Survivors: Seven Short Stories

Nominated for the Howard O'Hagan Award for Short Fiction of the Alberta Book Awards. Winner of the 2005 Canadian Jewish Book Award Winner of the Modern Language Association's 2002-2005 Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies Nominated for the 2005 ALTA National Translation Award In these seven stories, survivors of the holocaust play out that tragedy's last acts. Barukh, in The Greenhorn, is a newly arrived immigrant in Montreal and is an oddity for reasons beyond the winter coat he continues to wear long into spring. As a dying request, Amalia, in Last Love, asks her husband to find her a young Parisian lover. In Edgia's Revenge, Rella, a former kapo, loses her identity over the course of two decades in Montreal to the woman whose life she spared in the camps. Fran?ois is the account of a crumbling marriage; in it, Leah takes on an imaginary lover. The wife in Little Red Bird imagines kidnapping a baby from the nursery in the hospital so that she will be able to love, nurture, and raise a child of her own. These are stories of exile. Of life, loss, and love. In Survivors, Chava Rosenfarb takes the Yiddish short story, in the tradition of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and extends it with touches of Philip Roth and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Chava Rosenfarb was born in the industrial city of Lodz, Poland. She began writing at the age of eight, with the encouragement of her father. One of the most prominent Yiddish writers living today, Chava has received numerous prizes for her work, including the 1988 and 1993 Prize of the Congress for Jewish Culture (New York), the Sholem Aleichem Prize (Tel-Aviv), the 1985 Atran Prize (New York) and the 1972 Niger Prize (Buenos Aires). Her novel, Der Boym fun lieb (The Tree of Life) won the 1979 Itsik Manger Prize, the world’s highest Yiddish literature honour. Chava lives in Lethbridge, Alberta.

Goldie Morgentaler is the daughter of Chava Rosenfarb and Henry Morgentaler. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge, where she teaches nineteenth-century British and American literature, and has published numerous translation from Yiddish to English. She has translated of much of her mother’s work, including The Tree of Life and Survivors: Seven Short Stories, for she won the 2005 Helen and Stan Vine Jewish Book Award.