The Recreation of Jewish Poland in the Canadian Novels of Chava Rosenfarb1

“I Am Still There”: The Recreation of Jewish Poland in the Canadian Novels of Chava Rosenfarb1 Goldie Morgentaler The first line in Chava’s Rosenfarb’s trilogy, The Tree of Life, is a bald statement of place. “Samuel Zuckerman was born in Lodz.”2 Period. As if nothing else we are going to learn about Samuel Zuckerman is as important as his place of birth. The rest of that opening paragraph goes on to tell us that not only was Samuel himself born in Lodz, but so was his great-grandfather, who had been among the first Jews to leave the ghetto and settle downtown. There follows a description of Zuckerman’s ancestors and their civic contributions to the city. For instance, Samuel’s great-grandfather had laid the foundations for the Jewish cotton trade and textile industry, and in the year 1836 had moved into a massive brick house at No. 17 Novomieyska Street, where Samuel still lives. Samuel himself intends to write a history of Lodz, a city for which he feels a sense of ownership and pride. He considers himself to be both a Polish patriot and an ardent Zionist. That these two things are irreconcilable contradictions will be one of the many things that The Tree of Life demonstrates during the course of its three tragic volumes. The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto is Chava Rosenfarb’s massive work about the suffering of the Jews of Lodz during the German occupation of Poland. From the beginning, the city of Lodz is established as a character in the narrative. Place names are constantly invoked. Piotrkowska, Lutomierska, Narutowicz, Ogrodova. The beginning of the second chapter devotes its six opening paragraphs to a lovingly detailed description of Lutomierska, the main street in the Jewish slum of Baluty, which became the location of the Lodz ghetto when the Nazis took over the city. The first English-language edition of the novel, published in Australia, contained a map of Baluty on its 1 The following is a revised version of an article published in Studies in American Jewish Literature, Vol. 35 No. 2, 2016 (Special Issue: Canadian Jewish Writing, guest edited by Ruth Panofsky), 187–199. Reprinted by permission. 2 The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto. Book One: On the Brink of the Precipice, 1939. Trans. Chava Rosenfarb and Goldie Morgentaler. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004–6. p. 3. All subsequent citations from The Tree of Life in this essay refer to this edition of Book One, because this is the only volume that features Jewish-Polish interactions. The spell- ing of place and street names follows that of Rosenfarb’s novel. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004379411_005 “I Am Still There” 37 inside cover.3 Were the subject matter not so tragic, one might be tempted to call The Tree of Life a love offering to this shabby beauty of a city, as Rosenfarb once called Lodz. But Rosenfarb’s Lodz is the Jewish, Yiddish-speaking Lodz— not the Polish Łódź. In fact, one of the things that Rosenfarb attempts to do is to re-establish the Jews at the center of a novel about a city divided between three populations: the Polish, the German and the Jewish. As noted above, the novel begins with Samuel Zuckerman, the scion of a wealthy Jewish family who is about to write a history of Lodz. He intends to demonstrate with his history that the Jews were “so much a part of the city and its growth that it was impossible to separate their story from that of the city” (9). And yet, as everyone knows, once the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, that separation most wrenchingly and tragically took place. The pur- pose of Rosenfarb’s novel is to chronicle in painstaking and unflinching detail exactly how this large, vibrant Jewish community of over 200,000 souls, with its roots so firmly established in Polish soil, came to be extracted from that soil and destroyed, so that today there is hardly a trace of it left. It took Chava Rosenfarb twenty-two years to write The Tree of Life, which she began shortly after settling in Canada in 1950. She was twenty-seven years old when she arrived in Montreal on a cold February day, along with her husband, Henekh (later Henry) Morgentaler. By that time she was already a well-known poet in Yiddish-language literary circles, as can be seen by the fact that the welcoming party who awaited her arrival at Montreal’s Windsor train station included the internationally renowned Yiddish author Melekh Ravitch and his wife Rokhl. Ravitch kissed her hand, a gesture of gallantry that she had never experienced before and would never forget as signaling the introduction to her Canadian life. In fact, it was the publication of her poetry, first in London and then in Montreal, that had secured her entry into Canada, at a time when Canadian immigration laws, even for Holocaust survivors, were still restrictive. She and her husband were sponsored by her Yiddish-language Montreal pub- lisher Harry Hershman. Thus, Yiddish publication made possible Rosenfarb’s 3 The Australian edition was published by Scribe Publications of Melbourne in 1985, without distribution rights in North America or Europe. This was the first of Rosenfarb’s novels to ap- pear in English translation. It differed from the original Yiddish edition, which was published in 1972, in that it compressed all three volumes into one large hard-backed book. The title of the Australian edition was The Tree of Life: A Novel about Life in the Lodz Ghetto. When the novel was finally published in North America in 2004–06 by the University of Wisconsin Press, Rosenfarb changed the subtitle to “A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto.” University of Wisconsin Press also published the novel as three separate volumes and Rosenfarb gave a dif- ferent subtitle to each volume. The American edition does not reproduce the map of Baluty..

Load more