Chava Rosenfarb

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Chava Rosenfarb (b. 1923, Łódź, Poland), is a Holocaust survivor and Polish-Canadian author of Yiddish poetry and novels, a major contributor to post-World War Two Yiddish Literature. Rosenfarb began writing poetry as young as eight. After surviving the Lodz ghetto, Rosenfarb spent time in Auschwitz, where her father died, and Bergen-Belsen, where she fell ill with nearly-fatal Typhus Fever in April of 1945. After the end of the war, Rosenfarb married the future nationally-famous abortion activist Henry Morgentaler (the two divorced in 1975). She had published three volumes of poetry by 1950, and the same year, Morgentaler and Rosenfarb, pregnant with Abraham, their first son, decided to emigrate to Canada, landing in Montréal the winter of 1950, to a reception of Yiddish writers at Windsor Station.

Rosenfarb continued to write Yiddish, publishing in 1972 what is considered 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.

As the secular Yiddish culture in the Americas began to erode and assimilate, Rosenfarb's readership dwindled. Until it closed, 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.

Rosenfarb now lives in a suburb of Toronto. Her daughter, Goldie Morgentaler, is also a Yiddish writer, who created a Yiddish translation of Les Belles Soeurs, one of Québec's most famous plays, unlike her son Abraham, who, Rosenfarb says, has "...lost his Yiddish."

[edit] 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
• Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, Mark Abley, 2003, Houghton Mifflin Company, pages 209-212.