Editor’s Note: Following is the text of an address delivered in August on the 70th anniversary of the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto by Prof. Goldie Morgentaler, Ph.D., who teaches English and Yiddish literature at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Dr. Morgentaler was the subject of a recent feature story in San Diego Jewish World.
By Goldie Morgentaler, Ph.D.
LODZ, Poland — On this occasion, when we are gathered here to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto, I would like to tell you about a book that tells the story of that ghetto and I would like to tell you about its author. The book is called The Tree of Life and it is a novel in three volumes written in Yiddish by a woman who was herself a survivor of the Lodz ghetto, as well as of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. That woman’s name was Chava Rosenfarb and she was my mother.
Before I talk about The Tree of Life, I want to tell you something about the author. Chava Rosenfarb was born in Lodz in 1923, the elder of two daughters of Abraham Rosenfarb, a restaurant waiter. Her mother worked as a “shtoperke” (mender of faults in fabric) at a textile factory in Lodz. Both of Chava’s parents originally came from the small town of Konskie, near Kielce. The father’s side of the family traced its descent from Reb Jonathan Eibushutz, a famous rabbi who had opposed the false messiah Sabbetai Zevi in the seventeenth century. Chava was very proud of the fact that she descended from a famous rabbi. It gave her yikhes, pride in the blessing of an illustrious heritage. It also established the family’s long years of residence in Poland
Although Chava’s parents both came from Konskie, they migrated separately to Lodz to find work. There they were reunited and there they married, so that Chava and her younger sister Henia were both born in Lodz. Her father began his working life as a weaver in a factory, but because he was an unusually good-looking man, he landed a job as a waiter in a restaurant that catered to a literary and political clientele and this was his job when Chava, his first child, was born. She later published a fictional account of the early lives and courtship of both her parents in the novels Bociany, which is about Koinsk and Of Lodz and Love, which is about Lodz.
Chava’s parents were active in the Jewish Socialist Bund, the left-leaning Jewish political movement that had an enormous following among working-class Jews in eastern Europe. In the period between the two wars the Bund was a major cultural and political force in Poland, where it elected representatives to the city council in the larger cities. Bundist ideology encouraged agitation for equal rights for Jews in Poland, but it also incorporated a strong cultural element that privileged Yiddish as the language of the Jewish masses. So Chava and her sister were educated in Yiddish at the Bundist Medem school.
One of the other students at this school was Heniek Morgentaler, the son of Joseph Morgentaler, a Bundist representative to the city council of Lodz. Chava married Heniek Morgentaler in Belgium in 1949. While her elementary school education had been all in Yiddish, Chava’s high school education was in Polish, although the school she attended was funded by Jews and its student body was Jewish. She attended this school for five years both before and after the outbreak of the war. By the time she graduated, she was already incarcerated in the Lodz ghetto.
While still a child, Chava had shown a talent for writing, producing countless poems which her father proudly showed off to the patrons of the restaurant where he worked. But it was not until her imprisonment in the Lodz ghetto that she began to write seriously. The Nazis had established the ghetto in Baluty in 1940, herding the Jews into the poorest section of the city, which they encircled with barbed wire. Chava’s family was housed in a tiny apartment with only a kitchen and a bedroom. She and her sister slept in the kitchen on chairs and a sofa. It was from this bed of chairs that she would rise every morning at dawn to write poems before going to work at her various ghetto jobs. Her poetry brought Chava to the attention of Simkha-Bunim Shayevitch, the great ghetto poet and author of the epic poem “Lekh Lekho.” She became Shayevitch’s protegée and it was he who introduced her to the writers’ group of the Lodz ghetto, who quickly recognized her talent and accepted her, at age seventeen, as their youngest member.
When the ghetto was liquidated in August 1944, Chava and her family were deported to Auschwitz. There she was separated from her father, whom she never saw again. From Auschwitz, Chava, her mother and sister were transported to the forced labour camp at Sasel, on the outskirts of Hamburg, where they built houses for the bombed out Germans of that city. As the Allies approached, Chava, her mother and sister were again transported, this time to Bergen Belsen where they were liberated by the British Army in April 1945.
In 1950 she emigrated to Canada and settled in Montreal. Most of The Tree of Life was written in Canada, in Montreal, the city to which Chava and her husband migrated in 1950 and where she lived for most of her life. The novel is a massive, three-volume work that chronicles the annihilation of the Jews of Lodz, the second largest Jewish community in Poland (after Warsaw). Because the subject is so vast, the structure of the novel, its breadth and scope are vast as well. The Tree of Life is, in fact, an epic, a chronicle of the destruction of the second largest Jewish community in the world before the war, numbering over 200,000 souls. That this community was also intimately known to the author who had been one of its members lends both an urgency and an authenticity to the novel.
The Tree of Life presents in unflinching, precise and often horrific detail the inner workings of the ghetto, the daily frustrations and humiliations of ghetto life. It chronicles the barbarous cruelty of the Nazis, the constant hunger of the inhabitants, barely relieved by concoctions made from turnips and potato peels. It chronicles torture, betrayal and degradation. But it also documents the tenderness of human love despite these conditions. It illuminates the complexities of relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends. It describes the cultural life of the ghetto, the establishment of a library in a two-room flat, attendance at concerts and plays, meetings of the writers’ group, political agitation and resistance. Most importantly, it peoples the ghetto with complex human beings whose individual stories make for compelling reading. In short, The Tree of Life provides as complete and authentic a portrait of what it was like to have lived and died in the Lodz Ghetto as literature can. And in this way it also demonstrates the extent to which fiction can both transcend and animate history.
The narrative of The Tree of Life follows the fates of ten individuals from all walks of life who live through the terrible events of the years 1939-44. The main characters include the impoverished Itche Mayer, a carpenter with four sons, each of whom is a member of a different political party, as well as the wealthy Samuel Zuckerman, a rich factory owner before the war. There is the assimilationist Miss Diamond, a high school teacher and Polish patriot; Esther, a great beauty and ardent Communist, who is active in the ghetto underground and the doctor, Michal Levine, who compulsively writes letters that he never sends to a woman he loved in Paris before the war. The most autobiographical characters are Rosenfarb’s alter ego Rachel Eibushitz, a politically committed high school student and her boyfriend David, a diarist, who is modeled on Heniek Morgentaler, the man who became Rosenfarb’s husband. In addition to these central characters, the novel is replete with memorable secondary portraits, so that the overall effect is of a community of individuals all responding in individual ways to the torments inflicted on them by powers that they can neither control nor propitiate. It is the incomprehensible cruelty and capriciousness of Nazi rule that make up a large part of the horror of what the Jews endure; the ever decreasing rations of food permitted the ghetto inhabitants, the issuing of one evil decree after another.
For all the complexity with which Rosenfarb depicts her Jewish characters, there is never any doubt that for her the Nazis are the enemy. She is always aware of the beast at the door. While the focus of The Tree of Life is on the Jewish community of Lodz, the Nazis are not a shadowy presence in the novel. On the contrary, they appear as themselves, terrifying and all-too-human, enforcing barbaric decrees, shooting randomly into the ghetto as if it were a fish pond. In one particularly chilling instance they shoot a young boy sitting near a water pump quietly reading on a very hot day, because he has removed his shirt with its identifying Star of David.
Several of the characters in The Tree of Life are based on actual people, which makes the novel both an imaginative and a factual recreation. Among the most significant of these are Rosenfarb’s mentor, the poet Simkha-Bunim Shayevitsh (1907-1944), whose long poem “Lekh Lekho” was found on a garbage heap in the ruins of the Lodz Ghetto after the war. The Tree of Life supplies some of the only available information of what is known of Shayevitsh’s life in the ghetto. Shayevitsh appears in fictionalized form under the name of Simkha-Bunim Berkovitch.
And then there is the one historical character whose name is not changed from what it really was, Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, the so-called “eldest of the Jews,” the de facto king of the Lodz Ghetto. Rumkowski is one of the novel’s most powerful and ambiguous creations, a self-styled saviour of the Jews, who nevertheless aided the Nazis in sending tens of thousands of Jews to their deaths. The Tree of Life describes the road that Rumkowski traveled from being the founder and director of the Helenowek orphanage in Lodz before the war, to being the puppet leader of the ghetto, put in place by the Nazis and compelled to do their bidding even as he tried to “save” the ghetto.
The Tree of Life is organized chronologically, which allows for a logical progression through time even as each chapter concentrates on another major character. Book One begins with a New Year’s Eve party at the home of the rich factory owner Samuel Zuckerman, shepherding in the year 1939. Among Zuckerman’s guests are most of the characters whom we will meet again on more intimate terms in subsequent chapters and whose fates we will follow throughout the novel’s three volumes. Book One ends on New Year’s Eve 1940, thus encompassing a year of extraordinary change in the fortunes of Lodz Jewry, a year which sees the Nazis march into Poland and which signals the beginning of the end of the Jewish community of Lodz. By beginning her novel in the months before the Nazi invasion of September 1939, Rosenfarb allows readers to see what that community was like in “normal” times, when people still had the luxury of going about their daily activities, when they could still experience the joys and sorrows of peaceful times, when they could still act out their social roles and assume their public faces. This first book of the trilogy thus gives a sense of what will be lost, of the vitality and creativity of this community, which, within the space of a few short months will be reduced to fighting for the bare essentials of survival.
The subsequent two books of The Tree of Life—each of which encompasses two years in the life of the ghetto—describe in vivid and meticulous detail the deterioration and dismantling of this once vibrant Jewish community; how the social masks are dropped in response to ever increasing hardship as the ghetto is established and random killings, starvation, disease, deportation and death become the norms. Each book of the trilogy depicts the noose tightening a little more: Book Two begins with the establishment of the ghetto and ends with another New Year’s Eve retrospective. Book Three begins with the deportations from the ghetto, deportations that increase in intensity and number until the ghetto is finally liquidated. Because the narrative filters historical events through the experiences of its ten characters, by the time we reach the last pages, the destruction of human life has become so personalized that it is difficult to avoid the sense of loss as one after another of Rosenfarb’s characters is sent out of the ghetto to a fate we can imagine only too well. The chronological structure of the novel keeps readers tied to historical reality even as the events in the lives of the characters spiral out of control.
What Rosenfarb captures—perhaps too well, because it is so painful to read—is the constant anxiety that permeated every aspect of ghetto life, an anxiety about never knowing if one would survive to the end of the day, if one’s loved ones would survive, if one would make it through the Sperre [house arrest] or the deportations, an anxiety brought on by ever harsher decrees and ever decreasing food rations. It is this basic anxiety about being able to live another day and having no control over one’s fate, of being the sport in someone else’s game that gives this description of the Lodz Ghetto its nightmarish quality. And it is the psychological probing of what it is like to live with such an unrelieved sense of impending doom that is one of the novel’s contributions to our understanding of the Holocaust. What the novel conveys most vividly is that intangible quality of atmosphere, an atmosphere of dread that permeates the life of the ghetto and contributes to the “haunting” quality of the novel.
Added to this is the novel’s vivid presentation of character and the broad range of characters it chooses to depict, from the lowest classes to the highest, from the young to the old. Because the ten major characters of The Tree of Life come from all walks of life, the novel recreates, in all its complexity, an entire Jewish ghetto community. In addition, it captures in detail the everyday life in the ghetto workshops and food distribution centers. It describes the gatherings of the ghetto intelligentsia and the Jewish underworld, as well as the ideological responses of the various political parties—the Zionists, Communists and Bundists. Most importantly, it gives a portrait of that section of ghetto society that Rosenfarb knew well from personal experience, the Lodz Ghetto’s artistic community. Her portrayal of the tenacity and bravery of this community includes fictionalized portraits of the real-life poet Miriam Ulinover, who appears as the elderly woman poet Sarah Samet, at whose apartment the writers’ group meets, and the painter Israel Leizerowicz, who appears here under the name of Guttman. Incidentally, Leizerowicz is featured on the cover photo of the English edition of The Tree of Life. Many of Leizerowicz’s drawings and paintings survived the war and are housed today in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Leizerowicz himself perished at Auschwitz in August 1944.
Questions about the role and value of art and culture in the face of barbarity permeate the narrative and fuel debate throughout the novel. Arguments about the “Jewishness” of Jewish art, about the so-called insularity of Yiddish literature versus the “international” quality of European literature, arguments about the relative qualities of Yiddish versus Hebrew as appropriate languages for the Jews, about the value of theatre and concerts in the ghetto are all raised and discussed by various characters throughout the novel. One theme in particular arises at crucial moments: namely, the significance of Western culture for the Jews. For instance, when news reaches Lodz that the Nazis will be entering the city the following day, the father of the high school student David—a man whose political activities as a Bundist council member mean that he has the most to fear from the Nazis—suddenly takes to reading the Roman poet Horace. He annoys his terrified children with constant requests for help with the translation from Latin. “Garbage!” exclaims his exasperated daughter and throws the Latin book onto a heap of books to be burned. But the father responds: “What are you so mad at the book for? Don’t you think words are quite appropriate for this occasion?”
The elderly literature teacher Miss Diamand, for her part, uses Shakespeare’s The Tempest to try to comfort the students in the newly reopened Jewish high school after the Nazi invasion. She believes fervently that culture—that is, Western non-Jewish culture—equals salvation. The students initially respond to the play’s love story between Ferdinand and Miranda; but then some of the boys are pulled out of their classrooms by the Nazis and sent out to forced labour. After this, none of the remaining students can concentrate on The Tempest, which is suddenly as remote and meaningless to them as a fairy tale. As with David’s father’s attempt to use Horace as a way of shutting out present reality, Miss Diamand too offers her students the fruits of Western civilization as a way of making them forget their present situation. I quote:
“She wanted them to hold on, as she did, to eternal indestructible values. […] She was aware of what was going on around them, in their homes and in town. But [in school] at least, all that must be made to fade out of their minds, for only in this manner, she felt, could they acquire the strength and dignity to deal with the storm raging outside. She had therefore begun the first literature lesson by choosing the giant Shakespeare to assist her task. She spoke of Caliban and Prospero; she discussed Prospero’s dialogue with Ariel. The students listened to her, but their faces told her that she had not achieved what she desired” (Bk. 1, 211). End of quote.
Both of these examples force us to question the value of Western culture in addressing the problems of being Jewish in a world that despises Jews. Both David’s father and Miss Diamand turn to non-Jewish texts in an attempt to find comfort and healing in the cultural heritage of Europe and in doing so are accepting and perpetuating assumptions about the value of that heritage. But the younger generation in each case rejects these assumptions. In every confrontation of this type in the novel, it is the younger generation that is the more “Jewish,” and the more inclined to question the humanistic assumptions of its elders about the value and inclusiveness of Western culture.
The Tree of Life is not particularly sentimental in its depiction of the ghetto inhabitants. Rosenfarb’s characters may be victims of the Nazis but that is incidental to their essence; they are victims, but they are not innocents. Their natures partake of all the usual complexities of the human psyche, both good and bad. Rosenfarb’s great strength is as a psychological realist and she is at her best in delineating the personalities of those characters of whom she approves least. Suffering does not make Rosenfarb’s characters kinder or more noble than they were before; it merely highlights the qualities that were there before the war and in some cases turns those qualities into their opposites. At the same time, The Tree of Life never allows us to lose sight of the fact that this is suffering brought on by an outside force; that the ultimate evil belongs to the Nazis.
One of Rosenfarb’s most psychologically complex characters is Mordecai Chaim Rumkovsky, the Jewish boss of the Lodz ghetto. Rumkowski is an actual historical figure, and a man whose personality and motives have been much debated by historians. If Rumkowski does not emerge from Rosenfarb’s pages as likable, he does at least appear as knowable. When we first meet him at Samuel Zuckerman’s New Year’s Eve party, Rumkowski is soliciting funds for the orphanage he runs. Scenes set in the orphanage make it clear that Rumkowski loves the adulation of those who are weaker than he. The old man has a weakness for young girls and in the culminating episode of the first chapter in which he appears, he attempts to seduce a young girl from the orphanage, Sabinka, whom he has treated to an afternoon at the fair grounds of Luna Park. Rumkowski’s near-rape of the innocent fifteen-year-old Sabinka in the outlying bushes of the park is interrupted by some Polish boys, chanting “Hep, hep, give it to her old Jew boy! Give it!” (Bk 1,102). The reminder here is that the Jewish world of pre-war Poland is hedged around with anti-Semitic hatred, even before the Germans march into the country. And the irony here is that this same anti-Semitism of the Polish thugs saves the innocent Jewish girl from assault by a Jewish predator.
Rosenfarb’s Rumkowski is a man with a mission: He sees himself as a modern-day Moses, the predestined leader of an entire people. (Bk 1, 247). He is a man who is dangerous because he is so completely convinced of his own importance that he can blind himself to any reality. He is, ironically, an admirer of Hitler: When the Sperre starts, he realizes with regret that: “He now knew clearly what the Germans wanted and what they needed him for. He knew that he would never sit with Hitler at the same table, discussing the establishment of a Jewish state.”
Yet Rumkowski is not an out-and-out villain. Convinced as he is that only he can rescue the Jews, he nevertheless does act—at least some of the time—for altruistic reasons. And he can display bravery, as when, early on, he saves a number of Jews from the hands of the Nazis despite the fact that he is beaten for his efforts; and he puts up with the contempt and physical abuse of his Nazi overlords. But, as life in the ghetto becomes progressively more desperate, Rumkowski’s position becomes ever more untenable as the Nazis demand that he hand over larger and larger numbers of Jews for deportation to the death camps. Rosenfarb describes in chilling detail the kinds of accommodations with his own conscience that Rumkowski must make in order to justify handing over, first, the children from his beloved orphanage, then all children under the age of ten, then the sick from the hospitals, the elderly, the Western Jews, the Jews whose partners had been deported before, and so on. In one of the novel’s most horrifying accounts of a historical event—the Sperre—Rumkowski demands that the mothers of the ghetto willingly give up their children to the Nazis for the good of the collective.
Rosenfarb never personally knew Rumkowski, so his portrait in The Tree of Life is fiction. But clearly it is the moral ambiguity of Rumkowski’s position that fascinates her, the human kernel of good overlaid with layers of self-delusion, megalomania, and petty cruelty. This propensity for trying to imaginatively get under the skin of characters whom she despises in order to see how they tick occurs in other of Rosenfarb’s fictions: for instance, the long short story “Edgia’s Revenge” is told from the point of view of a former kapo, who after the war must come to terms with the guilt she feels for persecuting her fellow Jews during the Holocaust. The attempt to understand and convey evil from the inside also suggests a wish on the part of the author to come to terms with it, to fictionalize cruelty as a way of defanging the monster.
But Rosenfarb’s presentation of this type of negative Jewish character also has another dimension—it insists on the humanity of the Jews both for good and evil and in so doing makes an implicit argument that what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust was an abomination, not because Jews are inherently saintly or inherently evil, but precisely because they are not exempt from all the failings and all the greatness of humanity. All the more reason, then, that they should be treated as equal with other human beings. For this reason, Rosenfarb does not shy away from portraying negative Jewish characters, nor is she reluctant to portray the disintegration and self-delusion of even the most admirable among them, such as the well-meaning Samuel Zuckerman.
An ambivalent love for her lost Polish past is a feature of all of Rosenfarb’s novels, but it is especially evident in the first volume of The Tree of Life. The very first line of the novel declares: “Samuel Zuckerman was born in Lodz.” Period. As if nothing else we are going to learn about Samuel Zuckerman is as important as his place of birth. The rest of that opening paragraph goes on to tell us that not only was Samuel himself born in Lodz, but so was his great-grandfather who had been among the first Jews to leave the Ghetto and settle downtown. Zuckerman’s great-grandfather had laid the foundations for the Jewish cotton trade and textile industry and in the year 1836 had moved into a massive brick house at No. 17 on Novomieyska Street where Samuel still lives. Samuel considers himself a Polish patriot and an ardent Zionist and sees no contradiction in these two apparently irreconcilable poles.
Thus, from the beginning, the city of Lodz is established as a character in the narrative. Place names are constantly invoked. Piotrkowska, Narutowicz, Ogrodova. The first few paragraphs of Chapter 2 are devoted to a lovingly detailed description of Lutomierska Street, which are all the more remarkable given that they were written from memory in Canada. Were the subject matter not so tragic, one might be tempted to call the The Tree of Life a love offering to this “shabby beauty” of a city, as Rosenfarb once called Lodz. All her life Chava Rosenfarb was haunted by her memories of Lodz, the city she saw for the last time in 1948. But her Lodz was Jewish – it was the Yiddish Lodz and not the Polish Woodz — the Lodz in which she grew up. In fact one of the things that The Tree of Life attempts to do is to re-establish the Jews at the center of a novel about a city divided between three indigenous populations, the Polish, the German and the Jewish. Her purpose is to chronicle in painstaking and unflinching detail exactly how this large, vibrant Jewish community of 200,000 souls, with its roots so firmly established in Polish soil, came to be extracted from that soil and destroyed, so that today there is hardly a trace of it left.
The Tree of Life limits its narrative perspective to the ghetto; it ends with the liquidation of the ghetto and the deportation of all the characters, including Rumkowski. The death camps that await outside the barbed wire fence of the ghetto are indicated simply by a short inscription: “AUSCHWITZ. WORDS STOP. UNDRESSED. NAKED. THEIR MEANING, THEIR SENSES SHAVEN OFF. LETTERS EXPIRE IN THE SMOKE OF THE CREMATORIUM’S CHIMNEY. . .” (Bk. 3, 362). This is followed by a series of blank pages and an epilogue. In the epilogue, which is set in Brussels ten years later, we are told that three of the characters have survived. One of the survivors is the author of the novel we have just read and we see her sit down to begin her book with its actual first paragraph. But, of the fates of the other characters we learn nothing. Can we assume that some of them survived? The narrative is silent on this, and so allows readers to hope that some of those deported to Auschwitz may have survived. Silence allows for irresolution, which in turn allows for hope. But when she was asked about this in an interview, the author herself gave no hope. As far as she was concerned, all the characters except for the three mentioned in the epilogue perished at Auschwitz, because, as she said, “that’s the way it was.”
It took Chava Rosenfarb 22 years to write The Tree of Life, which she began shortly after settling in Montreal in 1950 By that time she was already a well-known poet in Yiddish-language literary circles. Not only was The Tree of Life written entirely in Canada, so were Rosenfarb’s two other novels, Bociany and Letters to Abrasha. Yet despite the fact that she lived most of her life in Canada, ALL of her novels are set in Poland, almost as if she never left. “I am still there,” says her character Barukh in the short story “The Greenhorn.”
Rosenfarb might well have said the same. She was still there, through all the years in Canada, through all her novels and stories, she relived and recreated Jewish life in Poland as she had known it before it was so devastatingly destroyed. It is for this reason that I believe The Tree of Life is such an important work. It is a testament to the vibrant life of the Jewish community of Lodz before it was extinguished, written with both love and skill, so that those who were not there might know what it was like to have lived through those terrible years.
If I may end on a personal note: as I mentioned at the beginning, Chava Rosenfarb was my mother. She died three years ago in Lethbridge, Alberta, the Canadian city where I live. Whenever I speak or write about her, I feel as if she were again alive, standing before me, ready to discuss her favourite authors, ready to argue with me about minute points of translation, ready to be loved. I thank Joanna Podoloska and the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center for inviting me to speak to you today, thus providing me with yet another opportunity to probe the many complexities of my mother’s extraordinary mind and so resuscitate this woman whom I loved dearly and whom I sorely miss.
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Prof. Morgentaler teaches English and Yiddish literature (in translation) at the University of Lethbridge.