This tender and moving memoir by the great Yiddish writer Chaim Grade takes us to the very source of his widely praised novels and poems the city of Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," during the years before World War II. Centered on the figure of Grade's mother, Vella simple, pious, hard-working this is a richly detailed account of the ghetto of his youth, of the lives of the rabbis, the wives, the tradesmen, the peddlers, and the scholars. We see Vella, desperate after losing her husband, become a fruit-peddler, struggling to survive poverty and to remain true to her faith in the face of...