After Delay, Yiddish Writer\'s Papers Will Be Made Available to Public

The papers and personal library of the esteemed Yiddish writer Chaim Grade have finally found a homeâ€"or more precisely two.

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan and the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem have been chosen to jointly receive Grade’s literary estateâ€"including 40 boxes of his letters, manuscripts, and photographs and 20,000 books in his wide-ranging personal library. Although the materials will reside in YIVO’s home on West 16th Street, the two organizations will jointly arrange for the translation and publication of works by Grade (pronounced GRAH-duh), including much that had not previously been published, and digitize the collection for scholars around the world to study. They will also seek to raise $150,000 for a fellowship so a scholar of Yiddish can write a book about the postwar Yiddish world that Grade inhabited.

The fate of thecollection had been in limbo since the death of his widow, Inna Hecker Grade, who died in the north Bronx in 2010 without leaving behind immediate survivors or a legally valid will. The estate was taken over by the office of the Bronx Public Administrator, Bonnie Gould, who asked a half dozen organizations, including Harvard and the University of Texas, as well as YIVO, to review the collection and make bids for its preservation and disposition.

The collection’s fate was complicated by a carbon copy of a will that Mrs. Grade apparently wrote but never formally filed with the courts. In it she requested the Yiddish scholar, Yechiel Szeintuch, an emeritus professor at Hebrew University, to take possession of his papers. Jonathan Brent, the executive director of YIVO, acknowledged that the joint agreement was a Solomonic way of avoiding any quarrels arising from Inna Grade’s will. The National Li! brary, which owns the world’s largest collections of Hebraica and Judaica, is located on the campus of Hebrew University and when its new building is completed in 2017 it will be able to display documents from the Grade collection.

Neither Mr. Brent nor Jay H. Ziffer, counsel to the Bronx public administrator, would reveal the size of the joint bid, but the proceeds will eventually be paid to a handful of first cousins of Mrs. Grade, the closest relatives, who still must prove their kinship in Surrogate’s Court.

Grade, who died in 1982, grew up in Vilna, now Vilnius, a vibrant intellectual hub of Polish and Lithuanian Jews, and studied in yeshivas but forsook Orthodox Judaism and wrote poetry as part of a fabled circle called Yung Vilne. He survived the war by fleeing to Russia but lost his first wife and mother. After meeting Inna Grade, he immigrated to the United Staes and wrote several novels, scores of poems, and a memoir, “My Mother’s Sabbath Days.” Among his most admired fictional works are “The Yeshiva” and “Rabbis and Wives.”

“Chaim Grade produced a body of work of Faulknerian power in its depiction of place and the psychological and moral depths of his characters,” Mr. Brent said in a statement.

While his works were highly praised, he never came close to achieving the fame or book sales of his putative rival Isaac Bashevis Singer. For that many blame his widow, who for two decades after his death parried efforts to translate or study his works.

Mr. Brent said so far no one has unearthed a novel that was never published in Yiddish. But many poems and shorter works have never seen the light of day and some longer fictional works were never translated into English. The two organizations will share the copyright.