Exile At Last: Selected Poems
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Exile At Last - Chava Rosenfarb
Chava
Rosenfarb
exile at last:
Selected Poems
ESSENTIAL POETS SERIES 198
Edited by Goldie Morgentaler
GUERNICA
TORONTO • BUFFALO • BERKELEY • LANCASTER (U.K.)
2013
For Ken Sherman, with gratitude and affection
Contents
Preface 9
Introduction 11
PART I Echoes of the Ghetto
Freedom 21
Ghetto Lullaby 22
Isaac’s Dream 24
Last Lullaby 27
Last Days in the Ghetto 29
The End of the Act 31
He Asked Me 32
PART II Questions of Faith
A Prayer 35
Rachel and Leah 36
Oriental Ballad 37
Twilight at Dawn 39
I Would Go into a Prayer House 40
PART III Poems Personal and Domestic
Praise 45
My Paper Worlds 47
Breakfast 48
Laugh With Me 50
Rendezvous 51
Landscape 52
Child 53
A Dress for my Child 54
My Children 56
Daughter 58
Nocturne 59
The Aquarium 61
At the Window 62
The Tree of Love 63
The Woman 64
Little Lives 67
The Three Little Goldfish 68
To a Dying Goldfish 70
Peace 72
Bourne End 73
Exile at Last 75
Notes 77
About The Author 79
About The Editor 80
Preface
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’s 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’s 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 exceptions are: I Would Go into a Prayer House
; He Asked Me,
Daughter,
and Rachel and Leah,
which I translated. The poems Peace,
Bourne End
and Exile at Last
were originally written in English and have never been published. Some of
the other poems have been published in English in Rosenfarb’s own translation: Praise
in Prism International and Aquarium
in Judaism; At the Window
in the Australian journal Bridges; Bourne End
and My Children
in the British journal Jewish Quarterly; Rachel and Leah,
The Three Little Goldfish
and A Dress for my Child
in the American journal Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal. A translation of I Would Go into a Prayer House
by Abraham J. Karp was published in Conservative Judaism in Summer 1966 and republished in the journal Jewish Roots in December 1966. Isaac’s Dream
and I Would Go into a Prayer House
were published in the June 2010 issue of Literature and Theology.
Most of the poems presented here are from Rosenfarb’s last
book of poetry, Aroys fun gan-eydn (Out of Paradise, 1965). The ghetto poems are from the volume Di balade fun nekhtikn vald (The Ballad
of Yesterday’s Forest). I have arranged the poems so that they follow roughly the chronology of Rosenfarb’s 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. The selection reflects my own preferences. I also want to extend a heartfelt thanks to Rivka Augenfeld for alerting me to the poem Landscape.
Rosenfarb’s introduction was also originally written in English and was