Chaim Grade: „Mein Streit mit Hirsch Rasejner“ (1948)

Reading & discussion with Susanne Klingenstein and Rachel Salamander:

In August 1948, two childhood friends meet by chance in the Paris metro. Until 1930, they studied together at a Talmud academy in Bialystok. One left to become a writer, the other stayed. Both survived the war under the most difficult of circumstances. Hirsch, who ended up in the camps, now runs a Talmud academy himself and is more religious than he was before the war. Chaim cannot believe that Hirsch still believes in God after the murder of a million Jewish children. Hirsch, on the other hand, cannot understand that Chaim, a recognized poet, still believes in humanity. A dialog unfolds, harsh, promotional, moving, relentless.

Rachel Salamander and translator Susanne Klingenstein introduce the Yiddish author Chaim Grade, read excerpts from his brilliant autobiographical fiction in Yiddish and German and talk about a fundamental dispute that has lost none of its topicality in the Jewish world.

The literary scholar Susanne Klingenstein is a specialist in Yiddish book history and teaches ancient Yiddish literature at Harvard University. Her most recent publication is the volume "Es kann nicht jeder ein Gelehrter sein. A Cultural History of Yiddish Literature, 1105-1597" (Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag 2022). She is also the author of the new translation of Chaim Grade's "Mein Streit mit Hirsch Rasejner" (Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag 2026).