Yesterday my wife invited me to go with her to the SM Mall in EDSA, in Quezon City. There was a big sale and she said I could relax for a few hours at The French Baker Cafe, a very nice place with free Wi-Fi. I took my Ipad and a collection of short stories about concentration camp survivors living in Montreal by Chava Rosenfarb. Chava Rosenfarb along with her friend Blume Lempel, featured three times during Paris in July 2018, are two of the greatest post Holocaust Yiddish language writers. Lempel lived in the New York City area, Rosenfarb settled in Montreal. They corresponded extensively. Both were fluent in French but wrote only in Yiddish. Paris was a first stop for many Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia.
Chava Rosenfarb
February 3, 1923 - Born in Lodz, Poland
1941 - along with her parents and sister she was incarcerated in the Lodz Ghetto. Her trilogy, The Tree of Life portrays this period and is considered one of the greatest of Holocaust novels
September, 1944- with her sister and mother she is transported to Auschwitz, their father unknown to them until after the war, died shortly after arrival. Rosenfarb,her mother and sister were sent to Sasal, a labour camp, to build houses for Germans.
From there they were transferred to Bergen Belsen where they remained in until the camp was liberated by the British Army April 15, 1945.
After spending some time in a displaced persons camp in Belgium, having married another camp survivor, she moved to Montreal.
(For additional details on her life after immigrating and her writings, see the link above.)
The lead story in the collection, "The Greenhorn" centers on a concentration camp survivor in Montreal, Barukh. His wife and children all died in the Holocaust, he spent time in a displaced person camp in Paris waiting to move to Montreal. In the argot of the time such places were just called "dp" camps. He is on his first day on a job in a garment factory. The foreman is Jewish as are half the workers. The other half are young French Canadian women. We see him trying to adjust, learning the ropes. A young French Canadian woman strikes up a conversation. When she finds out he has lived in Paris, she is convinced he must have had a fabulous experience in the world's most, in her dreams, wonderful city. Barukh has not been around young attractive women in a good while. We see him struggling to converse with the woman.
"The Greenhorn" was fun to read. There are seven stories in the collection, at least two more have ties to Paris.
3 comments:
How nice to read short stories in a café! Sounds like you enjoyed this shopping trip.
While I'm fascinated by the war time history that these short stories talk of, I'm ready Lilac Girls (based on your reading list),, but finding it all a bit hard to want to know about. Still this forms part of our world, I feel I owe it to history to keep going.
I have finally read this story and how I enjoyed the delicate struggle she depicts with the "Greenhorn"'s struggle to feel as though he is worthwhile in this new environment, having been shuttled around, having had to endure so many new environments through and following wartime. The slow eruption of rage with the jovial but bossy man in the charge contrasts beautifully with the sweetness of the gum on his tongue at the end of the story. Beautifully done.
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