The long-awaited English translation of a work, Tolstoyan in scope, that chronicles the last, tumultuous decade of a world succumbing to the march of modernity.
Sprawling and incident-packed ... It’s such an intimate and detailed portrait of Orthodox Jewish life in the old country between the wars ... A melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny ... So tightly written that the action moves at a crawl. If it were a car, only first gear would work. And perhaps I’ve buried the lede, but Grade died before this novel’s completion ... Grade’s female characters are wonderfully realized.
Even unfinished, it’s a towering work, a loving lament for the shtetl life of 1920s and ’30s Eastern Europe and a heartrending chronicle of generational schism ... [An] inviting and vigorous translation ... Its portrayal of the burdens of inheritance and the bonds of blood will be comprehensible to anyone.
Grade’s prose mimetically reproduces the way Jews thronged in their tight quarters. His major accomplishment, though, is at the level of the individual characters. They’re vortices of ambivalence, anxious and raw and at odds with themselves, hypercritical yet hypersensitive, repressed but not undersexed, subject to delusions of grandeur or abasement or both in turns ... Masterpieces.
