Montreal in the 1950s was a marvel as far as Yiddish culture was concerned. It bustled with a lively intellectual and social life, was home to several important Yiddish writers, and boasted a Yiddish library and a system of private Yiddish-language day schools, to which I sent my children. But while I found in Canada a Jewish community that still spoke Yiddish, the focus of this community had turned away from the universalism of my European past to more specifically Jewish concerns, such as supporting the state of Israel. It was in Montreal that I wrote my novels, and I wrote them in Yiddish. I wrote in Yiddish because it was the language in which I was most at home; it was the language that I knew like the map of my own heart. I could create in no other language. And I wrote in Yiddish out of a sense of loyalty to the vanished world of my youth, out of a sense of obligation to a world that no longer existed. And yet, I hardly knew how it happened, but I gradually became aware that Yiddish was in trouble in Montreal and in the world at large, that the number of its speakers and readers was decreasing.
Holocaust survivor and Jewish-Canadian author
Chava Rosenfarb (9 February 1923 – 30 January 2011) (Yiddish: חוה ראָזענפֿאַרב) was a Jewish Holocaust survivor and author of Yiddish poetry and novels, a major contributor to post-World War II Yiddish literature. She lived in Lodz, Poland in her childhood, and moved to Canada in 1950.
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I do not see myself primarily as a translator, although I have in fact, with the help of my daughter, translated much of my own work. Nevertheless, when I reflect more deeply on this subject, I realize that my entire life has been a process of translation. I have been translated from my birthplace in Europe to my present home in North America. I have written three novels, one collection of short stories, four books of poetry, three plays, many essays and travelogues. Yet, without translation, all of these would have been relegated to the graveyard of those few libraries that still contain books in my language, or to the bottom drawer of my own desk. This is because the language in which I write, Yiddish, has fewer and fewer readers and writers. Translation represents to me my literary future. It makes me think that not everything I write will be totally lost, even if things do inevitably get lost in translation.
The family archives were filled with piles of documents reflecting not only the growth of the Zuckerman clan, but also that of the Jewish community in Lodz. And while still a gymnasium student, Samuel had liked to sneak into the cellar and browse among the dusty papers; he was drawn to them not so much by their content as by the breath of generations gone by that reached him through them. At that time, however, he had been too busy with his own growth, with his own pulsating young life, to summon patience for a serious study of his origins. Then he had been merely proud to be so deeply rooted in his city, and it was sufficient for him to know that he could prove the fact at any time. (chapter 1)
Translation, I believe, is about interaction, interaction between one language and another, between one form of writing and another. It is the most optimistic of literary endeavours, because it suggests that everything may be transposed, and once transposed, comprehensible. Even idioms, phrases, and sayings that have no equivalents in other languages can, in one approximation or another, be somehow transmuted, so that those who speak an entirely foreign language and belong to an entirely different culture may nevertheless understand one another through the medium of translation.
I have no idea that at the same time in the United States of America, Theodore Adorno has come out with the sweeping declaration that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. A meaningful, powerful declaration, but it has nothing to do with me. The rhythms surging inside me deny his statement. I think of my father, who prodded me to write, even in the ghetto. I think of the poet Shayevitch, who wrote poems even in the camp, just days before he was sent to the gas chamber. They too deny Adorno's statement. As long as there is life, the human heart will never cease singing of its joys and sorrows. Up to the brink of the grave, man clings to his song, just as he clings to life. Moreover, those who feel the urge to sing, even when their throats emit only a whimper, or a screech, do not ask whether or not they ought to sing. Soon the philosophers will come, Sartre and Camus. Camus will say that life is absurd, nothing but the efforts of a Sisyphus. But the fact that he considers it important to write down his view of life proves just the opposite. Life without song, without spiritual expression, is absurd. Song gives meaning to the travails of Sisyphus.
What affects me most is the continual sense of isolation that I feel as a Holocaust survivor, an isolation enhanced by my being a Yiddish writer. I feel myself to be an anachronism, wandering across a page of history where I do not really belong. If writing is a lonely profession, the Yiddish writer's loneliness has an additional dimension. Her readership has perished. Her language has gone up with the smoke of the crematoria. She creates in a vacuum, almost without a readership, out of fidelity to a vanished language, as if to prove that Nazism did not succeed in extinguishing that language's last breath, that it is still alive. Creativity is a life-affirming activity. Lack of response to creativity and being condemned to write for the desk drawer is a stifling, destructive experience. Sandwiched between these two misfortunes struggles the spirit of the contemporary Yiddish writer.
Like most writers, I wanted to be read. But I also wanted the rest of Canada to know what I and millions of other Jews like me had lived through during those terrible war years. I wanted the non-Jewish world to recognize our pain, and I wanted to memorialize our vanished past and our lost communities. And so, I found myself once again face to face with the need to find a translator.
I was never a Sunday scribbler. Writing was never a hobby for me, a pastime to while away the hours. On the contrary, it was as necessary to me as life itself; it was a refuge, a substitute for living, a confrontation with myself, a form of confession - but always it was a necessity that allowed me to feel that my life had an accompanying motif, an underlying melody. Writing often gave me moments of such ecstasy as can only be experienced by lovers; it gave me instances of such intense spiritual forgetfulness that I truly believed that I and the cosmos were one, so that through the simple act of breathing the air in my room I felt that I was inhaling the universe itself. Clasped within the bosom of this universe, my physical self simply ceased to be. Rare moments these, but blessed.
In writing about the ghetto, I wanted to find that source. I wanted to discover the essence of our humanity, to touch upon the core of the human soul and see it reflected in the soul of the ghetto Jew, who had stood stripped of every shred of artifice and pretence necessary to lead a normal life. There, in the ghetto, humans had faced humans without any embellishments or illusions; they had faced the brutality of their fellows, as well as the knowledge of what that brutality meant to their own destinies.
Accompanied by my sister who had also survived the war, I wandered through all the zones of Occupied Germany. There was as yet no organized transportation system for civilians, so we hitched rides on the top of lorries loaded with coal, or on military trucks, but mostly we wandered on foot along with bands of other survivors. We made our way from the wreckage of one German town to the next. We hurried from one UNRRA office to the other, reading lists of survivors, searching for the name of our father and other dear ones.