Chaim Grade is a major author in what has tragically become a minor language, Yiddish….

"Masters and Disciples" is the second part of Grade's two-volume epic novel, "The Yeshiva."…

"The Yeshiva" is a saga about Talmudic students and their teachers, and is laced with plots and subplots involving brooding moralists consumed by guilt and doubts and religious scholars grappling with secular temptations. It presents a panorama of life in Eastern Europe's yeshivas, or Talmudic academies, that has never been depicted before in fiction.

Like all of Grade's novels, "The Yeshiva" eulogizes the pre-Nazi world of Jewish religious scholars and functionaries in the ghetto towns of Poland and Lithuania, and resurrects in literature a society that was destroyed in World War II. Written in a quaintly old-fashioned style and brimming with an extraordinary gallery of shtetl personalities, it is concerned with the ethical considerations of Judaism and the confrontation...