“A COTTAGE IN THE LAURENTIANS”. - A Short Story by Chava Rosenfarb

Chava Rosenfarb on The Reading Life



  From The Jewish Women’s Archive. A bio

After The Holocaust Yiddish Literature was very different from before The War.  It became almost entirely a literature written by immigrants to New York City, Montréal, Toronto, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Rio de Jeniro and Isrsel. I recently found  an anthology, first published in 1912 by The Society of Jewish Publications now available as a Kindle on Amazon (free).  It might be the first such anthology.  There are no 

works by women in this collection. Everything was written in Eastern Europe or Russia.  The Holocaust destroyed families, it forced women immigrants, to make new lives in huge cities so unlike their former home towns. Survivors needed to tell their stories. The Holocaust greatly challenged the faith of Jews everywhere.  How could God let this happen to them?  

Chava Rosenfarb survived, with her sister and mother, Auschwitz, moving to Montréal after the war, spending a few years in Beligium first.  All of her very prolic highly regarded multi-genre work involves Holocaust survivors.  

“A COTTAGE IN THE LAURENTIANS” is about a married couple living in Montreal.  As did Chava Rosenfarb and her first husband, they met and fell in love at a concentration camp. One of the things so evident in this story is Rosenfarb’s incredible ability to paint scenes of natural beauty.  

(The images above are of the Laurentians area of Quebec)

We follow the couple from the very early years of their marriage up to it’s dissolution twenty years later.  One thing they both loved was spending time in the Lauerntian mountains at a cottage they bought very early in their marriage.

Here is a sample of how much a master can put in a few sentences.

“Sonia and Victor were born in Lodz, the Polish Manchester. Both were concentration camp survivors who had lost their families, friends, and neighbours during the war. They had arrived in Canada carrying the substantial psychic baggage of horrific nightmares and tragic recollections, but aside from these, they had –in a manner of speaking –nothing else to declare. In their memories, the pre-war childhood vacations which they had taken in the sub-Carpathian regions of Poland stood out like the images of a paradise lost. The Laurentian Mountains reminded them of those enchanted spots, and so, even at a time when they could scarcely afford it, when their children were still small, Victor and Sonia had rented a cottage in the Laurentians when the summer heat made Montreal unbearable. They had borrowed money and renounced small luxuries so that they could rent a small cottage near Le petit lac mirage, which was located in a remote area, far from the bustle of the more fashionable vacation spots, an hour and a half drive from Montreal. Later, when their financial situation improved, they bought the cottage. Victor, who was a Yiddish writer, had been offered a teaching position at the Jewish Teachers’ Seminary in Montreal; Sonia, also a teacher, was hired by a Jewish high school. It was then that they began to spend not only their summer vacations, but also their weekends in the Laurentians.”

As the story goes on with how happy the family, now with a violin prodigy son and an academically gifted daughter, I had the feeling something terrible was coming.  I was not wrong but it was not anything I would ever have guessed.

I was left with two strong wishes after reading this story.  One was to spend an autumn month in a cabin deep in the Laurentians mountains and the other was to read more by Rosenfarb.  As of now I have access to seven of her short stories I have not yet read, including one online “In the boxcars”.  Her trilogy, The Tree of Life is considered by all one of the great master works of Holocaust fiction but at a cost of $57.00 plus shipping, it is about 2000 pages, I probably will never get to read this.  

I read this in The Exile Book of Yiddish Women Writers / edited by Frieda Johles Forman. This is a first rate collection meant to show the world the work of Yiddish Women who emigrated to Canada.

The story was translated by her daughter Goldie Morgentaler 

The website below is a wonderful resource, with lots of pictures.

http://chavarosenfarb.com/biography

Mel u

CHAVA ROSENFARB (1923 - 2011)Prize-winning writer of fiction, poetry and drama, Chava Rosenfarb was born February 9, 1923 in Lodz, the industrial centre of Poland before the Second World War. She completed Jewish secular school and gymnasium in this community where several hundred thousand Jews lived —nearly half the population of the area. The Holocaust put an end to one of the richest centres of Judaism in all of Europe. Like many Jews of the city, Rosenfarb was incarcerated in the infamous Lodz ghetto. She survived there from 1940 to 1944, when she and her sister Henia became inmates of the concentration camps of Auschwitz, then Sasel and Bergen-Belsen. Even in the ghetto Rosenfarb wrote, and she hasn’t stopped since. 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 Rosenfarb moved to Belgium. She remained in Belgium until 1950, when she immigrated immigrated to Montreal. In Montreal, Rosenfarb obtained a diploma at the Jewish Teachers’ Seminary in 1954. Rosenfarb has produced a prolific body of writing, all of which speaks from her experience during the Holocaust. Her work has been translated into both Hebrew and English. Rosenfarb has been widely anthologized and has had her work appear in journals in Israel, England, the United States, Canada and Australia in Yiddish and in English and Hebrew translation. Among the many prizes awarded her work, she has received the I.J. Segal Prize (Montreal, 1993), the Sholom Aleichem Prize (Tel-Aviv, 1990) and the Niger Prize (Buenos Aires, 1972). She has travelled extensively, lecturing on Yiddish literature in Australia, Europe and South America as well as in Israel and the United States..  From Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers..  from Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women.