Book discussion on Chava Rosenfarb’s essay collection in Manhattan
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Jordan Kutzik January 22, 2020
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts.
The publication of Chava Rosenfarb’s essay collection Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays will be celebrated at a book talk in Manhattan at the YIVO Institute on Tuesday, February 18th. Confessions of a Yiddish Writer recently received a Canadian Jewish Literary Award.
Dr. Goldie Morgantaler, the author’s daughter who edited the collection and co-translated most of the essays in the volume with her mother, will speak at the event, which begins at 6PM.
The Yiddish novelist and poet Chava Rosenfarb, who survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, is best known to English-language readers for her acclaimed novels and short stories that portray the fate of Polish Jewry during WWII and Holocaust survivors rebuilding their lives in Canada. Until the publication of Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays, the wider world did not have access to her literary criticism, autobiographical essays, travelogues and other non-fiction writings. The new collection provides a fuller perspective of Rosenfarb as a writer and public intellectual and shows that besides being one of the greatest novelists in Yiddish she was also among the best essayists writing in the language in the second half of the 20th century.
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