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May 13, 2005
Shining light upon the ghetto
Chava Rosenfarb writes tirelessly about her experiences in the
Holocaust.
CASSANDRA SAVAGE
Yiddish-language novelist Chava Rosenfarb writes about a period
of 20th-century history the rest of the world is often afraid to
touch. She was born in Poland in 1923 – and she and her family
were incarcerated in the Lodz ghetto during the Second World War,
where they lived for four years before being deported to Auschwitz,
Sasel and then Bergen-Belsen. Rosenfarb was only 16 when her life
in the ghetto began. More than 60 years later, writing is a way
for her to live with the memories and give the world another perspective
on this dark time in history.
Today, Rosenfarb lives in Lethbridge, Alta., with her daughter,
Goldie Morgentaler, who's helping to translate her work into English.
It's a practical necessity for English-speaking readers but a painful
component of Rosenfarb's life as a writer: despite the fact that
she's been living and writing in Canada for more than 50 years and
is widely celebrated as one of today's great Yiddish writers, Rosenfarb
is hardly known in the English-speaking world. In Morgentaler's
academic essay, "Chava Rosenfarb: The Yiddish Woman Writer
in the Post-Holocaust World," recently published in Canadian
Jewish Studies, Rosenfarb talks about the plight of today's
Yiddish writers. "If writing is a lonely profession,"
she said, "the Yiddish writer's loneliness has an additional
dimension. Her language has gone up in the smoke of the crematoria."
The Bulletin recently spoke with Rosenfarb to find out more
about her life and work:
JWB: To what extent was the Yiddish language lost as a result
of the Holocaust and can you talk about some of the great works
of Yiddish literature?
Rosenfarb: There were many, many Yiddish-language writers.
Now, there are some but, of course, the number has diminished. But
we had a huge literature, a very rich literature and a beautiful
one – really great writers that contributed with their works
to Yiddish literature, like Shalom Aleichem and Itzik Manger. These
people created a terrific atmosphere for Yiddish culture and literature
and they brought the world into Yiddish.
JWB: I wanted to talk about the subject matter of your books.
Rosenfarb: Mostly I am still writing about the Holocaust,
the camps, the ghetto. Mostly I'm still in that space; I want to
get out of it but somehow [it's] as if I were sunk into a place
that holds me tight. And I always find something to say about that
past. If I write, it must be in connection with the experiences
of the Holocaust. Even if I write about modern times and modern
people far away from the war, the trace of the Holocaust is there.
I just can't observe Jewish life differently.
JWB: What did people have as a survival mechanism in the
camps?
Rosenfarb: It was a tremendous zest for life and it's probably
also the human psyche. People want to survive. In the Lodz ghetto,
they also clung to the culture. It was a very rich cultural life
in the Lodz ghetto and this helped a lot for survival; it was a
community and families were still together. The major tragedy of
living in the camps [was when] the Germans forced the men into a
different camp and the women stayed in another camp. Not all of
them met again after the war, so this was a very tragic situation,
apart from the beatings and the hunger – being apart from the
near ones and dear ones when you didn't know what happened to them.
JWB: You have an urge to write for your own healing. But
is it equally important to you that others understand what you went
through?
Rosenfarb: Absolutely. Every book is a letter. I write a
letter to the world and I want to be received on the other side.
Of course this is a major element in a literary work – that
you want to communicate, you want people to know and understand
and need you in a way.
JWB: Do you find that people have a hard time accepting the
subject matter of your books?
Rosenfarb: I'm deep in it. I live with it and the people
with whom I meet are the same kind of people that I am: survivors.
We really don't know how the outside world takes it nowadays. [Anyone]
who hasn't survived these terrible years can't really know. Writers
are people who try to transmit their experiences of the war years
and the conditions of the Holocaust. They try to teach people about
the reality. But it's very hard to transmit these situations. Take
Primo Levi – he felt so helpless in his work as a writer and
I think this was one of the causes of his suicide; he couldn't get
in touch with the world that met him, the world into which he fell
from the other world, the concentration camp world. And there were
many, many survivors who committed suicide for lack of communication.
They had the feeling that the world didn't really want to know.
JWB: Has your writing helped you survive?
Rosenfarb: Oh, yes. I wanted to write. I wanted to tell the
story. In comparison with what I wanted and what I did, it's a big
difference but I wanted to bring a message, bring some hope. But
I wanted much more than I could achieve.
JWB: If someone were to read one piece of your work, what
would you recommend?
Rosenfarb: The Tree of Life has also appeared in English.
My main work is actually The Tree of Life. It is about life
in the Lodz ghetto. For the time being, the English-speaking public
doesn't really know much about this book, but in Yiddish it was
a really great success. I have about 10 main characters and I follow
their lives in the ghetto to give a picture of the ghetto society
and how people were treated by life in these conditions of hunger,
starvation and forced labor.
Rosenfarb has won numerous prizes for her literary work. She was
recently shortlisted for a 2005 Alberta Book Award for Survivors,
a collection of short stories. Rosenfarb will be presenting a literary
lecture on her life and work at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater
Vancouver on May 19 at 7:30 p.m.
Cassandra Savage is a writer and editor living in Vancouver.
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