Extraordinarily little has been written about how women who survived the Holocaust dealt with life after the war, with the trauma of their immediate pasts, and with the debilitating sense of alienation they felt in a changed world. Letters from the Afterlife chronicles the experiences of two female Holocaust survivors as they adjusted to life in their adopted countries of Canada and Sweden, where they knew neither the language nor the culture.

Childhood friends in Poland, Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson lived through the Lodz Ghetto and the death camps together, parting soon after their liberation from Bergen-Belsen. For the next fifty years, they continued their friendship through letters written in Polish, their only shared language. Despite their continuing traumas and insecurities, Rosenfarb and Larsson went on to become distinguished novelists in their respective languages, Yiddish and Swedish. In 1972, Larsson published her own side of the correspondence translated into Swedish, which caused a temporary rift in their enduring friendship.

Letters from the Afterlife, with evocative translations by Krzysztof Majer and Sylvia Söderlind, makes these letters available to an English readership. Rosenfarb’s daughter, Goldie Morgentaler, provides an introduction that establishes the importance of the correspondence from both cultural and historical perspectives and an epilogue that continues Rosenfarb and Larsson’s story after their written exchange was abruptly but temporarily suspended in 1971.

Goldie Morgentaler is the daughter of Chava Rosenfarb and Henry Morgentaler. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge, where she teaches nineteenth-century British and American literature, and has published numerous translation from Yiddish to English. She has translated of much of her mother’s work, including The Tree of Life and Survivors: Seven Short Stories, for she won the 2005 Helen and Stan Vine Jewish Book Award.

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Krzysztof Majer is a literary translator, assistant professor at the University of Lodz, and editor at Literatura na Swiecie and Text Matters.

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SYLVIA SÖDERLIND is a member of the Department of English at Queen's University.

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