Like most Yiddish writers who have lived in America, Chaim Grade was born and raised in Eastern Europe, and specifically in Vilnius, the sparkling center of Yiddish culture during the interwar period. Having made a name for himself as a promising poet in the ’30s, and having survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Grade immigrated to the U.S. 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, thirty 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, and 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 U.S. may have inflected his memory to some extent. Sure enough, Americans do appear here and there in the book, subtitled (and titled in English) The Yeshiva: one Vilna woman, nicknamed “the American” because she lives off the money sent by her older sister in the U.S., 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 “with chewing gum in their mouths.” Might these jabs at dissolute or disrespectful Americans have been inspired partly by Grade’s life as a Yiddish writer in an English-speaking country (and Jewish community)?

Furthermore, the central conflicts of the book resonate powerfully with their immediate context. The title character, a charismatic and handsome adherent of Musar—a fiercely ethical and somewhat ascetic branch of anti-Hasidic Judaism according to which a truly pious Jew must deny all of his personal desires—has one major problem: he’s not sure he believes in God. Grade’s autobiographical avatar, meanwhile, the teenaged Chaikl Vilner, struggles to reconcile his faith and his loyalty to his saintly teacher with his overpowering sexual lust. Such conflicts—between ethics and faith, tradition and sexual expression—were raging in the ’60s. Grade’s novel includes a long episode involving the censorship of pornographic and heretical books, and only a year before it was published, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to censor erotic literature like Fanny Hill. The parallels needn’t be overemphasized: Grade’s novel is first and foremost a detailed, psychologically and philosophically rich exploration of the conflicts simmering within the world of the traditional European Jewish scholarly elite before its destruction, a complex self-portrait, and a loving tribute to a major scholar and Jewish leader, the Hazon Ish, who was Grade’s teacher before he moved to Palestine and Grade, having rejected religious tradition, decamped to America.