Lecture: The Canadian Afterlife of the Great Yiddish-Language Holocaust Novelist, Chava Rosenfarb, as told in Letters and Stories

This lecture will introduce the life and works of the great Yiddish-language Canadian novelist, Chava Rosenfarb, whose major works include The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto, as well as other works of fiction that deal with the Holocaust. Chava Rosenfarb was a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, of Auschwitz, the Sasel forced labour camp, and Bergen-Belsen. Before settling in Montreal, Rosenfarb married Henry Morgentaler, another Holocaust survivor who settled in Canada. This talk will focus primarily on Rosenfarb’s writing, especially the short stories she wrote about Canadian Holocaust survivors, as well as on the letters she wrote to her best friend in Sweden. Rosenfarb was a remarkable writer, too little known in her adopted country of Canada, where she lived for over 50 years.

Goldie Morgentaler is Professor Emerita at the University of Lethbridge, where she taught 19-century British and American literature and modern Jewish literature. She is the author of a book on Dickens, as well as of numerous articles on Dickens and Victorian literature, including one on translations of Dickens’s fiction into Yiddish. She is an award-winning translator from Yiddish to English, primarily of the work of Chava Rosenfarb, for which she received two Jewish Canadian Literary awards, as well as the Modern Language Association’s Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies. She is the editor and translator of Rosenfarb’s book of short stories, In the Land of the Postscript, as well as the editor of Rosenfarb’s book of letters to her best friend in Sweden called Letters from the Afterlife. For many years she wrote a language column for the Montreal Gazette.

This special Highlander’s Lecture Series is hosted by the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies and the Jewish Historical Society of Southern Alberta.

Doors open 6:00pm, lecture starts 6:30pm

No purchase necessary. Registration will close upon reaching capacity.

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The Highlander Lecture Series is presented by the University of Calgary Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies.