She wrote in the Holocaust’s shadow. Can Poland bear to read her?
The Yiddish writer Chava Rosenfarb was born 100 years ago, into a world that no longer exists. In 1923, Lodz was home to the second-largest Jewish community in Poland, about 250,000 Jews, more than a third of the city’s population. Jews were entrepreneurs and unionists, Zionists and socialists, poor and rich and middle class, religious and secular, politicians and artists and writers.All that was obliterated during the Nazi occupation and the ensuing Holocaust. Now, only a few hundred Jews remain in the city. Yiddish, the language of Jewish commerce and culture, the language in which Rosenfarb wrote her acclaimed novels, poetry, essays and short stories, is but a memory there.
Despite that, Rosenfarb is being celebrated by the city of Lodz on the centennial of her birth with a variety of programs and a major international conference in October. Her work is being translated from Yiddish to Polish, and a complete selection of her short stories has been published in English for the first time. Those stories deal with the afterlife of Holocaust survivors in Canada, where she settled after surviving the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and where she died in 2011. Rosenfarb herself seems to be experiencing a literary afterlife.
“She wrote more pages about Lodz than any other Polish writer,” Joanna Podolska told me. A non-Jew, she is director of the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center, which is organizing the centennial. “But because we didn’t have her translated before, it is a new literature for us. It’s kind of a discovery.”
This discovery is occurring against the backdrop of a libel law aimed at punishing those who publicly accuse Poland of complicity in the Holocaust. How does a city honor Rosenfarb while its government seeks to whitewash her wartime experiences? Even her own daughter, Goldie Morgentaler, who translated her mother’s writing into English and delights in this long-sought attention, is apprehensive about attending the conference.
Anita Norich, a professor emerita at the University of Michigan and scholar of Yiddish women’s literature, understands the concern. “I don’t know what it means to be celebrating Chava Rosenfarb in the city of her birth in which she was a prisoner in a ghetto for almost six years,” Norich told me. “I think the people who are translating her work into Polish are heroes. To be making Polish readers confront this is a good thing.”
And yet, she wonders: “Can you do that in a country that hasn’t done the hard work of acknowledging the past? None of her characters can escape the Holocaust. Can Poland?”
Among those who could read Yiddish literature, Rosenfarb was best known for her epic novel “The Tree of Life,” a tragic, sweeping story of Jewish life in Lodz that spans more than 1,000 pages over the course of three volumes. In Montreal, where she settled after the war, she also published other novels, poetry, short stories and essays amid a thriving Yiddish literary and cultural scene.
“I knew all my life that she was a writer,” recalled Morgentaler, a professor emerita of English literature at the University of Lethbridge. “She was really obsessed with writing, every spare minute. If I said something as a child and she thought it was clever, she would go write it down.”
It wasn’t until she was in her 30s that she became involved in her mother’s writing and helped her translate “The Tree of Life” into English for an Australian publisher in 1985. It was revelatory for Morgentaler: “I had no idea she was such a good writer.”
Morgentaler also translated and edited a volume of her mother’s short stories, “In the Land of the Postscript,” newly published by White Goat Press, the imprint of the Yiddish Book Center. The Holocaust survivor characters in these haunting stories reflect Rosenfarb’s own experiences.
Among others, we meet Barukh, a newcomer to Canada who lost everyone and everything in Europe, a man who “cannot seem to get warm in this country.”
“I have a room that I rent, but I have no home,” he tells a co-worker, who responds to this confession with laughter.
Rosenfarb was “intimately acquainted with the subtle undercurrents of pain, confusion, anger, and despair in the lives she wrote about,” Morgentaler writes in the introduction. But beyond existential alienation, these stories also depict searing family drama, infidelity, depression, suicide, resilience, desire, love. While in other post-Holocaust literature, survivors are often treated gently, benevolently, as quiet heroes who overcame unimaginable suffering to begin life anew, Rosenfarb is an unsparing realist, unsentimental in her portrayal of the consequences of the Holocaust experience.
“Edgia’s Revenge,” perhaps her best-known story, is told in the first person by Rella, who survived by becoming a sexual slave to a Nazi officer and a kapo, or functionary, in the camp. Once in Montreal, Rella suppresses her tortured past, hiding from it and seeking to justify it. As soon as she’s able, she pays to remove her concentration camp tattoo: “Of course, I knew that it was easier to remove the tattoo from my skin than to erase the mark of Cain from my soul. But what went on in my soul had the advantage of not being visible.”
As Morgentaler wrote, “this is immigrant literature with a difference, because the Old World in this case incorporates the stain of the Holocaust, which the New World is incapable of washing away.”
By commemorating Rosenfarb’s life and work, and more widely sharing her stories, Podolska and her colleagues are also learning about their own past. “We see some parts of the history of our city, which most readers didn’t know about before because it was a Jewish history,” Podolska explained. “Sometimes Jews had a different view of the same city. It is a new perspective.”
But will more Poles be as interested in this new perspective? Especially if in extricating the past they stumble upon evidence of their own national complicity?
“For the country as a whole, this is one of the best times in history: independence, good economy, a defense umbrella,” Samuel Kassow, a historian of Polish Jewry, told me. “Yet it’s a very conflicted country because for so long they built their identity as victims, not perpetrators. It is hard for them to look at the good and the bad in their history.
So, a paradox: Jewish life in many ways is flourishing in Poland — with a new museum, community centers and cultural festivals like the Rosenfarb centennial, mostly driven by non-Jews since only a few thousand Jews remain. Simultaneously, sadly, antisemitism is still rampant, and polls show that a sizable number of Poles do not want Jews as citizens and neighbors. This is why the government’s tightening control of the national narrative finds general acceptance.
But Rosenfarb’s stories remind us of the cost of suppressing and censoring the past. In “Edgia’s Revenge,” Rella encounters Edgia, whom she had both brutalized and helped rescue in the camps, who knew her secret, and whom she subtly continued to resent and humiliate. Rella commences an affair with Edgia’s husband, training all her fear, guilt, and disgust about her past onto the one person who could expose her identity — until she can bear it no longer.
Edgia “had never pointed an accusing finger at me, and so she left me with the feeling that I must point the finger at myself, that I must let all the world know that I was a kapo,” Rella says before preparing to take her own life.
Through Rella, Rosenfarb demonstrates that lasting trauma can never be confronted and expunged without a thorough interrogation of the past. Nothing substitutes for such necessary, brutal honesty. That holds true for finely drawn fictional characters and for entire nations as well.
