Chaim Grade
Chaim Grade (Yiddish: חיים גראַדע) (April 4, 1910 – June 26, 1982) was one of the leading Yiddish writers of the twentieth century.
Chaim Grade | |
|---|---|
1968 dust jacket photograph | |
| Born | April 4, 1910 Vilnius, Lithuania |
| Died | 26 April 1982 (aged 72) The Bronx, New York |
| Occupation | Writer, Poet |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable works | |
Grade was born in Vilnius, Russian Empire and died in The Bronx, New York. He is buried in Riverside Cemetery, Saddle Brook, New Jersey.
Grade was raised Orthodox-leaning, and he studied in yeshiva as a teenager, but ended up with a secular outlook, in part due to his poetic ambitions. Losing his family in the Holocaust, he resettled in New York, and increasingly took to fiction, writing in Yiddish. Initially he was reluctant to have his work translated.
He was praised by Elie Wiesel as "one of the great—if not the greatest—of living Yiddish novelists." In 1970 he won the Itzik Manger Prize for contributions to Yiddish letters.