Chava Rosenfarb

Chava Rosenfarb (1923, Łódź, Poland — 30 January 2011, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada) was a Holocaust survivor and Jewish-Canadian author of Yiddish poetry and novels, a major contributor to post-World War II Yiddish Literature. Rosenfarb began writing poetry as young as eight. After surviving the Łódź Ghetto, Rosenfarb was deported to Auschwitz, where her father died, and then sent to a work camp at Sasel (subcamp of Neuengamme concentration camp), where she built houses for the bombed out Germans of Hamburg. At the end of the war she was sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she fell ill with nearly-fatal Typhus Fever in April 1945. After the end of the war, Rosenfarb married the future nationally-famous Canadian abortion activist Henry Morgentaler (the two divorced in 1975). She had published three volumes of poetry by 1950. The same year, Morgentaler and Rosenfarb, pregnant with Goldie, their daughter, emigrated from Europe to Canada, landing in Montreal in the winter of 1950, to a reception of Yiddish writers at Windsor Station.

Rosenfarb continued to write in Yiddish, publishing in 1972 what is considered to be her masterpiece, a three-volume novel detailing her experiences in the Łódź Ghetto, Der boim fun lebn (דער בוים פֿון לעבן), or The Tree of Life.

Rosenfarb's readership decreased as the secular Yiddish culture in the Americas began to erode and assimilate. She was a regular contributor to "Di Goldene Keyt" (די גאָלדענע קייט) or, roughly translated, The Golden Chain (of Generations), a Yiddish literary journal, edited in Tel Aviv by the poet and Vilna Ghetto survivor Abraham Sutzkever, until it closed.

Rosenfarb was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Lethbridge in 2006. Her novels and short stories have won numerous international prizes, including the Canadian John Glassco Prize and the Israeli Manger Prize, the highest award for Yiddish literature.

She died on 30 January 2011 in Lethbridge, Alberta. Her daughter, Goldie Morgentaler, is also a professor at the University of Lethbridge and a translator of her mother's work. She has also translated into Yiddish Les Belles Sœurs, one of Quebec's most famous plays. Rosenfarb's son Abraham is a doctor in Boston.

Major publications

• Di balade fun nekhtikn vald [The ballad of yesterday’s forest] (London, 1947) *Dos lid fun yidishn kelner Abram [The song of the Jewish waiter Abram]
• Geto un andere lider [Ghetto and other poems]
• Aroys fun gan-eydn [Out of Paradise]
• Der foigl fun geto [The bird of the ghetto] (1966)
• Der boim fun lebn (1972)
  • trans. into English as The Tree of Life (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004)
• Bocainy (Syracuse University Press, 2000)
• Of Lodz and Love (Syracuse University Press, 2000)
• Survivors: seven short stories (Cormorant Books, 2005)

References

• "The Tree of Life: A portrait of Chava Rosenfarb", CBC Radio, February 2001
• "Chava Rosenfarb + Alberto Manguel", Books & Writing, with Ramona Koval, Sunday 09/05/2004
• Joseph Sherman, ed., 'Chava Rosenfarb (Khave Roznfarb)' in Writers in Yiddish [Dictionary of Literary Biography 333] (New York: Bruccoli, Clark, Layman, 2007), pp. 250-256