“Letters from the Afterlife,” edited by Goldie Morgentaler, Ph.D., and translated by Krzysztof Majer and Sylvia Söderlind, chronicles the experiences of two Holocaust survivors as they adjusted to life in their adopted countries of Canada and Sweden. Childhood friends in Poland, Chava Rosenfarb (1923–2011) and Zenia Larsson (1922–2007) lived through the Lodz Ghetto and the death camps together, parting soon after their liberation from Bergen-Belsen. For the next 50 years, they continued their friendship through letters written in Polish. Despite their ongoing traumas and insecurities, Rosenfarb and Larsson went on to become distinguished novelists in their respective languages, Yiddish and Swedish.
After Chava Rosenfarb’s death in 2011, Goldie Morgentaler, Rosenfarb’s daughter, discovered a collection of Chava’s letters written in Polish to Zenia from 1945 to 1971. By bringing Chava’s letters together with Zenia’s side of the correspondence, drawn from the book Zenia published in Swedish in 1972, Morgentaler has created a testament to the emotional bond between two women writers who endured some of the most horrific events of the 20th century and emerged with their humanity and ability to love intact.
Goldie Morgentaler is professor emerita at the University of Lethbridge, where she taught 19th-century British and American literature and modern Jewish literature. She is also the translator from Yiddish to English of much of Chava Rosenfarb’s work, including Rosenfarb’s epic Holocaust trilogy, “The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto.”
“Letters from the Afterlife: The Post-Holocaust Correspondence of Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson” is available from McGill-Queen’s University Press, Amazon, Bookshop, and your local bookseller.
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