Remember

CHAVA ROSENFARB?
The Story of a Yiddish Woman Writer,
Edgia’s Revenge (1989)

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Exile at Last….
• “On the 8th of May 1945, the day the War was officially over, I was taken to
the hospital, located in what had once been the dwellings of the SS guards.
There I fought with the fever for my life, and won. However, the person
who won that fight, the person who survived the camps was someone else.
I had died in the concentration camp.
• This new person began recalling the past as it was once chronicled in my
poems, but I had no time to write them down. First I set out with my sister
to wander the length and breadth of Germany to find our father, my
boyfriend, our close friends. The search took us close to a month, after
which I did indeed find out all I could about my tremendous losses and the
few precious dear ones who had survived.”

• Excerpt From: Rosenfarb, Chava. “Exile At Last: Selected Poems”. Apple

Books.

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Facts…

• Chava Rosenfarb was one of the most important Yiddish

novelists and writers of the second half of the twentieth
century.
• Her primary subject was the Holocaust; she was a survivor of
the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen Belsen.

• She was born in Lodz, Poland in 1923. When she was a child,
her father encouraged her to write about her experiences and
to think about being a writer. In 1939, when she was 16, the
Nazis invaded Poland – and her life was changed forever.
In 1944 when the Lodz ghetto was liquidated, Chava and her
family were transported to Auschwitz and later to Bergen
Belsen, before being liberated by British forces in 1945. After
spending several years homeless and stateless in Europe, she
came to Canada in 1950 and settled in Montreal.

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Wtiting…
I was never a Sunday scribbler. Writing was never a hobby for
me, a pastime to while away the hours. On the contrary, it was as
necessary to me as life itself; it was a refuge, a substitute for
living, a confrontation with myself, a form of confession – but
always it was a necessity that allowed me to feel that my life had
an accompanying motif, an underlying melody. Writing often
gave me moments of such ecstasy as can only be experienced by
lovers; it gave me instances of such intense spiritual forgetfulness
that I truly believed that I and the cosmos were one, so that
through the simple act of breathing the air in my room I felt that I
was inhaling the universe itself.

• Rosenfarb, Chava. Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other

Essays (p. 3). McGill-Queen's University Press.

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Yiddish writer and
feminism
• I am not a card-carrying feminist, but the intellectual
baggage that I bring to the act of writing is certainly
coloured by my femininity.
• I ask myself whether my wavering attitude toward
feminism is not rooted in the fact of my being not just a
woman writer, but a Yiddish woman writer.
• There is a saying in Yiddish, “vi es kristlt zikh azoy yidisht
zikh” – meaning that there is little difference between
Yiddish literature and any other literature. But this is
not so.

Rosenfarb, Chava. Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays (p. 162-163). McGill-
Queen's University Press. Kindle Edition.

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Confessions of the • https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=PL_EkIOpaQU
Yiddish Writer….
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 Queens of Contradictions:
Yiddish Women Writers by
Irena Klefisz (1994/1997)

• 1. yidishe veltlekhe kultur /

• ‫יידישע וועלטלעכע קולטור‬
• 2. difference between English Yiddish cannon
and Yiddish literature
• 3. mame loshn vs losh-koydesh
• 4. Mendele Mokher Sforim, IL.Peretz, Sholem
Aleichem
• 5. 1908 Czernowitze

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Blume Lempel
• 1. Who is the narrator?
• 2. What are the most traumatic events in the story line?
• 3. The banality of evil? Who is the one who tells us about
it? Whose voice is it?
• 4. The most interesting linguistic, poetic, literary aspects
of the story?

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 I am twenty-four
led to slaughter
I survived. Virtue and crime weigh the same
I`ve seen it:
The following are empty synonyms: in a man who was both
man and beast criminal and virtuous.
love and hate
The Survivor friend and foe I seek a teacher and a master
darkness and light. may he restore my sight hearing and
speech
TADEUSZ RÓŻEWICZ
The way of killing men and beasts is the same may he again name objects and ideas
I`ve seen it: may he separate darkness from light.
truckfuls of chopped-up men
who will not be saved. I am twenty-four
led to slaughter
Ideas are mere words: I survived.
virtue and crime
truth and lies
beauty and ugliness
courage and cowardice.