My Mothers Sabbath Days

by Chaim Grade

Book Overview

This tender and moving memoir by the great Yiddish writer Chaim Grade takes us to the very source of his widely praised novels and poems the city of Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, during the years before World War II.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394509803
• ISBN13: 9780394509808
• Release Date: November 1986
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 397 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A melancholy look at a place & way of life that is no more.

Mr. Grade paints with words a lively, personal look at Jewish life in the Jerusalem of Lithuania in the twilight of its existence. "My Mother's Sabbath Days" is written in a way that enables the reader to feel as if he or she is in Vilna with Mr. Grade. We share the burden of day to day life, the joy and peace of celebrating the Sabbath, and an unforgettable journey with the simple Jews of Vilna, right before the bloody tide of the Shoah swept into history this unique way of life in Eastern Europe.

This is a great book, a work of art, much more than a memoir

Grade is a brooding writer, but one who also writes with grace and humor. "My Mother's Sabbath Days" is a memoir in the same way that Jorge Semprun's "Literature or Life" is a memoir, or Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." It is an artful recreation of a way of life, that is to say, a work of fiction in the most profound sense, a work that reproduces not only the surface of reallity, but its inner depths. Grade's reputation still lags far behind his deserts. He is certainly the equal of Isaac Bashevis Singer, but he recreates the world of Polish Jewry with less mockery and with a more brooding sense of tragic loss.