When Chava Rosenfarb arrived in Montreal in February 1950, she was already a published poet with one acclaimed volume, Di balade fun nekhtikn vald (The Ballad of Yesterday? Forest) to her credit. She was also a Holocaust survivor who, after being liberated from Bergen Belsen in 1945 had crossed the border illegally into Belgium, where she lived with her mother, sister and husband, all Holocaust survivors. In 1950 Rosenfarb? Montreal publisher, Harry Hershman, who had just published a Canadian edition of Di balade fun nekhtikn vald sponsored the entire group to come to Canada. Rosenfarb and her family settled in Montreal. Almost all of the poems in this collection were originally published in Yiddish. Chava Rosenfarb herself translated most of them into English. The poems have been arranged so that they follow roughly the chronology of Rosenfarb? life, beginning with the poems she wrote in the Lodz ghetto as a young girl and moving to the more mature poems of her years in Canada.

Chava Rosenfarb was born in the industrial city of Lodz, Poland. She began writing at the age of eight, with the encouragement of her father. One of the most prominent Yiddish writers living today, Chava has received numerous prizes for her work, including the 1988 and 1993 Prize of the Congress for Jewish Culture (New York), the Sholem Aleichem Prize (Tel-Aviv), the 1985 Atran Prize (New York) and the 1972 Niger Prize (Buenos Aires). Her novel, Der Boym fun lieb (The Tree of Life) won the 1979 Itsik Manger Prize, the world’s highest Yiddish literature honour. Chava lives in Lethbridge, Alberta.

Chava Rosenfarb's profile page

Guernica Editions’ new selected poems of Chava Rosenfarb – who is billed as “one of the most important Yiddish writers of the second half of the twentieth century” – will be many people’s introduction to this true woman of letters. Rosenfarb, who also produced fiction, drama, and essays, died in 2011 in Montreal, where for more than 60 years she wrote “not only from the experience of being Jewish, but also from the experience of being a woman in this turbulent century.” The latter quotation is from the book’s introduction, which the author composed in 1971 for an earlier volume that never actually appeared. This introduction is a harrowing document that may well induce tears in readers. It is the story of being deported from her native Lodz (“the Manchester of Poland”) to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Her manuscripts having been taken by the guards, she scratched her poems into the ceiling over her bunk in order to memorize them. The first section of the book is made up of poems about Rosenfarb’s early life in Poland. The second is more deeply religious and even theological in character. The final section, “Poems Personal and Domestic,” is the one most likely to resonate with non-Jewish and Jewish readers alike. Short quotations here would do the poems a disservice by emphasizing what many would view as obsolete poetic conventions (for example, simple ABAB rhyme schemes and the use of a refrain). But these are striking poems of family life, motherhood, and matrimony, including some clearly dealing with the author’s long marriage to Dr. Henry Morgentaler, which ended in divorce in 1975. The publishing history of the collection is unusual and interesting. Rosenfarb wrote a few poems in English (published here for the first time), but usually wrote in Yiddish and then translated the work into her adopted language. In several cases, the translator’s function has been performed by the poet’s daughter (also the volume’s editor), Goldie Morgentaler, a literary scholar at the University of Lethbridge. She has edited the collection – a moving testament to the human spirit – with daughterly affection and professional precision.

George Fetherling