Chaim Grade on the complicated relationship between Judaism and modernity

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“On the way home, the cantor tells Merl that his name is Kalman Maytes . He is a house painter by profession, but there has been no work lately. (…) He has heard the women say that she is alone. He wants to ask her where her husband is… Hasn’t he come back from the war? The war has been over for so many years now, why doesn’t he go to the rabbis and ask for permission to remarry? He has been a widower for several years now and can no longer bear the loneliness.”

Starting with The Rabbi's Wife (2019), Giuntina has launched the publication in Italy of the works of the great Lithuanian Jewish writer Chaim Grade . Born in Vilna into an Orthodox family, Grade escapes the suffocating rigidity of his environment and takes an active part in the process of secularization of the Ashkenazi world. His entire family is suppressed in the Holocaust, he is saved in the Soviet Union. He later emigrates to the United States, where he becomes one of the most important authors of Yiddish literature of the twentieth century .

After Fidelity and Betrayal (2021) it is now the turn of The Chained Bride, a beautiful, gripping novel, full of suspense and continuous twists. It is the story of a typical rabbinical dispute, endless and tormented, which ends up upsetting, in a dramatic crescendo, the entire Jewish community of Vilna, the "Jerusalem of the Baltics".

“I don’t want to get into this kind of domestic conjecture,” Levi angrily replies. “I stick to the law. The opinion of Rabbi Eliezer of Verdun is in the minority. And the law doesn’t follow it, because the pillars of rabbinical doctrine are against him . And the judge on Polotsk Street is also against the entire rabbinical council of Vilna.”

The antinomy between the most authoritative rabbi of the city, who dogmatically opposes, and the most modest judge of the neighborhood where Merl lives, who grants her permission to remarry out of compassion, is not the only antinomy that runs through the novel. There is also the much more modern one, between a hard-working woman, with an open and sunny character, and the hateful Morits, a rude and always rejected suitor, who will transform her scorn into jealousy, envy and desire for revenge .

Merl could ignore the rabbis and marry secularly, but she doesn't want to upset her elderly mother, nor does she want to find herself in a terrible and unhappy marriage like that of her two sisters. Because of the rigid and traditionalist environment that surrounds her, the woman finds herself "chained", that is, entangled in a series of absurd rules. Thus the religious conflict within the rabbinate becomes more acute and widespread.

“Rabbi, have mercy on yourself, your wife and your children, and do what the rabbis ask of you,” Merl can barely stand, she wants to throw herself on the ground and hug rov Doved’s knees. “I have separated from my husband and I do not intend to marry anyone else. I was an agunah and I will return to being one.” “I did not give you permission to do you a favor, but because that is what the law of the Torah says,” is the rabbi’s reply to the woman.

Slander begins to spread among the Jews of Vilna and turns into a raging river. The common people allow themselves to be fooled, jealousy gnaws at the soul, even the purest people lose their reputation. As events unfold, comedy turns into drama, drama into tragedy.

The Chained Bride speaks of an ancient and vanished world, but it is also a psychological novel, exceptionally modern precisely because of the author's ability to dig into the souls of the protagonists, in search of the most unspeakable and hidden thoughts. A book focused on the difficult relationship between Judaism and modernity, translated from Yiddish by three experts of absolute value . A few years after the events fictionalized by Grade, the Eastern Jews and their millenary traditions will be expelled from humanity, brutally and forever.

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