Chava Rosenfarb

[Eric]

First of all, I must disappoint you: I am neither Jewish, nor have I read the books in question. So it may seem a cheek (or "chutzpah" as they say) that I embark upon plugging this author.

Well, I can't say anything about the quality of the six books that Chava Rosenfarb has written, with or without the collaboration of her daughter Goldie Morgenthaler, but the thought struck me that when so many young authors, between the ages of 25 and 40, are jumping on the Holocaust bandwagon without even having experienced it, we readers should go back to basics, and read the memoirs and novels of those who were actually there. Just you wait till Jonathan Littell's huge novel "The Kindly Ones" gets translated from the French. Then there'll another, rather sickly, bout of Holocaustomania. And there are others that have suddenly discovered their Jewish roots in Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, or anywhere else where the local literature means nothing to most English-speakers.

One or two "actually-there-niks" are endlessly mentioned, quoted, praised for their bravery, and pitied for their despair. But there are quite a few more unsung authors that never make headlines, often because they chose to stick to the real language of the Holocaust, Yiddish.

While books get translated out of German (Celan), French (N?mirovsky), Italian (Levi), even Dutch (Frank, Hillesum), and so on, and are retranslated, those writing in Yiddish appear to have been sidetracked.

Who, pray, has ever heard of Abraham Sutzkever (partisan and poet in Vilnius), or Esther Kreitman (sister of the Singer brothers, who spent WWII in London during the Blitz, which she describes) or Dovid Bergelson (who fled back to Russia)? Or the literary periodical of the interwar years "Di Goldene Keyt"?

And Chava Rosenfarb. She has written six books in Yiddish about her experiences during WWII (English translation publication date in square brackets):

The Tree of Life Trilogy (novels):
1) - On the Brink of the Precipice 1939 [2004]
2) - From the Depths I Call You 1940-42 [2005]
3) - The Cattle Cars are Waiting 1942-44 [2006]
University of Wisconsin Press

Survivors - Seven Short Stories [2004]
Cormorant Books

Bociany (novel) [1999]
Syracuse University Press

Of Lodz and Love (sequel to "Bociany") [1999]
Syracuse University Press

Wikipedia article about her at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chava_Rosenfarb

And the books themselves:

http://www.booksite.com/texis/scripts/oop/click_ord/listbooks.html?sid=4382&type=a&qkey=Rosenfarb%2C+Chava

[Mirabell]

While books get translated out of German (Celan), French (N?mirovsky), Italian (Levi), even Dutch (Frank, Hillesum), and so on, and are retranslated, those writing in Yiddish appear to have been sidetracked.




Very very good point. I flatter myself to be reather well rtead in this area but to be honest the only text I've read that was written originally in yiddish that deals with the shoah (i prefer that word) is a story by Singer.

Thx.

[Eric]

You can call it the "shoah", I'll call it the "khurbn". The use of these two words, plus the Anglo-French "holocaust", rather demonstrates my point. The third of these is almost universal, the first is Hebrew, the language that Jews appear to prefer nowadays, but the word "khurbn" is probably only known among the remaining Yiddish-speakers, who are now dying off with old age.

To avoid all the information getting lost here, I'll start a separate thread about Yiddish literature. I am by no means an expert myself either, being a goy, but it's worth demonstrating that it was once very much an up-and-coming literature. Sadly the Holocaust / shoah / khurbn put an end to all that, as those who weren't killed fled to the USA, and their readership was, in any case, much reduced.