Chava Rosenfarb Quotes

Barukh is beside himself: "You are not the boss of my life, do you hear? I am a human being, just like you. Just like you!" he shouts, his voice growing increasingly louder the smaller he feels inside. "You will not curse me! No! I've heard enough curses in my life."

Nevertheless, I hold to my old romantic belief that writers of all times and places belong to a noble fellowship; that although they are the voices of their own cultures and languages, they transcend these boundaries. This belief helps me surmount my doubts as I reach out in my foreign language of English to the hearts and minds of the people among whom I live. I want to be accepted as an equal by my literary peers in this country, to be recognized as a writer who is both Jewish and Canadian. I want to come in from the cold.

I was entranced by the kind of magic that went into the act of transposing words from one language into another.

Writing is good therapy.

Writing is a lonely profession, and after the Holocaust, Yiddish writers were doubly lonely.

modern Yiddish literature came to maturity with the writing of the three classical writers, Mendele Mokher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz, whose influence served as both guide and catalyst for the generation of Yiddish writers who came after them. But all the members of this generation were male. It was only in the early-twentieth century that Yiddish women writers began to be published.

Friday the first of September, at six o'clock in the morning, the Germans

I think that books lacking such an introduction are like houses that one enters directly from the street, still wearing one's shoes and galoshes, still wrapped in the mood of outdoors. But an introduction to a volume of poetry functions like the anteroom to a house, a vestibule where one may shake off the burden of daily routine, where one may take off one's coat and boots, catch one's breath, pause for a minute to absorb the atmosphere of the dwelling one is about to enter.

one’s style, one’s method of writing—these, I believe, truly reveal the face of one’s soul.

I am not a card-carrying feminist, but the intellectual baggage that I bring to the act of writing is certainly coloured by my femininity.

Each writer nurtured the hope that his or her voice would be heard. It was a drive to raise oneself above fear through the magical power of the written word, and so to demonstrate one's enduring capacity for love, for singing praise to life. Even in the concentration camps, even by the glare of the crematorium flames, there were those who wrote.

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.

basically, language is an inadequate and limited instrument. No matter what language a writer speaks, she always hopes that it will be universal, that it will transcend the particular ethnic barriers that language creates.

The process of translation, of moving from one language to another, closely mirrors my own experience as a writer, driven from one country to another and from one language to another. I am so grateful to translators, to all translators, for making the literature of the world available to me and to all the peoples of the world, no matter what language they speak, because I do still believe that literature is the primary way in which we may come to understand one another. When translators sit down to their work, they are engaged in more than a mere transposing of thoughts and phrases from one language into another. Sometimes, as in the case of Yiddish, there is much more at stake: it is not merely that translation allows literary works to exist in languages in which they never existed before, but also that translators are engaged in snatching from the jaws of oblivion that which is in danger of disappearing. It is a most honourable calling; it is a preservation of the past in the present. I thank all translators for the fact that they exist and have devoted their lives to breaking down the barriers between peoples and alleviating the curse of the Tower of Babel.

I will say no more about the horrors of the concentration camps. They are indescribable and untranslatable.