Why it’s time to celebrate a glorious Yiddish writer who would have turned 100 this year
Rosenfarb gazes out from a mural in Lodz, Poland. Photo by Kathryn Hellerstein
The great Yiddish writer Chava Rosenfarb’s unforgettable short stories are all about afterlives. Most of her stories take place a decade or two or three after the Holocaust, in the seemingly neutral and snowy terrain of Montreal, Canada, where survivors have come to start over, to make new lives in a place far away from the crematoria of Europe. Among Rosenfarb’s unforgettable characters are a former kapo who befriends the only woman whose life she ever saved and a baby kidnapper. But even a writer of Rosenfarb’s ability probably could not have imagined the incredible afterlife of Rosenfarb herself.
This year, the city of Lodz, Poland, declared 2023 the year of Chava Rosenfarb — shocking considering that Rosenfarb was once imprisoned in the ghetto there, after which she was deported to Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. Had she lived to see it, Rosenfarb, a daughter of Lodz, would have been 100 years old this year, but she died in 2011. She is best-known for her novel The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto, and she also received acclaim as a literary translator of Yiddish. Her work was most recently translated by her daughter Goldie Morgentaler for In the Land of the Postscript: The Complete Short Stories of Chava Rosenfarb.
Recently, Lodz, the third-largest city in Poland, hosted a conference on Rosenfarb. “The most important thing is that there were these street murals of Chava Rosenfarb, in wild and crazy colors, on buildings and on street corners,” Kathryn Hellerstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told me when I called to ask her about the conference. “These beautiful street-art pictures were not defaced by graffiti, though we did see some antisemitic graffiti here and there on walls.” Hellerstein said she had never seen any Yiddish writer on a mural before, not even Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Stories not just written, but lived
I have been thinking about Rosenfarb’s work for months. They are complex, layered stories about guilt and forgiveness, but above all, they are about memory and the impossibility of forgetting certain things — ever. Many of the stories feature a troubled marriage of some kind, and a good percentage of the protagonists were previously married to someone who was murdered by the Nazis. For these survivors, their relationship to their first partner is always somewhere in their minds.
In “April 19th,” for instance, a Holocaust survivor named Hersh is happily married for the second time — but his happiness does not mean he can forget his murdered first wife, Rivkele. “Hersh loved Brunia just as powerfully as he had loved Rivkele, and he loved his new set of children just as much as he loved the two he had lost,” Rosenfarb writes. “He usually remembered that their names were not the same, but he confused their nicknames and sometimes called the living boy and girl by the pet names of their perished predecessors. Since Bronia had never corrected him, Hersh had the feeling that whatever had once been still was, that whatever belonged to his past was also part of his present.”
The story then moves to a beautiful Passover day, April 19th, which was the date of the Warsaw ghetto uprising commemoration.
“On just such Passover days the Nazis would descend the ghettos of Europe, intending to kill the Jews wherever they found them or deport them to concentration camps,” Rosenfarb writes, adding that, for survivors, “April 19th memorialized not just those who had fallen in the uprising itself but all the innocents who had been killed in extermination camps, in labor camps, in ghettos, in forests in fields, in pits, on highways, on streets.”
When I read that sentence, I could feel that Rosenfarb had lived it. I have read a lot about the Holocaust, but I have never read about murder on highways.
Later, Hersh is at the memorial service. He sees a woman get up to light a candle, and he imagines that it’s his first wife, Rivkele, right in front of him, lighting that candle. Meanwhile the choir sings a song with lyrics by Shmerke Kaczerginski, the poet of the Vilna Ghetto. “Springtime, on your blue wings, bring back my beloved, my dearest to me.”
One of the most beautiful things about reading Rosenfarb is how immersed she is in the Yiddish world, in its poetry, in its songs. The dead are never completely dead in these stories. But what is alive is a social circle of survivors. What is also alive is the strangeness of life — the coincidences, unexpected meetings, and freak accidents that often determine our fate.
Reading Rosenfarb after Oct. 7
I began reading these stories before the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel and continued a few weeks after the shocking details of the slaughter became known. In many survivors’ accounts of the massacre at the outdoor rave concert, a coincidence made it possible to survive — someone drove by at just the right moment; a young girl grabbed the hand of a young man she did not know and told him she was scared and that he had to stay with her. Both survived. Some survivor accounts were so difficult to absorb — such as those of witnessing rape after rape after rape — that I had to take breaks as I read.
I say this because I had to take breaks to read the story that is the most difficult in In the Land of the Postscript — but that is also Rosenfarb’s most unforgettable. “Edgia’s Revenge,” which, at 58 pages, is more novella than short story, is narrated by Rella, a woman who was a kapo during the war. “If there was such a thing as a good kapo, then that is what I was,” she tells us. “The only reason that inmates of the women’s camp called me Black Rella was because I have black hair, dark eyes, and dark skin. I am not a murderer; I do not even have a violent nature, although I did beat people, and I suppose you could say that I had a hand in murder. I grew up in a cultured, middle-class home. I had good manners. I liked people. I enjoyed life.”
Whew.
Rosenfarb’s complexity is on display here; she always tries to show her characters’ inner motivations. “In the camps I saw my entire family float heavenward with the smoke from the crematorium chimneys,” she writes. “I wanted to save myself. I was nineteen years old, I wanted to survive. I didn’t choose the means by which to do it. There were no choices to be made. Everything depended on luck. The means chose me.”
Rella flirts with her kapo, who “pushed me into an overturned lorry, and then he took me.” Rella let Albert do whatever he wants with her, and it happens again and again and again, after which he makes sure she rises in the ranks of the camp. “I stroked his shaved head and wondered if my god, the monster Albert, had ever been a child, had ever dandled on a mother’s knee, had ever absorbed even one drop of the milk of human kindness,” Rella says.
All of this is prelude to the real story, which is the one and only time Rella shows a bit of kindness toward one of the female prisoners she oversees. These paragraphs are so unforgettable that I have kept returning to them. After Rella discovers an inmate in what considers to be a pathetic hiding spot, she grabs the inmate “by the collar of her ragged dress. She fell forward on all fours, and this is how I dragged her, like a recalcitrant dog.”
The woman, Edgia, asks for pity. “I jerked her from the spot,” Rella recounts. “But at that point my eyes met her pleading gaze. Her dirty face, small and shrunken, was blotted from my sight, and all I could see were those eyes. I felt as if I were drowning in them, as if I were being sucked into an abyss. I saw the eyes of my little sister Maniusha looking at me imploringly as an SS man tore her from my arms.”
This is the prelude to Rella’s only moment of kindness — she allows Edgia to hide in her bunk during roll call, and thus saves her life. But when Auschwitz is about to be liberated, and prisoners are being loaded into carts and sent to points unknown, Rella sees Edgia on her way to freedom and insists on getting in her face and telling her that if they manage to survive and meet after the war, she must never reveal that Rella was a kapo.
Years pass. Rella moves to Canada and opens a clothing shop. She is looking through a rack of clothing when she thinks she recognizes someone — Edgia. She insists, and basically forces herself, into Edgia’s life. She makes Edgia’s friends her friends, and spends a great deal of time noticing Edgia’s subservience to her husband and his friends. Rella then — of course — seduces Edgia’s husband.
But the freaky coincidences of life intervene, and Edgia’s husband, Lolek falls down a staircase and dies. After that, to Rella’s surprise, Edgia blossoms into a beauty; she remarries. But Rella cannot let go and inserts herself again into Edgia’s new life and new confidence. Eventually, though, Edgia decides she has finally had enough. She thanks Rella for saving her life but ends the friendship. I’ll let you discover the exact words she uses, and how Edgia manages to torment Rella with this decision.
I admit it, I couldn’t stop thinking about Rella and Edgia, two incredibly complex characters, whose story raises questions: What does a person owe someone who saved their life? And what price is too high to be paid?
Characters on the outskirts of our consciousness
Sometimes Rosenfarb’s characters are paying a price without knowing it. In “The Masterpiece,” a man — a Holocaust survivor, of course — works and works and works on his novel, while his wife raises their five children. She begins to feel neglected, as her husband spends more time on the novel than her, so she has an affair. She becomes pregnant by her lover, but she doesn’t tell her husband until the boy is a teenager and performs in a concert. She decides to invite, of all people, her lover, and his wife to see just how talented the boy is.
But that’s not the whole story. The husband and wife met when he was scrubbing the floors of a concentration-camp infirmary, and she, shivering from cold and desperate, asked him for some food. Under the SS’s eyes, he gave her half a piece of bread. And he loved her, truly loved her, and she knew it.
After the war, he changes. Bold and brave in the camps, he turns inward after liberation. He writes and writes. She loved his novel, and never told him. She made a copy, because she anticipated that when he would find out about her betrayal, he would burn his novel. That was what happened, but she was still able to triumphantly escape to their vacation cabin and read the novel whenever she wished. And the husband writes a new novel, alone in a rented room. But coincidence — the freak accident intervenes. When the husband visits the cabin, he lights a fire, falls asleep, and the house burns down with the old novel inside. Well, his wife thinks, he was furiously working on his new novel after their separation; she eagerly goes to find it in his rented room. But alas, it is gibberish. And the first novel went up in flames.
So what was the masterpiece of the title? The burned book? The music played by the violinist son who wasn’t his son? All of European Jewish culture, sent to die in the camps? Maybe the real masterpiece was the devious, complicated, multilayered survivor-woman Rosenfarb created, who just wanted to live so badly.
That’s what comes through in Rosenfarb’s stories. Whether her characters are kidnapping a baby from the hospital because they want one so uncontrollably, or whether they are having an affair because they must, must, must enjoy life, these are people who will do anything to live. And after weeks of living with Rosenfarb’s creations, I can say that her characters remain in the mind, even when, in the simpler stories, they initially seemed predictable. They all live on — where else? — on the outskirts of our consciousness.
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