Help Make Dead Jews Live-
Read Chava Rosenfarb, please
Biocany
Chava Rosenfarb
Hardcover: 352 pages, Publisher: Syracuse University Press; 1st ed edition (June 1999). ISBN: 0815605765
reviewed by Allan Gould
One of the greatest tragedies of the Holocaust, the savage, wholesale slaughter of 85% of European Jewry, has been its focus on the murderers and murdered, rather than on What Was Lost. Six million, yes; 1.5-million innocent children, yes (as if the adults were guilty!). But what were their daily lives like, the explosion of Yiddish and Hebrew that was occurring in the preceding decades, the rise of Zionism and Socialism and, yes, Communism, the endless social ferment: what was the culture of Central and Eastern Europe that was obliterated by the Nazis and their cohorts?
For that, we must usually turn to literature. And while most literate Jews and Gentiles are aware of the often inspired short stories and novels of Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, far, far fewer Jews (and probably close to zero Gentiles) are aware of the extraordinary gifts of Canada's own Chava Rosenfarb. Born in Lodz, Poland over 80 years ago, she is a survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, the sister of a long-time teacher of Yiddish at Bialik Hebrew Day School (Henia Reinhartz), and the mother of a Professor of Literature in Alberta and a prominent medical doctor in Montreal which hints at the quality of a future generation that was destroyed in the Shoah.
Rosenfarb has been recognized for her literary genius, but only in the dwindling Yiddish community. (She won the Manger Prize in 1979- it is the Nobel Prize of that language for her astonishing 1,000-plus page trilogy, The Tree of Life, which I loved; it truly brings that Manchester of Poland, Lodz, to life). She was finally published in her Chosen Land recently, with a solid short story collection called Survivors, but here I wish to describe two of her latest novels, published in English (in her own translation) over the last dozen years, by Syracuse University Press (of all places).
The first of the two linked works is called Bociany (it's the name of a shtetl in Poland, and means stork in that language, since those remarkable creatures would return every year to nest in the village), and it is a masterpiece. (The second of the pair, Of Lodz and Love, follows many of the same characters to the giant nearby city, into the First World War, and, in a heartbreaking, brief yet awe-inspiring Epilogue, through the Holocaust and out of Poland (and clearly on to Canada, although that is left unspoken).
I want to briefly discuss Bociany, since it captures my point: the religious, spiritual, yet transitional world of shtetl Jewry between 1880 until the eve of World War I, which was so extraordinary, and of which we are all less aware than, say, Zyklon B or Wallenberg or Goering. A learned woman speaks to a lady's group of the days of the Messiah, when heaven and earth will become one, and the Garden of Eden will stretch from one end of God's earth to the other. People will have no need to speak to each other because they will be so finely attuned that they will hear each other's thoughts. A pogrom occurs nearby, and a young rabbi pleads, Yes, the waters have come up to our necks. But don't I know that your faith-our faith-is as deep as the mysteries in which His doings are shrouded? That is the meaning of being a Jew. The trouble is that we sometimes forget to trust ourselves or our faith. . . . Of course, such millennia-old religiosity is being challenged, as we see in several intellectual gatherings: One character speaks of The Zionist congress in Basel. . . When they heard this, some of the young men shook their heads vigorously, and disrespectfully attacked their hosts with words such as Karl Marx, Bund,' or socialismus'. . . .
A book review on the internet necessarily must be short, although I would love to write many pages more about the marvelous characterizations, the passionate (but asexual, of course) love that grows between a young Talmudic scholar named Yacov and Binele, our heroine, the amazing Jewish families and marriages and early deaths and poverty and conflicts, the agonizing relations with their Christian neighbours, and more. I.B. Singer has often been attacked for sexing-up the Jews of Eastern Europe, while Sholom Aleichem has been accused of sentimentalizing the shtetls, partly due to Fiddler on the Roof. I hope and pray that Chava Rosenfarb's powerful and truthful books are available in more and more libraries across North America (I ordered these later novels over the internet), and that many readers of this review will seek out her quality work.
We pray each day that G-d raises the dead. Novelist Rosenfarb does the same in her writing: she makes us aware of what kind of vibrant, enthralling, dynamic Jewish life was obliterated by murderous antisemitism. She is more than a Kaddish for the millions of dead, though; she is an exceptionally fine writer, of Tolstoyan scope and excellence.
Allan Gould is a Toronto-based author who often writes book reviews for this website, as well as attends and teaches at Kolel. (Visit his website: http://www.allangould.com)
