Flight, Return, and Emigration:
The Wanderings of a Yiddish Writer During and After the Holocaust
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Part of the series, “A Wandering People: Jewish Journeys, Real and Imagined”
With Dr. David Fishman.
The Yiddish poet Chaim Grade fled his native city of Vilna, known to Jews as “the Jerusalem of Lithuania”, in late June 1941, as the Germans invaded the city. He spent the next four years as a refugee in the Soviet Union, homeless and malnourished. When Grade returned to Vilna in 1945, he found the city in ruins – and learned from survivors of the Vilna ghetto that his wife, mother, friends and colleagues had been murdered by the Nazis. He decided that he could not live where the streets were “paved with skulls”, and emigrated across Europe, settling in the United States in 1948. Grade recounted his life before, during, and immediately after the War in his moving memoir “My Mother’s Sabbath Days” (1953), written in New York. But in a sense, Grade stayed in Vilna for the remainder of his life, dedicating his literary career to the memory of his destroyed Jerusalem. We will follow his journey of exile and redemption through selections from his works.
ABOUT THE SERIES
As the pandemic surged and forced us into our homes, many of us dreamed with new intensity of being elsewhere. For Jews throughout the ages, the promises and perils of travel have been central to shaping the individual and collective experience. Notions of home and homeland have been redefined by Jewish wandering. Drawing on literary, spiritual, and historical sources and responses, JTS scholars explore what happens when Jews—whether by force or voluntarily, whether in reality or in the imagination—travel from one place to another.
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