Little Red Bird - A Short Story by Chava Rosenfarb- Included in In the Land of the Postscript: The Complete Short Stories of Chava Rosenfarb Translated and edited by Goldie Morgentaler

Little Red Bird - A Short Story by Chava Rosenfarb- Included in In the Land of the Postscript: The Complete Short Stories of Chava Rosenfarb Translated and edited by Goldie Morgentaler - 2023

Originally publidhed - “Royt feigele” (“Little Red Bird”). In Yiddish. Di goldene keyt 139 (1994)

I greatly admire Chava Rosenfarb both as a writer and as a person. She is among the eight authors included in the header picture for my blog.

"Little Red Bird" focuses on a woman whose husband and four year old daughter were murdered in a German concentration camp.  Her daughter was thrown into the crematorium while still living.  She meets a man, while living in a post World War Two displaced persons camp.

"Manya and Feivel met after the war in the displaced-persons camp of Feldafing in Bavaria. Both had been members of the Bundist youth organization in Poland; he in Kracow, she in Lodz. They had discovered each other during those confusing post-liberation days of hope and despair. Neither of them had any surviving family, so their need for closeness and intimacy with another human being was great."

Manya is frustrated because she is not able to get pregnant.

"They are both upset about the direction the postwar world has taken, about the fact that the sacrifice of millions has been in vain. But in Manya’s case, there lingers beneath the surface of her general sorrow over the fate of the world an additional, more intimate pain, which translates into a longing to have another child. "

Manya does something deeply immoral.  I really hope others will have the opportunity to read this profound story so I will say no more.

I do feel obligated to share a bit more of the powerful unflincing prose of this story.

"Manya is standing by the window, peering out at the snow. A little girl is playing in the street among the mounds of snow. The child is about five years old. She wears a red coat and a red hat, just like Little Red Ridinghood, the child the wolf tried to devour in the story by the Brothers Grimm. Manya’s child was in fact devoured by the wolf—a wolf who was, in a sense, a grandchild of the wolf in the Grimm brothers’ story. Manya’s child had been destroyed by the Germans when she was five years old. Her name had been Faygele, Little Bird. She too had had a red coat. When she wore the red coat her parents called her roit faygele, little red bird. Her parents delighted in the sight of Faygele wearing her red coat. The color suited her. It harmonized with the dark brown hair her mother would roll in tissue paper to form curls. The curls peeked out charmingly from underneath Faygele’s red hat. It did not occur to Faygele’s parents to associate the color red with the color of blood— Faygele’s blood."

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.

Mel Ulm