves with: 1) Personal Ancestry/Race; 2) Religious affiliation/ beliefs/ tradition/lifestyle; 3) Native/everyday languages; and 4) Citizenshipllivingplace (Myhill 13). Of these four, historically, Jews place the most importance on the first two: ancestry (from the mother's side) and religious affiliation (why converts can be considered Jews). Moreover, they are the two factors which make a Jew eligible for citizenship in the state ofIsrael 65

equally important in Grade's recreation ofthe Jews of Vilna.37 The recreation of a particular place in minute detail, expressed through the language ofits Jews, becomes a defining characteristic of his ability to tell the collective history ofhis people. Moreover, the preservation of language and recreation ofplace through the printed page establish a materiality-a permanence-ofthis community that is arguably as powerful as the variables of ancestry and faith, which have been weakened by assimilation, mixed- marriage, and secularism in the global Jewish community.

Nevertheless, Bergelson's disdain for an "idealized" Yiddish culture points to a paradox inherent in Grade's choice to write in a language ofthe past, in a language that few can read and which is not being republished on a wide scale. The rejection ofEnglish or Hebrew as the language of his stories may force us to recalculate the subjectivity of

Grade's narrative, if his memories are meant for a privileged few, rather than a wide readership. Grade's recreation of place, of center, ofpermanence, even in the materiality ofthe written word, is threatened ifno one has the capacity to "see" this place. Rather than a naked corpse, no corpse is seen at all. However, the "I/Thou" connection between

Grade and his collective corpse perhaps can only be maintained by writing in their language, even if it puts dissemination at risk. As postmodem cultural scholar Jeffrey

Shandler writes: "Often the translation ofYiddish is regarded as having double-edge consequences: on the one hand, expanding the reach of Yiddish writers beyond the limits of a diminished Yiddish readership and on the other, undoing the close bond among the language, its literature and readership" (Shandler 104). While it is open to debate whether Grade upholds or undermines the collective memory through his use ofYiddish,

37 And obviously to the State of Israel, too, whose existence underscores the primacy ofHebrew and the Sinai Peninsula in Jewish history and culture. 66 ironically, it may be its existence in a language that "no one can read" that will help

Grade's work to maintain cultural currency, and his community to continue to be read.

Shandler argues that Yiddish, since the destruction ofthe Eastern European people, and the construction ofan Israeli state that chose Hebrew as its national language, exists in what he calls a "post-vernacular" mode. For the generations ofAmerican Jews who know only snippets ofwhat is now their grandparents' or great-grandparents' native tongue, Yiddish is a source ofgreat pride, ifhardly used in practice. As a "post­ vernacular" language (a language perceived in a postmodern way), Yiddish's signification lies not at the sentence level, but in the cultural meaning it symbolizes, and thus perhaps investing Grade's work with cache for present and future generations of

Jewish-Americans.

The postmodern currency, however unintentional, which stems from Grade's use ofYiddish, can be extended to his oeuvre as post-Shoah author, despite the explicit absence ofthe historical event in his novels. As Kugelmass & Boyarin have written about the "memorial books," their association with the Shoah renders it impossible to read them in an objective fashion.38 This points to the fact that, despite the potential materiality ofmemory (Zelizer 4), it remains the province of the reader, as well as purveyors of that material representation of memory, to control or make meaning out of it. This is despite the fact that Grade's fiction is set apart from other post-Shoah writing in its circumvention ofthe cycle of forgetting and remembering associated with the post­

38 "The reality depicted in the memorial books is distorted because it is all seen-and can only be seen-through the prism ofthe Holocaust [ ...] The account of"Anarchist Activities" in Krinek (Krynki) includes no reference to the Holocaust, yet the violent conflict between the anarchist territories and the Jewish manufacturers is overshadowed by a retrospective consciousness of the community they all belonged to and the fate they all shared ...We read the memorial books through that same prism" (Kugelmass & Boyarin 14-15). 67

Holocaust period. Barbie Zelizer argues that following WWII there was a period of 20­

30 years where memories ofthe Holocaust were swept under the rug, a period of

"forgetting to remember" (202). However, Grade proves to be both inclusive and exclusive ofthis claim, having written memoirs relating to his experience during the

Holocaust at the same time undertaking to put his energy into the recreation of a community that is untouched by the Holocaust. Grade certainly embodies the "never forget" mentality ofthe period Zelizer details as one of"remembering to remember" which began in the 1970s. However, unlike photographs ofthe atrocity, which Zelizer argues have become so commonplace as to cause its viewers to "remember to forget,"

Grade's work does not desensitize his audience through an overabundance ofcompelling ifredundant images that lack a center and begin to act merely as reference points for other examples ofviolence, like the Rwandan genocide. Grade's minute attention to a particular place allows no one to forget, through remembering, who these people are and what this place is, even if his readers must unavoidably remember them through "the prism" ofthe Holocaust.

Kugelmass and Boyarin have written that "the intense valuation of historical memory as a vital act incumbent upon every Jew became a cornerstone of Jewish consciousness" (18). Their architectural metaphor is apt in reference to the work of

Chaim Grade, whose memories of his childhood community of Vilna become a fundamental part ofthe reconstruction ofthat community. When Grade's garden is destroyed, he sows fields for his characters to tend. When he feels unmarked graves under his feet, he writes books that act as gravestones.39 In the first chapter I discussed

39 Yet, I am tempted to question the aptness ofthis metaphor because it betrays the vitality captured in Grade's stories. 68 how Grade deconstructs Jewish spirituality and identity by showing that nature should not be subordinated to the book. Yet, this chapter has shown that books-if not necessarily the book--can be a foundation for pennanence, for a connection to a center that is inhabited by a vibrant culture. For Grade, the written word becomes a powerful and noble substitute for something that has vanished from the earth. Yet, Grade's stories are purposefully not stories ofthe Holocaust, of the events leading up to or following the tragic era. Rather than be defined by a singular historical event, Grade's Jews prove that their destruction is more meaningful if we know what it was that was destroyed. To this end, Grade writes, "and so we must live with our memories of those who have perished­ not with the memory of their terrible deaths, but oftheir joys and sorrows in life" (362). 69

Epilogue:

Grade's "Diasporic Consciousness"

As I became more deeply involved in this project, it became clear to me that, even if

Chaim Grade were to remain in relative obscurity, the concerns his work expresses about

Jews, land, and social equality remain not only viable but omnipresent. However, it was a bit of a shock to fmd such a bizarre, close echoing of Grade's milieu in Michael

Chabon's 2007 novel, The Yiddish Policeman's Union, which parodies-amongst other things-the difficulties Jews have had in establishing roots. In an alternate-history scenario, Chabon's Jews have escaped the Holocaust, but instead ofbeing ferreted to

Israel, millions ofthem have ended up in Alaska, thanks to a timely-if temporary- piece of legislation by the American government.

However, as the narrator explains, this disparate throng of Jews, comprised of many regions and sects, do not find the bucolic homeland they were expecting. In essence, in the 1940s, they have merely been taken from one ghetto and placed in another. Instead of the "fabled north," with "icebergs, polar bears, walruses, penguins, tundra, snow in vast quantities," they are brought to Sitka, a grim port town on the panhandle that has

nowhere to spread out, to grow, to do anything more than crowd together in the teeming style ofViIna and Lodz. The homesteading dreams of a million landless Jews, fanned by movies, light fiction, and information brochures provided by the United States Department of the Interior­ snuffed on arrival. Every few years some utopian society or other would acquire a tract of green that reminded some dreamer of a cow pasture. They would found a colony, import livestock, pen a manifesto. And then the climate, the markets, and the streak ofdoom that marbled Jewish life would work their charm. The dream farm would languish and fail (291). 70

Here Chabon is acutely parodying both the world ofthe ghetto as well as the Jewish-

American agriculture experience, which, despite a handful ofgenuine successes, was mostly characterized by swift and unceremonious failures, generally due to poor choices of land and untrained participants. As the date of "reversion" approaches-the time when the Jews of Sitka will once again be cast out for parts unknown, only sixty years after their arrival-a group of fundamentalist Jews attempt a hostile takeover of faraway

Palestine. Ironically, the closest the Sitka Jews get to a successful "farming" project is the fundamentalists' clandestine raising of a rare cow which, according to the Bible, will accompany the restoration ofthe Temple ofJerusalem (295).

Chabon's novel raises similar existential concerns as this thesis, as it demonstrates

the concomitant anxiety over the impermanence ofJewish existence and the desire for

land. However, the ending makes for a doubly pessimistic story. Not only is the failure

to make a genuine connection with nature played for laughs, but the violent succession by

Jews to land in the Middle East is shown to be an unavoidable reality, even in an alternate

unIverse.

Conversely, one of the implicit points that Grade's narratives make is that a

Jewish homeland, that is, a place where Jews can develop a sense of inhabitancy, can be

found outside of Israel-and without resorting to violence. Nevertheless, as Israel

continues to be thought of as homeland, past, present, and future, ofthe Jewish people, its

mythic status undermines the desire-both material and spiritual-to be connected to

land. As Ellen Rifkin writes,

In emphasizing only religious life when teaching Jewish history, Jewish educators have mystified our existence as a people. They have created an impression that the earthly and secular lives ofdiaspora Jews have not mattered, and that the elusive yet grounding ingredient in a human life that 71

we have come to call "sense of place" has no meaning for Jews except for in Israel (28-29).

Thus it remains a paradox of the Jewish culture that the aspiration to be tied to a piece of

land often obviates the material and spiritual connections which would allow for a genuine sense ofinhabitancy for the people who live in that land.

Ironically, in present-day Israel, both the sacred and the profane-as characterized

(and cherished) by Grade-have recently found themselves in a state of vulnerability.

Recently, the Israeli parliament has proposed ending, or at least severely limiting,

subsidies for ultra-orthodox "benchwarmers," as the growing ranks of these scholars

threaten to diminish the future pool of employable men (Kershner, "Benefits" np). At the

same time, more and more agricultural land, part and parcel of the Zionist project at its

inception, is being rezoned for commercial and residential development (Benstein,

"Shavuot" np). Therefore, despite Rifkin's observation, modem global capitalism

presents as much ofa threat to Jewish inhabitancy in the State of Israel as the religious

and cultural traditions of Judaism.

One of the most troubling stories presently coming out of Israel is the much-

publicized infringement upon the natural landscape of Palestine, as illustrated by the

2008 film The Lemon Tree (an Israeli production, it should be noted). The same has

happened on the West Bank, but to olive trees, "an ancient symbol of peace and plenty

that has also long been a Palestinian emblem of steadfastness and commitment to the

land, [have] increasingly become a symbol of local, almost intimate, struggle and strife"

(Kershner, "Hopes" n.p.). And recently, Israeli soldiers crossed the Lebanon border to

cut down a tree, snapping a cease-fire and resulting in casualties on both sides (Kershner

and Bakri). In this way, the State ofIsrael, whether under the auspices ofreligion or 72 realpolitik, undermines not only their own citizens' connection to land, but that oftheir neighbors, as welL

Therefore it is heartening that the current sustainability and "back to the land" movements in America have a Jewish contingent. Apparently, reports ofthe death of the family farm, Jewish or otherwise, have been greatly exaggerated, as it has been pointed out that "there are Jewish farmers to be found in every part of this country. Jews farm and they do the type of farming that is appropriate to the part ofthe country that they live in"

(Lipman, "Greenberg" n.p.). This kind of respect for the land-and the land ofothers­

has also been expressed by participants in an orthodox colony in western Massachusetts,

founded about a decade ago. While maintaining the Jewish tradition of not milking cows on Saturdays, they decided to ask Gentiles to do it so the animals "will not be in pain"

(Belluck 1). In this way, the rhythms of both human civilization and the land are

respected.

When I read about this, I couldn't help but thinking of a particular passage from

Grade's "The Oath," where Gavriel is having lunch with his overseer, the head field hand

Godl Wilenczek. On one hand, Wilenczek is goyish and profane: "he rolled up a few

slices of his non~kosher salami and placed them gleefully on his outstretched tongue"

(273). Knowing that Gavriel is supposed to be studying with the rabbi, Wilenczek is

certainly flaunting the rules. All the same, we see that there is more to his character than

this: "Gavriel admired Godl Wilenczek-for his knowledge of agriculture, for his robust

way oflife, and even for his big mouth" (274). While it could be said that the young

Gavriel is simply lionizing someone who works with the land, and therefore ignoring his

more unsavory traits, I believe that Gavriel, as a Jewish cultivator and potential 73 landowner in the era post-Russian Revolution, may be said to be evincing what Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin have called a "diasporic consciousness": that is, "a consciousness of a Jewish collective as one sharing space with others, devoid of exclusivist and dominating power," but which does not "[eradicate] cultural difference" (Boyarin 713).

Gavriel, like many ofthe other characters found in this thesis, does not attempt to dominate others in terms of land or culture. Instead, he respects the cultural difference of his fellow farmers, and it might even be said that the connection that they have with the land carries over into the human realm, allowing them to connect with each other.

This thesis has shown that the work ofChaim Grade points to possibilities ofa

Jewish inhabitancy and sense of permanence not just through a connection to land but also through language. Therefore, it is possible that Grade's decision to write in Yiddish further enables him to exhibit "diasporic consciousness." Anita Norich has coined terms for two "paradigms of modem Jewish literary history," positing that while "Hebraism seeks to maintain the distinctiveness of Jewish culture ...Yiddishism, by contrast, insists on intersections, interdependence, on the virtues ofliving within other cultures" (Norich

780). By promoting the tolerance ofcultural difference, Norich's assertion gets at the heart of the Boyarins' goal, and echoes Rifkin's objections toward a continued focus on biblical traditions that mandate living in a particular land, but do not appear to respect the land itself, nor the people living on it. It is unclear what Chaim Grade's politics were, since he wrote about Jews from all walks of life in such an impartial fashion. However, by stressing the themes of community over the individual, equality over patriarchy, and the coexistence ofpeople of different backgrounds with the land, Grade's work performs the almost magical feat of endowing his people with a deep sense of center as well as an 74 appreciation of the interconnectedness of all life. In this way his writing remains relevant at a time when humans and nature are in dire need of both. 75

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