"The Masterpiece" - A Short Story by Chava Rosenfarb- Included In The Land of the Postscript: The Complete Short Stories of Chava Rosenfarb Translated and edited by Goldie Morgentaler-2023

 The Masterpiece" - A Short Story by Chava Rosenfarb- Included in  The Land of the Postscript: The Complete Short Stories of Chava Rosenfarb Translated and edited by Goldie Morgentaler-2023

Originally published in English under the title “A Cottage in the Laurentians” in the Exile Book of Yiddish Women Writers, ed. Frieda Forman. Exile Editions, 2012. Pp. 

"The great Yiddish writer Chava Rosenfarb’s unforgettable short stories are all about afterlives. Most of her stories take place a decade or two or three after the Holocaust, in the seemingly neutral and snowy terrain of Montreal, Canada, where survivors have come to start over, to make new lives in a place far away from the crematoria of Europe. Among Rosenfarb’s unforgettable characters are a former kapo who befriends the only woman whose life she ever saved and a baby kidnapper. But even a writer of Rosenfarb’s ability probably could not have imagined the incredible afterlife of Rosenfarb herself. 

This year, the city of  Lodz, Poland, declared 2023 the year of Chava Rosenfarb — shocking considering that Rosenfarb was once imprisoned in the ghetto there, after which she was deported to Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. Had she lived to see it, Rosenfarb, a daughter of  Lodz, would have been 100 years old this year, but she died in 2011. She is best-known for her novel The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the  Lodz Ghetto, and she also received acclaim as a literary translator of Yiddish. Her work was most recently translated by her daughter Goldie Morgentaler for In the Land of the Postscript: The Complete Short Stories of Chava Rosenfarb."  By Aviya Kushner, December 22, 2023 in The Tablet - 

https://forward.com/culture/574507/chava-rosenfarb-centenary-yiddish-writer-lodz-land-of-the-postscript/

"The Masterpiece" focuses on a couple who met briefly when both were prisoners in a Concentration Camp, the man gave a woman unknown to him half his bread ration, and met again after the war in a displaced persons camp.

"Sonia and Victor were born in Lodz, the Polish Manchester. Both were concentration-camp survivors who had lost their families, friends, and neighbors 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." 

15 years have gone by, they are married with five children both working as teachers living in Montreal.  They are still very much in love. The husband focuses his outside of work energy on writing a book he is convinced will surprass the work of James Joyce.  Joyce never experienced the horrors that define for him the modern world.  The wife is interested in numerous topics, trying to make up for her lost years in the camps.

His wife does something that hurts him more than the Nazis did.  Rosenfarb brilliantly shows us his feelings:

"Writing was his destiny, his assigned function in life. This was how he was meant to contribute to the singing of the birds, to the slashing hum of waterfalls, to the howl of the wind and to the soundless fall of the snowflakes. It must be so! It was for the sake of his calling that he had needed this tremendous crash in his life. What a wealth of suffering he had discovered in the dark abyss of his soul! Too soon had he forgotten the suffering that he had endured in the depths of a former horror. He had abused the entire supply of knowledge he had gleaned from his former trials. He had squandered it almost entirely with a naivete of heart that bordered on stupidity! Only now, enriched by a completely new kind of torment, did he see himself standing one rung higher on the ladder of experience. Now he had a better view of the panorama of human fate, of the human comedy. During the time between that other storm and this new one he had become fossilized, stagnant in his fool’s paradise; he had lost contact with reality."

There is much more in this amazing story than I have mentioned as I hole others will experience her stories.

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