Joseph Berger reports for the NY Times (archived) on a literary discovery:
Altie Karper had been waiting for the call for years.
An editor at a Knopf imprint, she had long wanted to publish an English translation of the last novel by Chaim Grade, one of the leading Yiddish authors of the 20th century. Grade was less well known than the Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, but was held in greater esteem in some literary quarters. He’d written the novel in question through the 1960s and 1970s, and published it in installments in New York’s Yiddish newspapers. But he died in 1982 without publishing a final Yiddish version.
The following year, his mercurial widow, Inna Hecker Grade, signed a contract with Knopf to publish an English-language translation. To do that, Knopf needed the original pages in Yiddish, with Grade’s changes and corrections. But Inna, who held his papers, put up roadblocks. She offered to translate, but then went silent, rebuffing entreaties from two editors over the years and refusing to consent to another translator. Karper took over the project in 2007, with no success.
And then, in 2010, Inna died without any children or a will, leaving behind a morass of 20,000 books, manuscripts, files and correspondence in their cluttered Bronx apartment. The Bronx public administrator turned the papers over to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel.
The galleys, if they existed, were somewhere in there.
And lo, they turned up:
In March, the 649-page novel, “Sons and Daughters,” painstakingly translated by Rose Waldman over a period of eight interrupted years, and edited for another two, will be published by Knopf.
Karper hailed the book as a masterpiece. In the book’s introduction, the literary critic Adam Kirsch said “Sons and Daughters” was “probably the last great Yiddish novel.” Giving it more of a contemporary spin, Brent said the novel, set in the turbulent period between the two world wars, distills “conflicts that still bedevil the Jewish people today.”
After a description of the novel’s plot and some perhaps overheated rhetoric by editors (one says it’s like Dostoyevsky, another calls it Tolstoyan), we get background on the author, who emigrated to the United States in 1948:
Settling into an apartment near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, Grade turned out a half-dozen novels that vividly depicted life in Eastern Europe, including “The Agunah,” “The Yeshiva” and “Rabbis and Wives,” as well as a collection of three novellas and a posthumously published memoir, “My Mother’s Sabbath Days.” Elie Wiesel praised him as “one of the great — if not the greatest — of living Yiddish novelists.”
After his death in 1982, publishers and scholars who wanted to track down Grade’s manuscripts and correspondence were almost always turned away by Inna. (In a letter, Grade once told her, “consciously or unconsciously your goal in life is to torture and scare me.”) Grade’s reputation began to fade.
Despite the fact that “Sons and Daughters” was never published as a book in Yiddish, interest in a translation remained. When Karper took over the project in 2007, she asked Brent to keep an eye out for the Yiddish galleys.
The galleys, stuffed into a plain manila envelope, were finally found in 2014 by Miriam Trinh, an Israeli scholar of Yiddish literature who was surveying the Grade archive at YIVO’s request. Waldman, who grew up speaking Yiddish in her Satmar Hasidic community in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and had translated works by S. Ansky and I.L. Peretz, was chosen to do the translation.
But the saga was not over yet. In 2016, Karper received a call from Waldman. “I have good news and bad news,” the translator said. “The good news is I finished the translation. The bad news is that novel doesn’t end. It just stops.”
Luckily, a graduate student at Tel Aviv University had collected correspondence from Grade that indicated the galleys were the first volume of a two-volume work. So Waldman was able to piece together that second volume from the rough weekly installments in the two Yiddish newspapers. Grade stopped writing the installments in 1976 and, for reasons that remained unclear, never resumed.
But then in 2023, after YIVO had digitized the entire trove of Grade’s apartment, Waldman stumbled across two pages that seemed to be an effort by Grade to map out the novel’s ending. She included those pages in a translator’s note at the book’s end.
“So here it is,” Waldman says in the note. “Not an actual ending but a glimpse of what we might have gotten had Grade completed ‘Sons and Daughters.’ It will have to suffice.”
Obviously one would have to read the novel to have any idea whether it lives up to the hype, but I always enjoy this kind of story of miraculous recovery, and I love the fact that the protagonist is a rabbi named Katzenellenbogen. However, I must slap the Times around for leaving the fact that the novel is, in fact, unfinished until the very end (long after the average reader will have gone on to other stories). I know it’s not a review, but it still makes you look like part of the hype machine… which of course you are, but try to retain a smidgen of distance, for Pete’s sake. (Thanks, Eric!)
But will the original Yiddish novel ever be published? Doesn’t sound like it unfortunately.
Yeah, I have to say such a publication would have basically zero chance of earning back what it cost.
My grandmother Shifra Bogin’s family had a legend that they were a branch of the grand Katzenellenbogen tree (which was known to have sprouted a number of distinct surnames, from Katznelsohn to Padva) (the latter is related to the fact that the original XV c. Katzenellenbogen was known as the great rabbi of Padua).
The Katzenellenbogen biggest family nest was in Bobruysk, not far from the Bogins’ Minsk. But digging deeper, I realized that the Bogins were already in Minsk when the official surnames were assigned to the Jews, and that they were often referred to as Beygens in those years (a Yiddish name which is cognate with German “Bogen”; both mean “arch” or “bow”). This means that the Katzenellenbogen connection was most likely an afterthought.
There were also Reygenboygen / Reigenbeigen / Reygenbogin (“Rainbow”) families in Minsk.
the grand Katzenellenbogen
They sound like the bees’ knees.
And of course there is also just “Katz” as an Ashkenazi Jewish surname which had literally nothing to do with cats….
An acronym, IIRC.
The Gentiles had had to content themselves with the drawn-out 16th-century War of the Kaztenelnbogen Succession, probably one of the more obscure entrants in the “War of the X Succession” genre that was popular for several centuries. (The eventual victor was Philip the Magnanimous, Landgrave of Hesse and an important early patron/protector of Dr. Martin Luther.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Katzenelnbogen_Succession
And of course there is also just “Katz” as an Ashkenazi Jewish surname which had literally nothing to do with cats….
Without actual historical data, my starting guess would have been 50-50 that either ‘cat’ or ‘Kohen Tzedek’ is a folk etymology. I do think the acronym etymology is true, but it’s frustrating to see it quoted all over the place, yet never with actual support.
It’s also frustrating that Beider’s encyclopedic, up-to-date and reliable books on Jewish surnames are expensive, and too few libraries have them.
As a shortcut for the regrettably poor availability of Beider’s fantastic books, I sometimes email him directly with questions, and he readily shares the snippets of interest. One can also ask him questions in the Jewish Onomastics section of the Jewish Roots forum (which is linked in my handle) and he usually answers within days.
As I recall, Ashkenazi surnames derived from animals are virtually nonexistent, and where they seem to exist at a first glance, they turn out to be patronymic or toponymic at a closer look.
This site has a useful search function; if you put Katz in the “contains” field you get:
Surname Book Title Entry in Book
1 Barkatz A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Maghreb, Gibraltar, and Malta” (2017) Barkat
2 Katz A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Italy, France, and “Portuguese” Communities” (2019) Cohen
3 Katzab A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Italy, France, and “Portuguese” Communities” (2019) Cazzav
4 Katzav A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Italy, France, and “Portuguese” Communities” (2019) Cazzav
5 Katzenellenbogen A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Italy, France, and “Portuguese” Communities” (2019) Katzenellenbogen
@hat: i’m involved with the one u.s. yiddishist organization that might be interested in putting out the original novel, but the prospect of dealing with YIVO over rights and royalties is decidedly unappealing. i think the best bet for the book appearing in print is probably a swedish press, though Olniansky Tekst Farlag, probably the heaviest hitter over there, seems to be more interested in translations of writing by non-jewish bigots they think will sell (and, oddly, believe won’t discredit them with young yiddishists*) than in major yiddish literary figures.
sadly, none of the u.s. nominally-yiddishist institutions with significant money have any interest in publishing anything that’s actually af yidish: the National Yiddish Book Center’s White Goat Press barely puts out bilingual editions; YIVO hasn’t even put out an issue of YIVO Bleter in 20 years; the Forward has been a joke for even longer than that. the Yidish-Lige, a step down the economic ladder, does publish in yiddish (admirably, keeping some of morkhe schaechter’s work easily available), but the only literature it’s put out in quite a while has been a classroom edition of sholem-aleykhm’s Motl Peyse Dem Khazns.
.
* who are, in my experience, not particularly interested in waving away either rowling’s unambiguous fascism (and its anti-jewish expression in her work) or the complicated relationship between tolkein’s work and white supremacy.
Oh man, that’s sad. And incomprehensible to me.
LH: Katsav means ‘butcher’.
If I understand correctly, neither YIVO nor the Bronx Library nor anyone else has copyright on the text now, right? So if a dedicated volunteer wanted to edit and publish it cheaply (like Print on Demand), they could, right?
Or just put it online!
It would be hazardous to assume that no one controls the copyright on the Yiddish text. Maybe no one knows who, meaning you don’t know who to try to license from even if you’d like to. But if you go ahead and publish you run the risk of someone popping up afterwards and claiming to control the rights. Perhaps the records of the Bronx Public Administrator would indicate who? A dead author’s copyrights don’t necessarily or automatically go to whoever gets physical possession of physical manuscripts, but if the Public Administrator (who deals with settling decedents’ estates where there’s no will and no relative turns up in court asking to be put in charge of the estate) gave physical manuscripts to YIVO because they couldn’t find any living cousins or what have you who wanted them, it might have been sensible for YIVO to ask for whatever copyrights the widow had controlled. OTOH, maybe there was a cousin or two who didn’t want piles of paper but did want the modest balance of the widow’s bank account plus whatever theoretical rights could lead to future cash.
As to the previously-published installments, the newspapers in question presumably published them lawfully, but you’d need to know what deals they had with the long-deceased author re right to anthologize them or combine them into a book, and of course those newspapers may themselves be long gone, their business records gone, and the successor to their theoretical rights likewise difficult to locate.
It’s not clear to me from the story if Knopf is just relying for the authorized nature of its translation solely on its long-ago deal with the widow, or on something else. If there’s something else, they would have needed to satisfy themselves re who controlled the copyright to the Yiddish original (who would thus control the right to authorize translations) after the widow’s own death.
incomprehensible to me
me too!
and not even thinking about the work that’s out of print and undigitized, and so essentially unavailable, but has been published in book form, and special cases like the altenaye grade, there’s so much that has just never been published at all – far and away enough to keep a publisher or three busy for a lifetime.
i mean, the poetry of fradl shtok – one of the most highly regarded and most anthologized poets of the 1910s, and so important to the history of the yiddish sonnet that she’s often (wrongly) claimed to have been the first to write one – has never been collected at all. in fact, her work is so neglected that six or seven years ago, while trying to read her thoroughly on a whim, i accidentally found a few poems that aren’t even indexed! and she’s someone whose name is pretty widely known, and who’s more translated than most (though mainly her prose).
anyway, if somebody out there has a few hundred thousand dollars (or even a few dozen!) that they’d like to use for these kinds of important though decidedly esoteric literary purposes, give me a yell!
Is there–I ask without checking my available sources–good reason to doubt that katz intended to refer to a righteous priest?
Here’s an old 2010 story about the fight over the stuff and the surfacing of a photocopy of a purported will in which the widow had purportedly bequeathed all the stuff to Prof. Yechiel Szeintuch, who was said to be “working with” the National Library of Israel. One suspects that the 2013 deal splitting the stuff up between YIVO and NLI may have been a settlement of Szeintuch’s disputed claim to all of it. The 2013 press release announcing that deal mentions that YIVO/NLI got from the Public Administrator Grade’s “personal papers and library, literary manuscripts, and publication rights,” which I suspect means that one or both of YIVO/NLI may have the right to sue for copyright infringement if anyone puts out a bootleg, however public-spirited their motives. (Note bonus detail in linked story about the widow’s former lawyer being mad on her deceased behalf that YIVO had invited Ruth Wisse to speak at some event rather than carrying on the widow’s alleged feud with Wisse.)
https://www.jta.org/2010/09/21/ny/fight-over-grades-archive-gets-messier
@SG: Other acronymic surnames exist, e.g. the specifically Cohanic מזא”ה Maze = מזרע אהרן הכהן mizera aharon hakohen ‘from the seed of Aaron the Priest’.
Kohen Tzedek might mean ‘a true/authentic Cohen’ in the relevant later usage. The term comes from the Talmud, here.
@Stephen Goranson: As an actual agnate of the Bobruysk Katznelson family, I can assure you that some members of the lineage were a long, long way from being “righteous.”
It’s all in the punctuation, Comrade.
I was wrong? I should apologise?
In a similar way, given that Roman noble cognomina tend to be less than flattering, one wonders if the Claudii Pulchri might perhaps have run a bit to the physically unprepossessing side.
(no, yes) I was not supposing that all named Katz were righteous priests, or so aspired; just interested in the name origin. In Qumran texts someone (Judah the Essene that Josephus mentioned, imo) was called Teacher of Righteousness, though opinions back then differed.
Vaguely apropos: I was just lately reading (possibly even via LH) an article claiming that the many anecdotes about Ellis Island immigration officials mangling immigrants’ names (either from ignorance or malice) are apocryphal, not to say, untrue. Apparently the names already appeared on the ships’ passenger manifests anyway, and the usual process was just to copy them over.
Though I suppose that this does not rule out some pre-mangling.
that’s definitely my family experience! we’ve got a number of changed surnames (and one branch that went through several shifts), but all of the changes happened on one side or the other of the actual im/emigration, at the initiative of the people wearing the names. and yes, ships’ manifests from the relevant period show everyone’s name – whatever name they gave the ticket office – pretty clearly (plus or minus the national/regional variations in cursive that we’ve talked about now and then).
definitely in the “no irish need apply signs” category of u.s. ethnic fictions; it’s always nice to have a bureaucrat to blame for one’s forebears’ own assimilatory moves (and it gets the actual sources of pressure – neighbors, bosses, relatives, politicians, and even other more proximate bureaucrats – off the hook too!).
Fair enough, though the name Katz is older than the name Ellis Island. And some Jewish priestly names apparently go way back. The Qumran מורה הצדק was also (reportedly) a priest.
It should be pretty obvious that the literal federal bureaucrats literally working at Ellis Island or similar ports of entry had a lot of things to do that were more immediately important than promoting medium-term assimilation of immigrants, and matching up the people they were processing to whatever names they went by on the ship’s manifest is very consistent with those immediate tasks. Plus those bureaucrats were by the nature of their daily work a lot more familiar with exotic foreign-looking spellings etc. than the bureaucrats the immigrants might subsequently encounter in their subsequent lives in America. Now, a significant number of immigrants to the U.S. in that era came from milieus that did not primarily use Roman script, but they tended to cross the Atlantic on ships flagged to Roman-script nations, so to the extent there were ad hoc and sometimes dubious romanizations, they may have more commonly happened when the ship’s manifest was being filled out at the port of departure.
One significant change from then until now is that back then no one in the bureaucracy was checking super-strictly if the name on the naturalization papers X years later matched the name used upon initial arrival. Databases that are suspicious of lack of consistency over time have impeded the old natural/organic/gradual processes of eroding or transforming names to fit the American milieu.
It was not until circa the 1870’s that (at least if you were a white person coming from Europe or perhaps Canada) you had to typically deal with bureaucrats at all upon initial arrival, rather than just get on a ship and walk down the gangway when it docked in the U.S. All of my own post-1776 immigrant ancestors came to the U.S. during that no-screening-on-arrival-at-all era.
There were many attempts to screen yet-earlier immigrants, but they ultimately failed because of a lack of centralisation and of effective enforcement mechanisms. With hindsight, it is also clear that too little weight was attached to the question of effective medical screening (though in fairness, many of the more modern conceptual tools relating to such efforts had not yet been developed at that point.)
There’s maybe a shift from older practices done port-by-port that would apply to anyone arriving on any ship (whether or not they intended to settle in permanently as immigrants) to try to not have people disembark who seem likely to spread infectious diseases to local residents to practices done to screen out people who were thought undesirable on not-strictly-public-health grounds such as being prostitutes or polygamists or anarcho-syndicalists or ethnically Chinese.
Other acronymic surnames exist
Emmanuel Weill adds Schatz (see nº 405, p. 78). (For LH readers who don’t read Hebrew, it’s from the acronym of שליח צבור sh’liach tzibur ‘chazzan, cantor’ (lit., ‘emissary of the congratation; representative of the community’).) Katz, Matz, and Schatz all ‘make sense’ as surnames in a German gentile context (‘cat’; Matz from Matthias like Petz from Peter, Bernhard, or Berthold, or something along those lines; ‘treasure’). I wonder if there are any others like these.
If they were polygamists, could they not be put on a sealed train and sent to a Mormon settlement? I heard of one Irish visitor to Australia who was asked if he had ever been convicted of a crime. He replied that he did not realise that was still a requirement…
@Xerîb: Maybe Sack = ז״ק? (זֶרַע קְדוֹשִׁים zeraʿ qǝdôšîm ‘seed/offspring of saints’). Beyond that — have at it…
PP: FWIW that particular restriction on would-be immigrants was formally enacted in 1891, a year after the Mormons’ then-President (and Prophet and Seer and Revelator) Wilford Woodruff had been vouchsafed the understanding that the divine will now required pragmatic public renunciation of polygamy in order to overcome the Mormons’ very negative relationship with the national government and many of their fellow Americans, thereby facilitating Utah’s long-delayed admission as a State of the Union. Such would-be immigrants might have been better advised to go to the remoter parts of Mexico and/or Canada, where the Mormon “fundamentalists” dissatisfied with Pres. Woodruff’s change of policy were relocating in the hope that enforcement of any national anti-polygamy policy would be lax-to-nonexistent if you were far enough away the capital.
It is perhaps of more linguistic relevance to note that well over a decade before the Mormons decided that the pursuit of polygamy was not worth the cost of a continuously adversarial relationship with the rest of American society, they had quite prudently and without much outside pressure abandoned their earlier cultish enthusiasm for spelling reform and a phonemic script of their own devising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet
Oh, and Sacks זק״ס (זֶרַע קְדוֹשֵׁי סְפָרַד zeraʿ qǝdôšēi sǝfārad ‘seed/offspring of the saints of Spain’), and Beck ב״ק (בְּנֵי קְדוֹשִׁים bǝnēi qǝdôšīm, ‘sons of saints’).
Somehow I had never associated the bear (Meister Petz) with Peter (established nickname /ˈpɛd͡sɪ/ back home).
appears to have been intended as media siloing. More’s the pity.