חוה ראָזענפֿאַרב: דאָס בלעזעלע וואָר
Chava Rosenfarb: That Bubble of Being

… in another European town [German philosopher] Theodore Adorno has come out with the sweeping declaration that there is no poetry after Auschwitz. A meaningful, powerful declaration, but it has nothing to do with me.
– Chava Rosenfarb, Midstream, April 1989

In the film Chava Rosenfarb: That Bubble of Being, noted Canadian Yiddish writer and major Holocaust literary figure Chava Rosenfarb discusses her life in Lodz, Poland, before the Holocaust; her years in the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; and her career as a Yiddish writer in Montreal. Despite Theodore Adorno’s declaration, Rosenfarb wrote copiously, eloquently and movingly about the Holocaust even though she herself admits in the film that she doesn’t know if she has found the right words to talk about it.

She offers insights into writing in general and specifically about the Holocaust, life and love, and the post-Holocaust Yiddish literary milieu in Canada. Intertwined with these topics she reads several of her poems. This film is an unscripted interview between Anna Fishman Gonshor and Chava Rosenfarb just before the writer’s passing, enhanced by photo stills and music. The interview is conducted entirely in Yiddish with English subtitles. The DVD also includes a bonus feature of 35 minutes of Rosenfarb reading from her poetry and prose subtitled with translations by Kathryn Hellerstein.

Despite her advanced years and the frequent discussion of the Holocaust, Rosenfarb makes a delightful, captivating, sometimes even funny, subject.

Chava Rosenfarb (1923–2011) was a leading figure in post-World War II Yiddish literature. Born in Lodz, Poland, she completed secular Yiddish school and Polish gymnasium in that center of Jewish life. She loved poetry and began writing at age eight. Like many Jews of the city, Rosenfarb was incarcerated in the Lodz ghetto from 1940 to 1944. Here, waking up at dawn from her bed of chairs, she composed lyric poetry in bookkeeping registers in the hours before going to work at her various ghetto jobs. These were wrested from her in Auschwitz. However, in the labor camp Sasel a sympathetic German gave her the stub of a pencil which she kept in her shoe and used to write out her destroyed poems on the ceiling above her bunk each night. By the time she was sent to Bergen-Belsen, she had been rereading them each evening and knew them by heart.

Her first collection of ghetto poems, Di balade fun nekhtikn vald (The Ballad of Yesterday’s Forest), was published in London in 1947. After the liberation she moved to Belgium and remained there until 1950 when she immigrated to Montreal. There she wrote and published the play Der foygl fun geto (The Bird of the Ghetto) in 1958 about the martyrdom of the Vilna ghetto partisan leader Isaac Wittenberg, which was translated into Hebrew and performed by the Habimah, Israel’s National Theatre, in 1966. Finding that neither poetry nor drama could begin to express the range and depth of her feelings about the Holocaust, Rosenfarb turned to fiction. In 1972 she published what is considered her masterpiece, Der boym fun lebn (The Tree of Life), a three-volume novel about the Lodz ghetto.

Whether in poetry, drama, short story or novel, all of Rosenfarb’s work speaks from her experience during the Holocaust. As she herself said in an interview for CBC Radio (2001), “The ghetto was the soil on which I really grew…  What I saw, what I learned there gave me my outlook on the human condition, on how people are, on life in general.”

Among the many awards and honors Rosenfarb has received are the I. J. Segal Prize (1993), the Manger Prize (1979), the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award (2005) and a Modern Language Association Book Award for Yiddish Studies (2006). She received an honorary PhD from the University of Lethbridge, in the Canadian city of the same name, in which she resided until her death.

Anna Fishman Gonshor, Faculty Lecturer of Yiddish Studies in the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University, is also on the faculty of the Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. As a translator, her work includes film, academic articles and archival materials. She is a native Yiddish-speaker with a lifetime involvement with Yiddish.

The films are directed and edited by Josh Waletzky, director and editor of Image before My Eyes and Partisans of Vilna, and the editor of Emmy Award-winning Itzhak Perlman: In the Fiddler’s House. Among other awards, Waletzky is the recipient of the Silver Ducat at the Mannheim International Film Festival for Image and First Prize at the Anthropos International Film Festival for Partisans. Other editing credits include Peabody Award-winning Revolution! (1997), the A.C.E. Eddie Award-nominated The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2000) and the Emmy Award-winning She Says: Women In News  (2001).