
Sons and Daughters
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Rob Shapiro
About this listen
From “one of the great—if not the greatest—contemporary Yiddish novelists” (Elie Wiesel), the long-awaited English translation of a work, Tolstoyan in scope, that chronicles the last, tumultuous decade of a world succumbing to the march of modernity
“A great beard novel . . . Also a great food novel . . . A melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny . . . [Grade’s] fretful characters vibrate as if they were drawn by Roz Chast [and] Rose Waldman's translation seems miraculous to me.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“It is me the prophet laments when he cries out, ‘My enemies are the people in my own home.’” The Rabbi ignored his borscht and instead chewed on a crust of bread dipped in salt. “My greatest enemies are my own family.”
Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen’s world, the world of his forefathers, is crumbling before his eyes. And in his own home! His eldest, Bentzion, is off in Bialystok, studying to be a businessman; his daughter Bluma Rivtcha is in Vilna, at nursing school. For her older sister, Tilza, he at least managed to find a suitable young rabbi, but he can tell things are off between them. Naftali Hertz? Forget it; he’s been lost to a philosophy degree in Switzerland (and maybe even a goyish wife?). And now the rabbi’s youngest, Refael’ke, wants to run off to the Holy Land with the Zionists.
Originally serialized in the 1960s and 1970s in New York-based Yiddish newspapers, Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters is a precious glimpse of a way of life that is no longer—the rich Yiddish culture of Poland and Lithuania that the Holocaust would eradicate. We meet the Katzenellenbogens in the tiny village of Morehdalye, in the 1930s, when gangs of Poles are beginning to boycott Jewish merchants and the modern, secular world is pressing in on the shtetl from all sides. It’s this clash, between the freethinking secular life and a life bound by religious duty—and the comforts offered by each—that stands at the center of Sons and Daughters.
With characters that rival the homespun philosophers and lovable rouges of Sholem Aleichem and I. B. Singer—from the brooding Zalia Ziskind, paralyzed by the suffering of others, to the Dostoyevskian demon Shabse Shepsel—Grade’s masterful novel brims with humanity and heartbreaking affection for a world, once full of life in all its glorious complexity, that would in just a few years vanish forever.
©2025 Chaim Grade (P)2025 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Since Hamas's attack on Israel last October 7, the term "settler colonialism" has become central to public debate in the United States. A concept new to most Americans, but already established and influential in academic circles, settler colonialism is shaping the way many people think about the history of the United States, Israel and Palestine, and a host of political issues. This short book is the first to examine settler colonialism critically for a general audience.
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Critic reviews
“A great beard novel . . . Also a great food novel . . . A melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny . . . [Grade’s] fretful characters vibrate as if they were drawn by Roz Chast. Nearly everyone is about to smack someone . . . Grade has so many gifts as a writer. Like a rabbi, he is a distributor of beneficence . . . he has folk wit as well as intellect . . . he can write about a hairy little soul with as much sensitivity as a great one. He is a custodian of traditions, yet in close, chafing contact with this flippant world . . . Rose Waldman’s translation of Sons and Daughters seems miraculous to me. The language is crisp and clean; it is also bright, like a painting that has been restored.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“[Grade’s] ambition is biblical. I don’t think the word overreaches. . . . The risk writers run when they set out to memorialize is that they’ll produce memorials, not literature. Grade didn’t do that. His novels jam almost too much life into their pages. That’s not a criticism, because the streets of prewar Jewish Eastern Europe also jostled and overflowed; Grade’s prose mimetically reproduces the way Jews thronged in their tight quarters. His major accomplishment, though, is at the level of the individual characters. They’re vortices of ambivalence, anxious and raw and at odds with themselves, hypercritical yet hypersensitive, repressed but not undersexed, subject to delusions of grandeur or abasement or both in turns. On the whole, they’re good people. They scheme and bicker and get on one another’s nerves, and yet they have deep family feeling, and few of his protagonists wholly free themselves from a yearning for contact with the divine. The dominant emotion in a Grade novel is tortured loyalty.”—Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic
“An epic, an elegy, as unfinished as the Jews, and one of the world’s great books.”—Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus
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Rooms for Vanishing
- A Novel
- By: Stuart Nadler
- Narrated by: Orlagh Cassidy, Bruce Mann, Kathleen Gati, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In Rooms for Vanishing, the violence of war has fractured the universe for the Altermans, a Jewish family from Vienna. Moving across decades, and across the world, the novel finds the Altermans alone in their separate futures, haunted by the loss of their loved ones, each certain that they are the sole survivor of their family.
By: Stuart Nadler
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Counting Backwards
- By: Binnie Kirshenbaum
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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It begins with hallucinations. From their living room window, Leo sees a man on stilts, an acting troupe, a pair of swans paddling on the Manhattan streets below. Initially, Leo believes the visions are related to his terrible eyesight, something he and his wife, Addie, joke about. Then, he starts to experience occasional, but fleeting, oddities. He's unable to perform simple tasks and he hears things that aren’t real. The doctors have no answers, and his erratic disturbances multiply.
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Sharing the journey of losing a husband to young onset Lewy Body Dementia
- By Elliott Greene on 04-19-25
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On Being Jewish Now
- Reflections from Authors and Advocates
- By: Zibby Owens - editor
- Narrated by: Zibby Owens, various
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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On October 7th, 2023, Jews in Israel were attacked in the largest pogrom since the Holocaust. It was a day felt by Jews everywhere who came together to process and speak out in ways some never had before. In this collection, 75 contributors speak to Jewish joy, celebration, laughter, food, trauma, loss, love, and family, and the common threads that course through the Jewish people: resilience and humor.
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Great accounts of recent atrocities
- By Erez Kats on 12-28-24
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Taiwan Travelogue
- A Novel
- By: Yang Shuang-Zi, Lin King - translator
- Narrated by: Sarah Skaer
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She's been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste its authentic cuisine.
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Cultural differences show the importance & learning experience of travels.
- By Robert G Hartshorn on 06-16-25
By: Yang Shuang-Zi, and others
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The Human Scale
- A Novel
- By: Lawrence Wright
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 18 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Tony Malik, a half-Irish, half-Arab FBI agent based in New York, specializes in tracking money from drug and arms deals. His life takes a dramatic turn when a long-term relationship ends and his job hangs in the balance. Amid personal turmoil, Malik becomes intrigued by his Palestinian father's past. He decides to visit his ancestral homeland for his niece's wedding, accepting a seemingly simple FBI assignment along the way.
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A History Lesson within a Mystery/Thriller
- By Kat on 04-20-25
By: Lawrence Wright
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Don't Believe Him
- By: Monica Arya
- Narrated by: Kimberly Austin
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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We had it all—a lake house, two kids, and twenty years of marriage. Except, our marriage was no longer exciting. We scheduled intimacy, ate meals in silence, and became strangers. Our kids went off to college, and we were now empty-nesters, trying to reconnect. But my husband, a psychology professor and thriller novelist, had other plans. Perhaps writing a fictional novel had him living in a false reality? Perhaps he was having a mid-life crisis? He didn't want to reconnect with me; he just wanted to replace me. Worst of all, the girl he was having an affair with was our son's girlfriend.
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Favorite Book So Far in 2025!
- By Allie Dankenbring on 06-27-25
By: Monica Arya
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Sister Europe
- A Novel
- By: Nell Zink
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Naema, an elderly princess dedicated to her pet causes, is in a bind: struck by a malady that maroons her in Montreux, she’s unable to host an exclusive gala dinner in Berlin to honor the author Masud al-Huzeil for his lifetime achievement in Arabic literature. Not only is she unable to attend, RSVPs have been slow to materialize, and she’s reduced to begging the ancient award winner to find some attendees at the last minute. Masud invites his old friend Demian, a native Berliner, who in turn invites his two best friends.
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a look into such a different world.
- By Rochelle Jewel Shapiro on 05-15-25
By: Nell Zink
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Ladies’ Lunch
- And Other Stories
- By: Lore Segal
- Narrated by: Callie Beaulieu
- Length: 2 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Beloved New Yorker writer Lore Segal, at ninety-five years old, is a national treasure. Working at the height of her powers, in this story collection she turns her gimlet eye and compassionate humor on aging and life in the slow lane. From the master of the short short comes a collection of sixteen new stories featuring old friends who have loved and lunched together for over forty years. These erudite, sharp-minded nonagenarians offer startling insights into friendship, family and aging.
By: Lore Segal
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The Californians
- A Novel
- By: Brian Castleberry
- Narrated by: Micky Shiloah, Rob Shapiro, Nancy Peterson, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s 2024, and Tobey Harlan—college dropout, temporary waiter, recently dumped—steals from the wall of his father’s house three paintings by the venerated and controversial artist Di Stiegl. Tobey’s just lost everything he owns to a Northern California wildfire, and if he can sell the paintings (albeit in a shady way to a notorious tech bro) he can start life anew in a place no one will ever find him, perhaps even Oregon. A hundred years before, Klaus Aaronsohn—German-Jewish immigrant, resident of the Lower East Side—inveigles his way into a film studio in Astoria, Queens.
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The Trial of Anna Thalberg
- A Novel
- By: Eduardo Sangarcía, Elizabeth Bryer - translator
- Narrated by: Cassidy Brown
- Length: 3 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Anna Thalberg is a villager shunned for her red hair and provocative beauty, so when she is dragged from her home and accused of witchcraft, her neighbors do not intervene. Only Klaus, her husband, and Father Friedrich, a priest experiencing a crisis of faith, set out to Würzburg to prove her innocence. There, locked in a prison tower, Anna faces isolation and torture while anxiety builds over strange happenings within the city walls. Can the two men convince the Church inquisitors to release Anna, or will she burn at the stake?
By: Eduardo Sangarcía, and others
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Shoestring Theory
- By: Mariana Costa
- Narrated by: Philip Battley
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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The kingdom of Farsala is broken and black clouds hang heavy over the arid lands. Former grand-mage of the high court, Cyril Laverre, has spent the last decade hiding himself away in a hut by the sea, trying to catch fish for his cat familiar, Shoestring, and suppressing his guilt over the kingdom's ruin. For he played his part—for as the king, Eufrates Margrave, descended further into paranoia, violence, and madness, his grand-mage—and husband—Cyril didn't stop him.
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Fun once it gets going
- By FlyingFish on 05-11-25
By: Mariana Costa
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Twist
- A Novel
- By: Colum McCann
- Narrated by: Colum McCann
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.
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So happy he’s still writing fiction
- By Franki on 03-31-25
By: Colum McCann
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Accidental Tyrant
- The Life of Kim Il-Sung
- By: Fyodor Tertitskiy
- Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Accidental Tyrant serves as a stark cautionary tale, underscoring that the triumph of liberty is never guaranteed. Met with insufficient resistance, even the most unlikely leader can build a regime of repression and privation that long outlives its founder.
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Helpful information, Great storytelling, inaccurate pronunciation. Book should be probably be renamed “Intentional Tyrant”
- By T. Foley on 06-29-25
Great writing/disappointing performance
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The many faceted lives and issues of Eastern European Jewry in the early 20th century.
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A mostly lost culture, partly preserved
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Tender and thoughtful
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A compelling picture of a lost world
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Unforgettable book
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