Rabbis and Wives

Plot

My grandparents all came from the very places written about in these three stories by Chaim Grade, who somehow survived the Holocaust and came to America afterwards. They had come long before. Before arriving in America, they lived in that now-vanished Jewish world of cheder, beth midrash, endless ritual, prayer, and study; a world in which women supported men, but had no voice outside the home. For me, these stories are like a kind of soul-archeology, digging into the past I never knew and about which my grandparents never told me. I ran track, played in the band, swam with all my non-Jewish friends every summer, dated anyone I wanted to, and eventually learned Japanese, not Hebrew. I was just too weird ! They couldn't speak of what they knew because, I suppose now, they didn't even know where to begin. Now, decades later, I have enjoyed reading the works of Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer, two authors well-known for their stories of the Eastern European Jewish world destroyed in the 20th century by Fascism and Communism. One day, a couple summers ago, I chanced upon this book at a yard sale in my hometown. I've just read it.
"The Rebbetzin" tells of a stubborn pill of a rabbi's wife who maneuvers her mild-mannered, hesitant husband from a small town pulpit to the chief rabbi's post in Grodno, a large city (now in Belarus). She also manages to make him a judge and a teacher. The idea is that she can do this because she was once engaged to the great light of Talmudic scholarship in Grodno, who broke the engagement, leaving her to marry Uri-Zvi, the small-town rabbi. Perele, no doubt, is a scheming, plotting shrew without a tender bone in her body. The plot, frankly, as in all Grade's stories here, is thin. What you get is a rich description of Jewish religious life, the world of rabbis, scholars, and hermit-like porushim. Contrasts are drawn between modernizing and traditional Jews, between those who want to emigrate and build Israel (Mizrahi) and those who want to wait for the Messiah (Agudah), and between those men who believe in strict interpretations of the law and those who are more tolerant. No Gentiles appear at all. It is as if the Jews were all by themselves. I found it hard, at times, to understand what Perele meant when she spoke. Perhaps the translation should have included some additions to help people like me, so removed in time and space.
"Laybe-Layzar's Courtyard" is a fascinating panorama of Jewish life in Vilna, Lithuania, once a capital of Jewish learning. It includes several stories at once, though the main one concerns two men, one tolerant, one fanatic in his strict interpretations of the Law. Love stories, a rake, ghosts, disputes, a poor synagogue---it's a wonderful recreation of the times.
"The Oath" tells of a dying man who forces his two children to swear oaths tying them to old Jewish life, separating them from the modernizing life of 1920s Poland. In a roundabout way, very subtle, he sends his wife to a pious, severe rabbi/shopkeeper who had divorced his own wife years before. Again, the story is flat description tracing slow changes in life. There are no sudden turns or very dramatic events in any of these stories, little suspense if any. Grade writes fiction that reads like extraordinarily rich biography of ordinary people. In your mind the whole time is the knowledge that all these people's lives came to a stop: their world destroyed. It is Grade's shout---we remember you !!!!! I repeat it.