Nigel Farage loves Donald Trump. The 60-year-old’s day job is as the parliamentary representative for the English seaside town of Clacton, and as the leader of Reform, the latest of his populist right-wing parties. But Farage is often focused on America, and his heavily advertised friendship with the 47th president. He was in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration (and chafing that he didn’t get a prime spot in the Capitol Rotunda). He was also onstage last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, joking to his American audience that “you gave us ‘woke,’ and we gave you Prince Harry.”

As the leader of a party with fewer than half a dozen members of Parliament, Farage knows that his American profile gives him a grandeur he would not otherwise possess. In December, he posed with Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago under a portrait of a young Trump in cricket whites. Days after Trump survived an assassination attempt in July, Farage flew to the United States on a mission funded by a wealthy Reform donor. On his parliamentary financial-disclosure form, Farage recorded the purpose of his trip as being “to support a friend who was almost killed and to represent Clacton on the world stage.” Lucky Clacton.

But now Farage’s embrace of Trump has become a liability. The 47th president is broadly unpopular in Britain, where Farage hopes to improve the 14.3 percent vote share he received in last year’s election. (He likely needs to at least double that proportion if he wants to be prime minister one day.) Even worse for him, Trump’s MAGA movement is seen as overtly racist and pro-Russia, two huge turnoffs for the majority of British voters. Even Britain’s right-wing newspapers were outraged by Trump’s shabby treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, while Reform’s existing voters are already outliers in their sharply anti-immigration views. Heading further to the right is not a winning strategy in Britain.

Or elsewhere, really. “The populist right around the world has a MAGA problem,” Sunder Katwala, the director of the think tank British Future, told me. “There is a backfire effect in countries that aren’t America.”

[Anne Applebaum: The rise of the brutal American]

Key figures in Trumpworld, such as Musk and Steve Bannon, continually urge European populists to take more extreme positions on race, immigration, and cultural issues. Hard-liners usually point to the success of the German far-right party AfD (known in English as Alternative for Germany), which placed second in the country’s recent elections, its best showing ever. Musk had enthusiastically endorsed the AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel, and he celebrated the result with a personal phone call to her.

In truth, the AfD did not achieve the electoral breakthrough its leaders hoped for. Although conditions were perfect for a populist surge—Germany’s economy is stagnant, and a car attack by an Afghan refugee 10 days before the vote helped keep immigration at the forefront of the national conversation—the AfD struggled to gain a foothold outside the former East Germany. Other parties still refuse to include it in coalition talks. By dabbling in German politics, Trumpworld’s second-most-powerful figure hurt his own business interests while being at best irrelevant to the AfD’s performance. The party “got nothing out of Musk’s backing,” Katwala told me. “It transformed Tesla’s reputation in Germany, but did nothing for the AfD.”

Ultimately, Trump’s fundamental positions have limited appeal to most European electorates. His abandonment of Ukraine is so unpopular in Europe that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen—two natural MAGA sympathizers—have carefully distanced themselves from it.

As MAGA becomes ever more extreme, allies such as Farage must decide how far to go along with it—in the knowledge that, if they do not oblige, their domestic rivals will. The Reform leader has just fallen out with one of his five MPs, in a drama precipitated by (who else?) Musk, which played out on (where else?) X. Back in January, Trump’s “first buddy” declared his support for the agitator Tommy Robinson, whom Musk credited with publicizing the so-called grooming gangs of men, mostly British citizens of Pakistani descent, who raped and trafficked girls in towns across England. But Farage recognizes Robinson for what he is: a rabble-rouser with numerous criminal convictions. When the Reform leader repeated his long-standing refusal to admit Robinson to his party, Musk declared that Farage “doesn’t have what it takes.”

[Read: Elon has appointed himself king of the world]

Musk’s preferred alternative to lead Reform was Rupert Lowe, a 67-year-old who used to be chairman of a soccer club. Lowe’s day job is representing another English seaside town, Great Yarmouth, in Parliament. But his passion is posting on X. His disclosure forms show that he now makes about $4,000 a month from pumping out spicy takes on Musk’s social network, and all the attention appears to have gone to Lowe’s head. He recently told the Daily Mail that Farage saw himself as a “Messiah” and that Reform risked being a “protest party” unless its leader surrounded himself with good people. By enormous coincidence, soon after the interview was published, Lowe was suspended from Reform for alleged HR violations.

Cast out from Farage’s party, Lowe has since become even more extreme—a known side effect of spending too much time on social media. He wants the families of grooming-gang offenders deported from Britain, not just men convicted of crimes—and perhaps even “entire communities” of British Pakistanis, who he says have ignored the problem. (The white police officers and social workers who might face the same accusation do not appear to bother him.) Lowe claims that his party leader tried to stop him from expressing these views, an assertion that I instinctively believe; Farage, sometimes known as the father of Brexit, has succeeded in disrupting British politics because he knows when a dog whistle is preferable to a whistle. He has repeatedly forced out people from his various parties when their inflammatory rhetoric tipped into overt extremism. In 2018, he left the U.K. Independence Party after it appointed Robinson as an adviser.

Farage has a winning formula, Katwala believes: be guided by the British press. “If the Mail and The Telegraph think the candidate has a racism problem, ditch them,” he said, referring to two right-leaning papers. “If it’s just The Guardian”—which leans left—“you’re fine.” In the U.S., however, any such boundaries have collapsed. The breadth of permitted opinion, Katwala said, “goes all the way out to the Proud Boys”—the far-right group whose leader was jailed for his part in the Capitol insurrection, and then pardoned by Trump.

Voters outside the United States have one more objection to the MAGA movement: Trump and his allies talk about other countries in a profoundly alienating way. “America First”? Fine, but not “America Thinks Your Tin-Pot Country Is a Joke.” The toxic combination of Trump’s pro-Russia leanings, Vice President J. D. Vance’s arrogance and condescension, and Musk’s sad case of advanced poster’s disease have tanked America’s reputation among its traditional allies.

The exultant right-wing influencers who cheer on MAGA’s sassy clapback anti-diplomacy should remember that insulting another country’s politicians is like insulting someone else’s family. I can be rude about my sister, but you can’t. The Trump administration has revived almost every negative stereotype that Europeans have about Americans: too loud, too brash, too big. Vance, who lectures U.S. allies about how to run their affairs, reminds us of every rich guy from suburban Pittsburgh who visits the Amalfi Coast in the summer, drives up the pedestrianized streets, and then complains that the pasta is too chewy and there’s no AC in his 15th-century villa.

As a result, even formerly bloodless technocrats have found new vigor when being picked on by the Trump administration. So far, the net effect of MAGA foreign policy has been to get exactly zero concessions from Moscow, while simultaneously reviving the fortunes of Canada’s Liberal Party and helping the mainstream center-right win in Greenland. The new prime minister of Canada, the former central banker Mark Carney, was able to appeal to voters’ patriotism when rebutting Trump’s demand to annex his country, and his punitive tariffs. “Americans should make no mistake—in trade, as in hockey, Canada will win,” Carney said, after taking over the Liberal leadership from Justin Trudeau. The Liberals have been able to stop their opponent Pierre Poilievre’s momentum by painting him as a MAGA lackey. “A person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him,” Carney said.  

Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democrats, has been similarly energized. During a televised debate ahead of the recent German elections, he attacked the AfD for drawing support from the MAGA movement, painting his rivals as unpatriotic. “The interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow,” he added.

Ben Ansell, a University of Oxford politics professor, believes that MAGA’s sympathy for Moscow has given Europe’s mainstream politicians a potent attack line. “We may finally be witnessing the moment of hubris for the past decade’s unstoppable rise of populism,” he wrote in a recent Substack post. When mainstream politicians attack conservative populists, the latter can easily shrug off any criticism as the revenge of elites. “Populists who actually side with an existing foreign enemy, though? Well, that clarifies matters. Now every decision the populist takes can be tied to the foreign enemy.” In recent weeks, Farage’s approval ratings have noticeably fallen.

[Read: How not to hand populists a weapon]

“If you’re being directly attacked by Trump and you have your own elections, it’s hard to imagine being very successful in those elections by saying: Yes, please,” Ansell told me. Farage is plainly struggling to balance his desire to be close to MAGA with his domestic ambitions.

Populist parties define themselves as being against the status quo and the mainstream, but many of their members (and voters) hold eclectic and divergent views on economics and other issues. “These parties are more fragile than people have thought, and now you have this little lever that mainstream parties can use to split them apart—their closeness to much hated figures,” Ansell told me. European voters have long been wary of Moscow’s intentions. What’s new is a sense that the people now running the United States have lined up with Russia—and against Europe. “Vladimir Putin has been around for a quarter of a century,” Ansell said. “It’s Musk and Trump.”

Populists outside America might love the reflected glow of MAGA’s power and success, but being linked to the Trump administration means tethering themselves, in the eyes of their home audiences, to an unpopular president, his unpopular celebrity adviser, his unpopular stance on Ukraine, and his unpopular bullying tactics. That is populists’ MAGA problem—and the mainstream’s opportunity to fight back.

The Yiddish poet Chaim Grade survived World War II by fleeing his city, Vilna, now Vilnius, and wandering through the Soviet Union and its Central Asian republics. His wife and mother stayed behind and were murdered, probably in the Ponary forest outside Vilna, along with 75,000 others, mostly Jews. After the war, Grade moved to the United States and wrote some of the best novels in the Yiddish language, all woefully little known.

Before he left for America, however, he went back to Vilna, previously a center of Eastern European Jewish cultural, intellectual, and religious life—“the Jerusalem of Lithuania.” In his memoir, My Mother’s Sabbath Days, he describes what he found there. The impossibility of conveying in ordinary Yiddish the experience of walking through the empty streets of one’s eradicated civilization pushes Grade into a biblical register. His mother’s home is intact, he writes, but cobwebs bar his entry “like the angels with flaming swords who barred Adam and Eve from returning to Eden.”

Later, he goes to the Synagogue Courtyard. With its impressive library, ritual bath, and houses of worship great and small, it was the Lithuanian Jerusalem’s functional equivalent of the Holy Temple. Now the courtyard lies in ruins, and in his anguish, Grade’s voice takes on the proclamatory cadences of a prophet. Not just any prophet but, I think, Ezekiel, the subject of an early poem of his. Ezekiel did his prophesying from exile before and after the destruction of the First Temple in the Babylonian conquest of 586 B.C.E., another defining cataclysm in Jewish history. In Ezekiel’s most famous vision, he sees a valley full of dried bones and, channeling the words of God, raises the bones, creating an army of the resurrected. Grade wouldn’t have encountered bones—the Nazis ordered Ponary’s corpses to be dug up and burned during the war—but from under the heaps of stones come prayers, “all the prayers that Jews have uttered for hundreds of years.” He hears them without hearing them, because what screams, he says, is the silence.

[Chris Heath: A secret diary of mass murder]

Grade was born in 1910, came to the U.S. in 1948, and died in New York in 1982; he devoted the second half of his life to re-​creating the universe wiped out in the first half. He turned to prose, a form better suited than poetry to inventorying the psychological and material conditions of a complex and divided society, and he developed an almost Flaubertian passion for detail. His main subjects were poor Jews—he himself grew up in a dark cellar behind a smithy—and the hermetic world of Lithuanian Misnagdic rabbis and their yeshivas, which relatively few Yiddish writers of the time knew or wrote much about. Scholarly and strict about Jewish law, Misnagdic Jews looked down on the anti-intellectual, antinomian mysticism of Hasidic Jews. If your image of Old World Jewry comes from Grade’s contemporary Isaac Bashevis Singer, with his kabbalists, dybbuks, and elaborate rabbinic courts, swap in Lithuanian Talmudists conducting self-critique and doing pilpul—close textual analysis—in spartan houses of study.

Grade’s father was a maskil, an intellectual who adhered to the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, movement. But the general penury that followed World War I reduced him to working as a night watchman, and he died young, leaving Grade’s mother to support herself and Grade by selling fruit. She sent him to a yeshiva mostly because she could afford it, but also because she was devout. There he was trained in musar, a particularly rigorous—you might even say puritanical—strain of Misnagdic Judaism.

Grade studied rabbinics into his 20s, then turned secular and became a member of Young Vilna, a now-legendary group of leftist, modernist Yiddish writers. Although he never became a practicing Jew again, he didn’t turn against his teachers and their maximalist approach. On the contrary, Grade observes their fictional counterparts with a knowing, sometimes cynical, but always loving eye. He doesn’t ridicule them, at least not unduly, nor does he apologize on their behalf, and their single-minded pursuit of Torah can be inspiring.

Grade’s novels aren’t oracular, the way the section on postwar Vilna in his memoir was. But his ambition is still biblical. I don’t think the word overreaches. The Torah, thought to have been compiled over centuries in response to catastrophes and traumas, including that same Babylonian exile, is also a product of the impulse to preserve memories and knowledge all but lost in a calamity, lest the dispersed Jews forget who they’d been. Grade considered his undertaking a sort of holy assignment. “I’ve always found it strange that I have so little faith and yet believe, with complete faith, that Providence saved me and allowed me to live, in order to immortalize the great generation that I knew,” he wrote in a letter in 1977.

Another striking feature of Grade’s fiction is that it almost never acknowledges the imminent annihilation of the world it so meticulously reconstructs—as if by ignoring that obscene fact, he could annul it. “The mission of his prose after the war is to undo the Holocaust through literature, if you can imagine such a thing,” the historian David Fishman, a friend of Grade’s and lifelong champion of his work, said at a 2012 conference on the writer at the Yiddish Book Center.

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.

Sons and Daughters is Grade’s last novel, and the most recent of his fictional works to be translated and published. He wrote it in weekly installments that appeared in Yiddish newspapers, with intermittent interruptions, from 1965 to 1976. When he died a few years later, Grade had adapted some of the columns into the first volume of a novel, but hadn’t finished the second. Neither the first nor the uncompleted second volume saw the light of day until they were brought out this year as a single novel in an English translation by Rose Waldman.

Sons and Daughters unfolds during the early 1930s, primarily in shtetls in what was then Poland and is now mostly Lithuania and Belarus. It tells the stories of two families of rabbis that are fragmenting under the pressure of modernity. The rabbis, both of high repute, belong to different generations and display differing levels of stringency—the stricter is a grandfather; the other, his son-in-law, is more lenient but by no means lax. Both expect their own sons to become rabbis too, or at least Torah scholars, and their daughters to marry men of the same ilk. I can’t emphasize enough the intensity of the obligation felt by Jewish parents of the time to make sure that they vouchsafed a life of Torah to their children.

Predictably, the children have other ideas. One daughter, loving but stubborn, leaves for Vilna to study nursing. The youngest son, the darling of both families, upsets his father and grandfather by openly aspiring to join the halutzim, or Zionist pioneers; the pious Jews of the day abhorred Zionists because they had the audacity to try to found a state in the Holy Land without the intervention of the Messiah. Even worse, Zionists cast off religious strictures, dressing immodestly and eating treyf (nonkosher) food. The most treyf of the sons is not a Zionist, though. He goes to Switzerland for a doctorate in philosophy, marries a non-Jewish Swiss woman, and doesn’t circumcise their son. Whether his parents realize the extent of his apostasy isn’t clear. The way the family avoids talking about it, you might think that confronting it directly would kill them.

The theme of intergenerational conflict may sound familiar to anyone who is acquainted with Sholem Aleichem’s canonical “Tevye the Milkman” stories, or has seen Fiddler on the Roof, which is based on them—or, for that matter, has read Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, or even D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. The battle between parents and wayward children is the archetypal plot of modernization. But Grade has his own approach to it. Sholem Aleichem, the most important figure in the late-19th-century Yiddish renaissance, tells it from the father’s—Tevye’s—point of view. As Ruth Wisse points out in her study of Sholem Aleichem in The Modern Jewish Canon, all of his contemporaries writing on the same topic, in Yiddish or Hebrew or a non-Jewish language, more or less side with the rebels.

Grade doesn’t wholeheartedly endorse the values of either generation, though he is slightly more sympathetic to the parents. That makes sense: Nothing strengthens the case for tradition more than its destruction. The parents draw us into their earnest struggle to repress their horror at their children’s deviations from religious norms. The wife of the younger couple plays deaf and lets disturbing information slide by. Her husband, Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen, makes a valiant effort not to recriminate; he blames himself for his children’s choices. Would that he were a simple Jew in a poor village, Sholem Shachne thinks. Then he wouldn’t have spoiled his children.

His father-in-law, the more severe Rabbi Eli-Leizer Epstein, is not in the habit of second-guessing himself, and he will be harshly punished for his dogmatism by a deranged son. The son is his father’s fiendish double, an antic, self-loathing imp who, loudly proclaiming his adoration of Eli-Leizer, makes a mockery of him. This character may be Grade’s most magnificently grotesque creation, half demon, half schlemiel. His get-rich schemes end in disgrace; his marriage to a wealthy heiress bankrupts and breaks her. They move back to his hometown, ostensibly to run a store selling fancy china bequeathed to her by her father (which no one in the poor village wants, and which will soon be smashed to pieces), but really to stalk his father and demolish his reputation. Eli-Leizer comes to understand that his son’s aim is to hold up a hideously distorting mirror before him, “bringing him untold humiliation with the mimicking of his piety and his zealotry.”

Eventually parents and children start to soften toward each other, but because Grade didn’t finish the second volume, we don’t know for sure whether or how he would have resolved the tensions. In any case, as readers know even if the characters don’t, the Germans would occupy eastern Poland in a few short years, making all other concerns irrelevant. In the background, Grade tracks the whirlwind of history as it picks up speed. Jewish socialist youth groups parade through the marketplace and put on a tumbling show that highlights their muscular and shockingly exposed limbs (they wear shorts). More menacingly, anti-Semitic Polish-nationalist hooligans have mounting success enforcing a boycott against Jewish merchants in villages across the region. All of this really happened in the ’30s.

Toward the end of the book, Grade unites life and fiction in the character of a lapsed yeshiva bocher (student) named Khlavneh who has become a Yiddish poet. He is the fiancé of Sholem Shachne’s daughter, the one who went to Vilna to study nursing. Lest we fail to grasp that Khlavneh is a self-portrait, Grade drops hints. The daughter, for instance—an attractive, spirited woman, perhaps the most appealing figure in the novel—is named Bluma Rivtcha, a rhyming echo of Frumme-Liebe, the name of Grade’s murdered first wife, also a nurse and also the daughter of a rabbi.

Bluma Rivtcha brings Khlavneh home to meet the family. Over Shabbos dinner, the brother who moved to Switzerland and no longer observes Jewish laws ridicules him for writing poetry in “jargon”—that is, Yiddish, the bastard language of the uneducated Jew, “a common person, an ignoramus, a boor”—rather than in Hebrew, and for thinking that he and his fellow Yiddish writers could capture the spirit and poetry of Jewish life without following Jewish law themselves. Khlavneh refutes the brother in a brilliant show of erudition, then concludes: “You hate the jargon boys and girls because they have the courage to be different from their fathers and grandfathers, even to wage battles with their fathers and grandfathers, and yet, they don’t run away from home.” The father, who everyone thinks will be offended by a guest’s outburst at the Sabbath table, laughs in delight. Grade, having fashioned a world in which the old fights mattered, now gets to win them.

In Grade’s lifetime, he was considered one of the most important living Yiddish novelists—by those who could read Yiddish. When Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, some fellow Yiddish writers believed it should have gone to Grade instead. (In a 1974 review, Elie Wiesel had called him “one of the great—if not the greatest—of living Yiddish novelists,” and “the most authentic.”) But he never received the wider recognition he deserved. In 1969, Cynthia Ozick published a short story in Commentary called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” which paints a comi-tragic picture of a literary universe that has room for only one famous Yiddish writer. An obscure Yiddish poet in New York named Edelshtein rages against an old friend and enemy—Ostrover, another Yiddish writer in New York—who is internationally acclaimed for his colorful tales of love and sexual perversion, dybbuks and other folkloric creatures. In a harassing late-night call, Edelshtein howls at Ostrover that the murder of Yiddish has turned him into a ghost who doesn’t even know he’s dead.

[From the January 1979 issue: Lance Morrow on the spirited world of I. B. Singer]

Ostrover is Singer, of course, and Edelshtein could have been Grade. Some scholars think he was; others say he was modeled on another forgotten genius, the poet Jacob Glatstein. Ozick herself once said that she’d based Edelshtein at least partially on an uncle, a Hebrew poet. Whichever writer she had in mind, it was a pitch-perfect portrayal of Grade’s situation. And he suffered an additional indignity: His name was posthumously all but erased by his widow, Inna. For whatever reasons, including possible mental instability, she foiled almost every attempt to publish his work, whether in Yiddish or in translation. After his death, she signed a contract with his English-language publisher Knopf to bring out Sons and Daughters (under a different title, The Rabbi’s House), but then she stopped responding to the book’s editor and the project stalled. His unpublished work became available to the public only after she died, in 2010.

In the four decades since Grade’s death, Yiddish has had a revival. Chairs in Yiddish have been endowed at major universities. Klezmer is cool. The number of haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, who grow up speaking Yiddish has risen and keeps rising: The haredi community has the highest rate of growth in the Jewish world. To be sure, none of this guarantees that Grade will finally get his due. As a rule, haredim don’t engage with secular texts. And many of those who learn the language in college or read it in translation are drawn to it because it’s coded as politically and sexually radical. In the old days, Yiddish—especially written Yiddish—was associated with women, who were not taught Hebrew. Yiddish literature and theater had their golden age in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when a Jewish left and a Jewish avant-garde defiantly embraced the then-stigmatized dialect. Today, it appeals to some in search of an alternative Judaism: Yiddish is not Hebrew, and therefore not Israeli. In the latest twist in the singular history of Yiddish, it has become the emblematic language of Jewish diasporism, the quest to reinvent a Judaism without a Jewish homeland.

Grade’s work, however, is not radical. He dabbled in socialism in Vilna, but then he encountered Soviet Communism. He wrote sympathetically about women and created formidable female characters, but his protagonists are mostly male (as is rabbinic society), and I wouldn’t call him a feminist. Nor does Grade’s account of life in prewar Europe support the diasporist claim that Jews would be perfectly safe without a state.

In the introduction to Sons and Daughters, Adam Kirsch calls it “probably the last great Yiddish novel.” In all likelihood, he’s right, but I like to think that a vibrant Yiddish literary culture just might emerge from the ranks of the religious, as it did in 19th-century Europe. Ex-haredim such as Shalom Auslander are writing remarkable memoirs and novels. Admittedly, they’re in English. Any real renaissance of the Yiddish novel would require a critical mass of native Yiddish speakers and writers, who almost certainly would have to come from ultra-Orthodox enclaves—which is not unimaginable. Hasidim are already producing historical and adventure novels in Yiddish.

In 2022, the Forward ran an essay by Yossi Newfield, who was raised as a Hasidic Jew, about his discovery of Grade’s novel The Yeshiva: “The struggles Grade so masterfully described between faith and doubt, between Torah and the world, in his words, di kloyz un di gas, were my own.” Intentionally or not, Newfield echoed something Grade wrote in a letter in 1973: “The writer inside me is a thoroughly ancient Jew, while the man inside me wants to be thoroughly modern. This is my calamity, plain and simple, a struggle I cannot win.” The struggle may be an affliction, but it fueled Grade’s masterpieces. Who knows? The next great Yiddish novelist may be growing up in haredi Brooklyn right now.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Last Great Yiddish Novel.”