Chava Rosenfarb’s Montreal, with Goldie Morgentaler

This talk will center on Yiddish writer Chava Rosenfarb’s early years in Montreal in the 1950s, the vibrant Yiddish literary world that she encountered there, and the institutions, like the Jewish Public Library, that helped to nurture her career. It will also look at the portrayal of Montreal in Rosenfarb’s fiction.

Goldie Morgentaler is Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge. She is the translator from Yiddish to English of much of Chava Rosenfarb’s work, including Rosenfarb’s epic Holocaust novel “The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto”. Her translation of Rosenfarb’s book of short stories, “Survivors: Seven Short Stories”, won a Canadian Jewish Book Award and the Modern Language Association’s Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies. She is also the editor, most recently, of a collection of Rosenfarb’s essays called “Confessions of a Yiddish Writer” published by McGill-Queens University Press in 2019. This collection won a 2019 Jewish Canadian Literary Award.

Presented as part of the Yiddish Book Center’s 2022 Decade of Discovery: Women in Yiddish