Chava Rosenfarb’s Memory of the Holocaust Was Formed in the Abyss and Redeemed by Writing

The more engrossed I’ve become in the work of the Yiddish writer Chava Rosenfarb (1923-2011), the more dismayed I am by her relative obscurity. At once grounded in realism and laced with lyricism, her novels, poems, plays, and short stories materialize out of the shadows of her own experience as a Polish Jew whose world dissolved when the Nazis invaded her country in September 1939. She endured four years in the Lodz ghetto, and close to another year in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. But in the years that followed, on the other side of horror and ensconced in a new life in the Jewish community of Montreal, she created out of the degradation she had experienced and annihilation she had witnessed a forceful body of work that calls out to be rediscovered. First and foremost among them is her epic trilogy of the Lodz ghetto, The Tree of Life, originally published in Yiddish in 1972.

Not nearly as well remembered or as widely read as she should be, Rosenfarb could not forget—or stop writing about—the Holocaust. Given the immense proliferation of memoirs, novels, histories, and other works about the Shoah, it perplexes me that those of her works that have appeared in English have not yet found a wider readership. The recent publication of Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays, edited by Rosenfarb’s daughter and frequent translator Goldie Morgentaler, will, perhaps, help to remedy the situation. Collected by Morgentaler, a professor of English at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, the essays—most of which originally appeared in Yiddish-language publications, although a few translations have appeared in Jewish periodicals—also serve as a welcome, and welcoming, introduction to Rosenfarb’s work.

Morgentaler groups the essays into three broad sections: literary criticism, travelogues, and personal history. We see Rosenfarb bringing her multiple perspectives as author, Holocaust survivor, and Yiddishist to her literary investigations—especially those grappling with the fragile future of Yiddish literature and her evaluations of other writers of the Holocaust, in particular Paul Celan and Primo Levi. Rosenfarb also proves herself an engaging travel guide in her accounts of her journeys to Australia (where she eventually spent several months each year with her second husband) and to Prague (where she conjures a panoply of Jewish ghosts, including Franz Kafka, and considers the messianic longings of her otherworldly great-great-grandfather).