The Yiddish poet and novelist Chaim Grade is best known for his literary depictions of religious life in prewar Eastern Europe—and of his own disillusionment from that particular life. Much of his work is centered around the great yeshivas of Vilna and its environs, heirs of the anti-ḥasidic countermovement of the late 18th century. Yet in the 1960s, Grade began a correspondence with the rebbe of the Chabad-Lubavitch Ḥasidim, facilitated by Israel’s then-president Zalman Shazar and encouraged by Grade’s wife, who generally wanted little to do with Jewish affairs. Eli Rubin tells the story, and presents a translation of some of the correspondence:

In July 1966, Chaim Grade . . . received a phone call. Zalman Shazar, the journalist and Labor activist who was now president of Israel, had arrived in New York on his first official visit to the United States, and would soon be heading to Washington to meet his counterpart, President Johnson. But Shazar had something else on his mind. As Grade recalled in a letter penned a few weeks later, “the [Israeli] consul told me that a constant stream of warnings are coming from Israel” that President Shazar “should not visit the Lubavitcher rebbe, and it is making the president ill, depressed, and agitated.”

Grade soon arrived at Shazar’s hotel, together with his wife, Inna Hecker Grade, for a heart-to-heart. “If you go,” Grade told the president, “there will be a storm outside of you, in Israel. But if you don’t go, there’ll be a storm within your own self, and it will never quiet down!”

“Now I see two things,” Shazar excitedly replied, “you are a poet, and you are a friend!”

A couple of days later, the New York Times was . . . reporting that “Mr. Shazar had clearly placed his own deep spiritual attachments ahead of the criticism of some Israeli newspapers when he made an unscheduled midnight visit to Rabbi Menahem M. Schneerson, head of the Lubavitcher movement in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.” At Shazar’s request, and with Inna’s encouragement, Grade was in the presidential entourage.

Reviewing Stranger Than Fiction, a new history of the 20th-century novel, Joseph Epstein draws attention to what’s missing:

A novelist and short-story writer who gets no mention whatsoever in Stranger Than Fiction is Isaac Bashevis Singer. When from time to time I am asked who among the writers of the past half century is likely to be read 50 years from now, Singer’s is the first name that comes to mind. His novels and stories can be sexy, but sex, unlike in many of the novels of Norman Mailer, William Styron, or Philip Roth, is never chiefly about sex. His stories are about that much larger subject, the argument of human beings with God. What Willa Cather and Isaac Bashevis Singer have that too few of the other novelists discussed in Stranger Than Fiction possess are central, important, great subjects.