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Chaim Grade spent the last decade of his life working on a book he considered his masterpiece, BEYS HARAV. The novel is a rich family saga that spans several decades of the twentieth century and three generations of the colorful, rabbinical Katzenellenbogen family. Like most of Grade’s fiction, the story is set in yeshiva and shtetl life before World War II. The original Yiddish in book form and its English translation are forthcoming from Knopf Doubleday.
This paper provides a short overview of the book and explores its most common motifs, which reflect Grade’s own struggles in various areas of his life. Drawing on Grade’s personal correspondence with his friend and patron, Abraham Bornstein, the paper attempts to draw a connection between Grade’s own assessment of his literary scope and artistic limits and how that plays out in his literary oeuvre, particularly in the BEYS HARAV. These explorations aim to provide an understanding not only of a specific Grade novel, but also of Grade’s general thoughts and lifestyle at the end of his life.