This summer, Christian Desmeules wrote a fascinating series of six texts entitled “Writers in the Trenches”, in which he traced the thread of the complex links between war and writing in the light of modernity. However, I would like to add a major element that has been overshadowed: the role of writers who, not being strictly speaking soldiers “in the trenches”, nevertheless saw the war too closely. I refer to the civilian and political witnesses of the Nazi atrocities committed during the Second World War.
As often, these witnesses found themselves excluded from the discourse surrounding war and literature, which was already one of the great obstacles to the reception of testimonies from the post-war period, since it was considered that only soldiers—and a handful of male Resistance heroes—could have authority in the matter.
Among the writers of the “trenches” concentration camps, let us mention in particular Primo Levi, who by his style devoid of pathos makes us paradoxically feel the extent of the Jewish tragedy; Elie Wiesel, who has spent his life pondering the philosophical implications of violence; Robert Antelme, whom M. Desmeules briefly mentions to pass immediately to Marguerite Duras, but who has published one of the most brilliant books of the testimonial genre.
Chava Rosenfarb
However, it turns out that we have among our Montreal writers a woman of remarkable writing who survived the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis, but who unfortunately remains unknown to the general public: Chava Rosenfarb (1923-2011).
Born in the industrial city of Lodz, Poland, Rosenfarb was incarcerated in the city’s ghetto, then in the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sasel and Bergen-Belsen camps, from where she was released in April 1945. She immigrated to Canada in 1950 and moved to Montreal with her husband, a certain Henry Morgentaler. It is in this city that she loves that she writes the vast majority of her work focused on the Shoah and its consequences.
Both writer and survivor, the questions that inhabit her revolve around these two vectors of deep identity. How to represent in a literary way the dehumanizing persecutions – famine, promiscuity, insalubrity – undergone by the Jews? How can she authentically evoke the memory of all those she knew who perished at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators? How can we speak, too, of the magnitude of the creative boiling that animated the artists of the Lodz ghetto in the face of the imminence of their death?
In 1972, she published a vast fictional chronicle in three volumes on the Lodz ghetto which follows and intertwines the fate of ten families of various social classes from 1939 to 1944, that is to say from before the war until to the liquidation of the ghetto. The reading of this epic masterpiece, which is in line with the filiation of the great Russian novels, is essential for anyone seeking to grasp the many stages of the Nazi genocidal enterprise experienced at human level.
In admirable short stories about the difficult — if not impossible — rehabilitation of Holocaust survivors crushed by the weight of their memories, Chava Rosenfarb evolves many of Montreal’s immigrant protagonists. With this news gathered under the title Survivors (2004), we find a work where the memory of the Holocaust and the Quebec territory coexist, and where characters from the Jewish and French-speaking Catholic populations of the metropolis interact.
Yiddish literature
So why is a writer of this caliber so ignored in Quebec and Canadian literature? The main reason is simple, but no less tragic: Chava Rosenfarb wrote in Yiddish.
When we know that, of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, about five million were speakers of Yiddish, that Nazi hatred led directly to the collapse of this language throughout the world and that, at the same time, Rosenfarb continued to Writing in Yiddish — losing his readers at the same rate as his talent grew — we can measure the extent of the desperate audacity that drove him: that of recounting the disaster in the language of the victims.
Much of his work has already been translated into English (his novel about the ghetto is called The Tree of Life), in particular by the author herself and by Goldie Morgentaler, without this having earned her the notoriety she deserves.
Let’s hope for a prompt French translation — begun by Chantal Ringuet and Pierre Anctil — which will be able to bring her closer to the French-speaking Quebecers she sincerely appreciated. Our literary understanding of the Holocaust, and of war more generally, will only be enhanced.
Replica of Christian Desmeules
This improvised six-episode summer series focused on writers who participated in the war, arms in hand, who exalted it or who tried to resist it. If it had also been necessary to take into account the civilian victims, the writers who survived the Shoah and the novelists who made war the soul of their fictions, it is easy to understand that the corpus would have exploded. There is no doubt, moreover, that the experience of the Nazi camps, as recounted by Chava Rosenfarb, Edith Bruck, Charlotte Delbo or Robert Antelme, constitutes an important part of the history and literature of the twentiethe century. But none of these authors was “eclipsed”, rest assured: they simply did not correspond to the narrow subject in which we chose to focus.