Chaim Grade, "The Rebbetzin," trans. Harold Rabinowitz and Inna Hecker Grade

 I CHECKED THE recently-published version of Chaim Grade's Sons and Daughters out from the local public library and, truth to tell, found it more generously provided with description and exposition than I felt like continuing with. (I do enjoy 19th century novels, but there's a reason novel-writing took a different direction.) There was something in the voice I liked, though, so I took the advice offered by Daphne Merkin in her NYRB review of Sons and Daughters and picked up one of Grade's novellas.

"The Rebbetzin" (i.e., "The Wife of the Rabbi") is set in Lithuania, I think, although it may be in northeastern Poland or western Belarus (googling the names of the towns that figure in the story did not quite pin things down). The title character, a rabbi's daughter, was as a young woman betrothed to an up-and-coming rabbi who broke off the engagement, offering her family a relatively plausible excuse but telling his own family that Perele was a "shrew." He goes on to become the Horadno Rabbi, leader of his city's Jewish community and famous throughout European Jewry for his wisdom and scholarship. Perele instead marries Uri-Zvi Koenigsberg, who becomes the rabbi of a smaller town, Graipewo. He is loved and respected by his community, but is nowhere near as big a deal as Moshe-Mordechai Eisenstadt, the Horadno Rabbi.

Decades have passed, but Perele has not forgotten what she takes as a slight, and her slow campaign to get back at the Horadno Rabbi drives the plot. She persuades her husband to retire early, then to move to Horadno, then to take on various tasks that will give him some standing in the Horadno rabbinate. Somewhat mysteriously, misfortunes befall the Horadno Rabbi: his adult daughter sickens and dies, his wife is prostrated by grief, his own health falters. Perele never articulates any particular plan or expresses any particular animus, but the reader nonetheless gets the distinct impression that she has engineered the whole thing.

The novella put me somewhat in mind of Nikolai Leskov's "The Lady Macbeth of Mtensk." As in the Russian fiction, we meet a woman who is constrained (a) by the subordinate situation she is locked into by her sex and (b) by the provinciality of the setting she happens to occupy, but who otherwise has the same relentless ambition and the same willingness to do whatever that ambition requires that we see in Lady Macbeth. Koenigsberg, the Graipewo Rabbi, is no Macbeth; he would rather study Talmud than assassinate Duncan and would have preferred to stay in Graipewo. But, as his and Perele's daughter Serel exasperatedly puts it in the novella's last sentence, "My dear little mother will win out over everyone. Everyone!"

I am not quite ready to attempt Sons and Daughters again, but I would definitely read another Grade novella.