Chaim Grade (1910–1982), Yiddish poet and prose writer, was born in Vilna, lived in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, Poland, France and the USA, while in exile he actively contributed to the revival of Jewish cultural life and literature in Yiddish. He has written collections of poems, short story cycles and novels describing the life of the Jewish community in pre-war Vilna and the tragedy of the Holocaust. “The Silent Minyan” (“Der Stumer Minyan”, 1976) is a late collection of Grade’s stories, united by a common chronotope - Vilna at the end of 1930 's - and common characters, including the main character - carpenter Elokum Pap, a dreamer and loser, neglecting earnings and other responsibilities of the head of the family for the sake of a great idea - the revival of an abandoned beit midrash. Grade's stories are characterized by simplicity, uncomplicatedness and artistic minimalism, in general typical of classical Yiddish literature and excellently conveying the originality and flavor of the everyday life of a Jewish town, with its joys and sorrows, fun and quarrels and characteristic inhabitants: a bungler-carpenter, “long, skinny and dry, like a broomstick”, grannies in wigs, a bilious ascetic rabbi, a kind-hearted bakery owner, a blind preacher and a greedy synagogue elder.