Yid-Lit Treasure Hunt
by David Gutherz · 09/02/10
This has certainly been an exciting summer for Jewish literature fanatics. First, in the latest installment of a–I won’t say Kafkaesque–trans-continental bureaucratic battle-royal, there was the cracking of a Zurich bank vault that is thought to contain thousands of Kafka’s unpublished manuscripts. And now, a small cadre of experts are finally getting a chance to pan for hidden gems in the library of the (as-of-yet) little known Yiddish master Chaim Grade. For years, Grade’s texts had been hidden away by his widow, whose zeal for concealing her husband’s work made her the mirror image of Max Brod–who famously refused to honor his friend’s dying wish to burn his papers. But, with her passing, researchers are at last getting a closer look at the “tremendous literary mind” of a man who (like Kafka) clearly believed that ”writing is an assault on the frontiers.” As Jonathan Brent–Habitus contributor and director of the YIVO institute–comments, “As a Yiddish writer he is trying to position himself with writers like Faulkner…This is not the collection of a recluse. It is a collection of a writer with tremendous intellectual ambition.”
At the moment, neither Grade or Kafka’s treasure chests has yet yielded any true “literary gold”–but the hunt continues. In the meanwhile, check out this trailer for “The Quarrel,” a feature film based on one of Grade’s stories.
