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foreseen anything like that?” But the rabbi points out that not all wealth is oppressive and not all penury admirable. Many of Rosen’s characters find their expectations confounded in just this way and struggle to adjust to the demands of the situation, as in “Apples,” where a young husband doesn’t know quite how to ask his widowed father to move in with him and his wife. The collection’s later stories deal with the interracial dynamics typical of New York’s Upper West Side, in terms of the relationships between Jewish mothers and Jamaican baby nurses, in three of the book’s most effective tales, and, in the one that concludes the collection, between well-off Jews and poor Puerto Ricans (this was before the gentrification of the neighborhood that pushed most of the low-income families northward). Such stories tend toward sentimentality, but Rosen fends off the typical platitudes about class relations, and her characters, like us, rarely figure out solutions to their dilemmas. Rosen’s ear for language and light prose style amuse throughout the collection (she transforms “dybbuk” into a verb and calls Muriel, “like everyone else, a virtuoso of flawed accomplishments”) and couch the seriousness of her concerns in a pleasing form. Many of the strongest stories seem decidedly autobiographical (and a couple of details have been confirmed as such in Rosen’s essays, like one story’s European husband, more knowledgeable about Judaism than his wife, or the Jamaican nurse who, before Passover, asks her Jewish employers, “What must I say to you?”). Even if the stories provide glimpses into Rosen’s personal life—having been raised in a mostly nonobservant family, she began to discover in the 1960s and 1970s the attractions of Jewish faith and community—their primary attraction is the sympathy with which they treat their characters’ foibles. Further reading: Rosen’s first novel, Joy to Levine! (1962), was rather light and charming like the stories; her second and third, Touching Evil (1969) and At the Center (1982), deal with weightier issues, such as the resonance of the Holocaust in American life. She has also published a collection of essays, including memoirs and critical pieces, called Accidents of Influence (1992), a Passover haggadah (1980), a nonfiction account of Anzia Yezierska’s relationship with John Dewey (1989), and a midrashic account of the women in the Torah (1996). Her son is the novelist and editor Jonathan Rosen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61pTsemakh Atlas/The Yeshiva By Chaim Grade YIDDISH: NATIONALN ARBETER-FARBAND, 1967–68. TWO VOLUMES. ENGLISH: TRANSLATED BY CURT LEVIANT: BOBBS-MERRILL. 1976–77. TWO VOLUMES. Like most Yiddish writers who have lived in America, Chaim Grade was born and raised in Eastern Europe, and specifically in Vilna (now called Vilnius, Lithuania), the sparkling center of Yiddish culture during the interwar period. 87 Titles American Jewish Fiction Having made a name for himself as a promising poet in the 1930s, and having survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Grade immigrated to the United States in 1948, but—unlike his predecessors, such as the Singer brothers, Sholem Asch, even Sholem Aleichem—Grade never wrote more than a couple of brief poems about his new homeland. “I don’t write about America,” he told an interviewer in 1980. “I don’t feel I understand the psychology of Americans, even the Orthodox here.” Such a statement, more than 30 years after his arrival, suggests the enormity of Grade’s alienation and loss. Still, by the time the first volume of his massive autobiographical novel of interwar Poland, Tsemakh Atlas, appeared in Yiddish in 1967, thanks to a Los Angeles publisher, Grade had already been in America for nearly two decades. The author’s note to the second Yiddish volume reveals his reliance on Americans for support both emotional and financial, as he thanks friends in Grand Rapids and Cleveland (as well as Windsor and Johannesburg). Though the novel portrays the famed yeshivas of Lithuania and their brilliant, tormented students and faculty, one can’t help but suspect that Grade’s sojourn in the United States inflected his memory at least a little. Americans appear here and there in the book, subtitled (and titled in English) The Yeshiva: one woman in Vilna, nicknamed “the American” because she lives off the money sent by her older sister in the United States, has an unstoppable desire for “sweets and expensive fruits,” while a vacationing delegation of actual American students have “money but not a crumb of decorum” and speak...

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