“I am stIll there”: The Recreation of Jewish Poland in the Canadian Novels of Chava Rosenfarb

Abstract

ABSTRACT:All three of Chava Rosenfarb’s novels are set in Poland, despite the fact that they were written in Canada, where the author lived most of her life. Rosenfarb, a Holocaust survivor and one of the major Yiddish writers of the second half of the twentieth century, returned to her native Poland only once after the war. Yet Poland, and especially the city of Lodz, where she was born and raised, lived on in her imagination and are the focus of all her longer fiction. This essay examines the theme of Jewish-Polish relations as they are expressed in Rosenfarb’s fiction, in particular in the novels The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto and Bociany.