(JTA) — Sixty years after he first began serializing it in the Yiddish press, and 42 years after publisher Alfred A. Knopf acquired the book, “Sons and Daughters” — the last novel by the late, great Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade — is landing in bookstores this week.

To call it “long-awaited” is an understatement.

How the novel came to be published in English translation is a story of family intrigue, literary detective work and dogged creativity on the part of its translator and editors.

The result, a sprawling 600-plus-page book about a rabbi in 1930s Lithuania and the different paths taken by his children, is “quite probably the last great Yiddish novel,” the critic Adam Kirsch writes in an introduction. Dwight Garner, in a New York Times review, calls it “a melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny.”

“We could not have let this die. It had to be out there,” said the book’s translator, Rose Waldman, in an interview. “It had to be available to the English speaker.”

Waldman was hired in 2015 to translate a manuscript that had already taken a circuitous route from Grade’s typewriter to the cluttered rooms of his Bronx apartment to the limbo of probate law. Grade, who died in 1982 at 74, was highly regarded — although never as widely known to English readers as rival Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. What was perhaps his best-known book — “Rabbis and Wives,” drawing on his memories of the pious, Jewish, vanished Vilna of his youth — appeared in English only the year he died. A memoir, “My Mother’s Sabbath Days,” was published four years later.

In 1983, Knopf signed a contract with Grade’s widow, Inna Hecker Grade, for what was then called “The Rabbi’s House.” Inna, notoriously protective of her husband’s legacy, worked with a translator and editors on a few chapters of the book but then retreated into obstinate silence. Until her death in 2010, she rebuffed publishers and scholars who sought access to Grade’s manuscripts, correspondence and works in progress.

The Grades left no heirs, and in 2013 the Bronx public administrator named the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel as executors of the Grade estate, and YIVO inherited his papers. The ensuing treasure hunt led to the discovery, in 2014, of a 148-page Yiddish galley that Waldman assumed was the finished novel later to be called “Sons and Daughters.” Instead, as she realized after a year’s work on the translation, the novel was incomplete. According to material uncovered by Yehuda Zirkind, a graduate student at Tel Aviv University, she had been working on what Grade had planned as the first volume of a two-volume work.

Piecing together the second volume involved a dive into the YIVO archive, where Waldman found more chapters that Grade had serialized in the Yiddish newspapers Tag-Morgn Zhurnal and Forverts between 1965 and 1976. Waldman got to work translating these installments and knit them together into the just-published opus.

A happy ending? Not quite –........

© The Times of Israel