Ideas - 'Here lived Chava Rosenfarb' : A Profile of the Canadian Yiddish writer

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

Chava Rosenfarb, Holocaust survivor and Canadian Yiddish writer, was born 100 years ago in Łódź, Poland. In 2023, Łódź celebrated “The Year of Chava Rosenfarb." In this episode, producer Allison Dempster revisits a 2001 IDEAS documentary that profiles Rosenfarb’s legacy and the politics of Holocaust remembrance in Poland today. *This episode originally aired on Jan. 29, 2024.

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncovered, available now.

This is a CBC Podcast. You turn into an animal. You are with yourself and your skin and that's it. You have to hope and to struggle to survive another hour, another day. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. I promised myself in Auschwitz. When we arrived there, on the ramp, when we stood there,

I promised myself that if I survive, I will write about it. Hava Rosenfarb was 21 years old when she was taken to Auschwitz in 1944. She survived the Nazi concentration camp only to be taken to another, Bergen-Belsen. Despite the horror, the hunger and the fear, she found ways to write. My bank was, I had the upper bank. And I started in the evenings or after work or before we got down from our banks, I started to write down the poems which I remembered. Intense, wincey letters on the ceiling,

on the ceiling above my head. I wrote them down, I learned them by heart, and I erased them sort of with my hand. And then, after liberation, I remembered these poems. After liberation, Hava Rosenfarb immigrated to Canada. Stories about the Holocaust poured from her pen. Her best-known novel is The Tree of Life, written in Yiddish, about life in the Nazi-established Jewish ghetto of Lodz, Poland. The ghetto was the soil on which I really grew. I really became what I am now because what I saw, what I learned there, gave me my outlook on the human condition.

The city of Lodz is marking the centennial of Hava Rozenfarb's birth. For me it is amazing that the writer, the person from Lodz who didn't want to come back probably, she was always walking through her native city and I wanted her to be known in Poland and in Polish. And along with the celebrations and dedications, there are difficult conversations about the Holocaust. I really didn't want to go there with my mind. I didn't want to hear that my parents had suffered what they said they had suffered.

And how it's remembered. In 2001, Ideas profiled Rosenfarb, her story of survival, her writing, and her marriage to abortion rights activist and provider Henry Morgenthaler in a documentary called The Tree of Life. Producer Alison Dempster revisits that episode, Rosenfarb's legacy and the politics of writing about the Holocaust in Poland today. This is The Tree of Life Revisited. Hava Rosenfarb was born on February the 9th, 1923, the elder of two daughters of working-class socialists in Lodz, a sooty industrial city of sweatshops and factories in central Poland.

It was and is the country's second-largest city. On the eve of World War II, it had a Jewish population of a quarter of a million, that is to say more than one-third of the total population. Historians have called it the Polish Manchester. My mother worked in a factory, in a textile factory, and my father, he worked in all kinds of places, and he was very handsome, a very handsome man man like my son, my son resembles him. In 2001, Ideas broadcast this profile of Hava Rosenfarb from writer and journalist Elaine Kelman-Naves.

Rosenfarb died in 2011 in Lethbridge, Alberta, where she lived with her daughter Goldie Morgenthaler. When Goldie was growing up, she didn't want to hear about the Holocaust. My mother liked to talk about it, and I didn't want to listen when I was a child because it was painful. That changed as Goldie got older and read the stories her mother had written. She doesn't reach for easy interpretations of her characters. They're complex human beings and some of them are not very likeable. And one of the things that has always intrigued me about her fiction is she tries to get inside

the mind of people she despises. Goldie got an even deeper understanding when she began translating her mother's writing to English. And we fought a lot, a lot, over words. Mostly I would sit at the computer, she would read the English to me and I would tell her what I was going to do with it or I would mark up pages that she herself had translated. And we go back and forth like this. And sometimes she was right. I would say, you can't use that word. There is no such word in the English language. And then she'd show me the dictionary. So you said, right, here's the word.

And I go, okay, but nobody will know what it means. I don't know what it means. And it would be that kind of interaction. And I have to say that when I started translating after her death, one of the things I missed the most was the sights. Gulti got the chance to see her mother's work in a new light on a recent visit to Poland. The city of Lodz declared 2023 the year of Chava Rosenfarb. Her writing has inspired concerts and readings and public art. Mural painted on the walls which say, here lived Popeye Wilson Park.

A square near a local theater has been named after her. Tours are being led through what remains of the ghetto. When you know my mother's novels and you see in front of your eyes what she's writing about, it makes it come to light. about, it makes it come to light. But visiting Lodge always brings up mixed feelings for Goldie. Looking at the buildings is what you're doing is you're going back to history, right? And when those buildings meant something, when my mother lived there, even though they were in the ghetto, there was a Jewish community in that city, a large one, the second largest in the world

after Warsaw. And now it's all gone. Poland has long wrestled with its second World War history and the treatment of Jewish communities while under Nazi occupation. In 2018, the government passed a law which made it a civil violation to assert that Poland bore any responsibility for atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. Still, some in large are determined to grapple with the history. Johanna Podolska is the organizer of the centennial celebrations dedicated to Chava Rosenfarb. For me, it was important for Polish people to read Hava Rosenfarb, to see part of the history we don't know. And also I treat in some way the tree of

life as kind of a testimony even if I know that it is fiction. You can see that she really knew these places. So we have a lot of people who are very interested and of course we have thousands who are not interested but they don't come. But I think now quite a lot of people know about her, at least in Łódź. I don't want to make you this beautiful picture that we are so wonderful and now we don't face antisemitism because we do. But generally we have support to present the Polish Jewish topics as well. Podolska has spearheaded efforts to get Hava's books translated into Polish. These books of Habarud and Warp make us more rich. I think, you know, give us a different perspective.

It is also always, you know, to tell something more about us, for good and bad, you know, because you can learn something about yourself just in this universal way. Goldie Morgenthaler says her mother never wanted to go back to her home country, but the idea of reaching new readers would have thrilled her. She really did want recognition for what I think is in fact a major work about the Holocaust that nobody knew of. Mostly because it was written in Yiddish and even though it was translated into English it had a hard time finding the publishing.

So she was focused on the North American world, on Canada and on the United States, mostly because I think it never in her wildest dreams had hurt to her that Poland would have a commemoration of her work. So the fact that they did, I mean my biggest regret when I was there was that she wasn't around to see what kind of an impression she was finally making on readers. I think she would have been happy as this two-week award. She would have been overjoyed. The story the new readers are discovering is an extraordinary one. Here's more from the CBC Archives, the documentary The Tree of Life.

So we were sort of the rich poor, you know. We lived in one room, but we had a very nice life in that room. We had everything we needed. And we were a happy family, a very happy family. My childhood was very happy. And my father was really the one who dreamt my future. Yeah, yeah. And he used to go for walks with me and tell me, I was maybe eight years old or so, he said,

Echava, when you have an interesting thought, don't lose it, write it down on a piece of paper. never know it might come in useful. He taught me sort of how to organize my intellectual life without him being aware that we are preparing my future and me being aware of it. But he dreamt great dreams for me. Havas' parents were members of the Bund, the Jewish Socialist Party, which was very active in Lodz. So were the Morgentalers, the parents of Havas' future first husband, Henry. Henry Morgentaler is well known as an abortion rights activist in Canada. We met, we were students together at the school that was operated by the Jewish Socialist Party Bund.

And it was a set of schools which were very progressive. And you were taught in Yiddish and they were taught Yiddish literature. And all the subjects were in Yiddish, except, of course, Polish, which was the language of the country. So it was quite a unique school, really. And I think that I met Haber when I went into third grade. So I was about 10 years old I guess. Henry was a student in my class. We sat on the same bench and we were always competing. And he was very jealous of my poems.

And he said he always wrote poems too. But I wasn't as good in math as he was, you know. I was good in literature, in reading, in understanding stories and so on. It so happened that we were both good students. And then we became boyfriend and girlfriend very easily, almost at the age of 13, 14. She was beautiful, she was intelligent, she was artistic, she was accomplished.

She had an air of, how should I say that, the awareness of her own dignity. And she was awfully bright. And we had long discussions about all kinds of things, the philosophy, literature and whatnot, you know. And it was just a tremendous childhood romance. World War II broke out. The very first act of the war was the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. Still, Hava Rosenfarb and Henry Morgenthaler were continuing to pursue their childhood romance, even under very

trying circumstances. We used to stay in lines for bread very often at each other's houses, close to each other's houses and things like that, I would see her quite often. While it was sort of the Twilight Zone sort of where we knew we were persecuted and that we had to wear the little Star of David to show that we were Jews and they would raffle us to work carrying furniture or whatever else the Germans required and there was not enough to eat, you know, we had to scramble to get food or bread or something like that. And then they decreed that they had to be established and the Germans had chosen a very rundown part of the city, actually, Baluti, the most rundown part of the city, and squeezed all the Jews into that part.

The Lodz ghetto was set up in February 1940. In the grand scheme of the Nazis' final solution, ghettos were conceived as way stations to the labor and death camps. Their purpose was to aid in the control and supervision of Jews by concentrating them in specific areas. In Lodz, the ghetto was established in Baluti, the poorest of the Jewish neighborhoods.

Conditions were woefully inadequate. About a quarter of a million people came to be crammed within four square kilometers. Housing was shoddy and fit only for demolition. Sewage disposal was rudimentary and rations were restricted. Here is an excerpt from the Tree of Life in which Hava Rosenfarb describes the move to the ghetto in February 1940. The Rachel character is loosely based on Hafa herself.

It was the first day of the resettlement and the city purged itself of the Jews. Arriving from the suburban districts, from the wealthy city center, from the marketplaces and from the industrial quarters, they inundated the entire city. Through all the streets and alleys they moved in black swarms, dragging on like an endless funeral cortege. Once in a while, a face in a window would light up with a broad smile, and it was difficult to judge whether it was one of delight at the beautiful day, or delight at the fact that a huge invisible broom was sweeping the Jews out of every nook and cranny of the city, gathering them in the distant dumping ground called Baluchi. The road led uphill. The wheels of the buggies squeaked and grated over the wet cobblestones. Tens of thousands of shoes soaked with mud shuffled and sloshed in

monotonous rhythm. Rachel walked in the crowd, asking herself whether there was a pair of all seeing eyes somewhere. Looking down from above and taking in the entire awesome spectacle, a pair of eyes watching as a people marched forward in history while walking back in time, towards the ghetto. She walked bent under the weight of the knapsack on her back. It pressed down on her shoulder blades and cut into them. Her hair was glued to her forehead. Beside her walked her father in a new striped suit which he had not, until today, had the occasion to wear.

On his back lay a huge sack tied around his arms with cords. Both of them, Rachel and Moshe, carried a pack of bedding between them, and their hands each held bags full of dishes. From all sides people pressed against the pack of bedding. She had to grip the cord tightly so as not to lose the bundle. Her hands were cut, and they burned at the fingertips. In the ghetto, Hava Rosenfarb was almost perpetually hungry, cold, and afraid. Even so, today, she looks back to the era of the Lodz ghetto with a certain degree of nostalgia.

It was an interesting life. I remember, you know, I didn't have a bed. I didn't sleep on a bed. I slept on chairs. And I remember myself lying on that bed of chairs and writing an essay very early in the morning, you know. Before the troubles of the day started, I wrote some lofty essay about who knows what,

very, very far removed from reality. This I remember how I sat and worked and wrote with my pencil, had a little pencil, and scribbled on and on and on. I was so taken by it, so involved. And then I felt very good about these things. I felt good when I was creative, and I was very creative in the ghetto.

I started to write poems, and I wrote hundreds of them. There's a great deal of spirit there. to write poems, and I wrote hundreds of them. There's a great deal of spirit there. There's an orchestra, there are cultural gatherings, people are reading their works, their poems. It was actually quite nice. I mean, if you could make abstraction from the misery that's surrounding you

and the future that was murky. So there are periods of time when we could forget the mundane and things that weren't well and that the threat that was hanging over all of us and just concentrate on the sweetness of living. The ghetto was the soil on which I really grew. I really became what I am now, you know, in a certain sense,

as far as creativity is concerned, because the ghetto and the atmosphere of the ghetto and the experiences of the ghetto and human relations in the ghetto where you can't hide and pretend that you are somebody else, that you are noble and smart and whatnot. The person was completely naked with their soul and that's how I learned by observation and by being myself immersed in that snake pit.

This, what I saw, what I learned there and by being myself immersed in that snake pit. This, what I saw, what I learned there, gave me my outlook on the human condition. That's Hava Rosenfarb in a 2001 ideas documentary by Elaine Kelman-Naves. 2001 Ideas documentary by Elaine Kelman Naves. Despite the constant danger and hardship, Chava found her literary voice in the Lodz ghetto, but new horrors awaited her, Henry Morgenthaler, and their families.

The ghetto was liquidated in 1944. 1944. And we knew, we knew by that time that about what was going on in Auschwitz there was a clandestine radio in the ghetto and we knew the reports from the BBC in London about the program of extermination of the Germans. But many of us, including myself, didn't really believe it. I mean, it was impossible to believe that the sort of civilized nation would stoop so low as to kill women and children and grownups for no good reason that they're different. So even though the evidence was there and day by day these reports are coming in, it

was hard for us to believe. I personally didn't half believe and half did not believe it. So we didn't want to go to the trains and have his father made an ingenious kind of, and he put one wall with a door, he put a kind of commode over that. So the door was hidden and we sat behind that door So the door was hidden. And we sat behind that door during the day. Nobody moved. And nobody went to the toilet. And we hid out for 10 days. Of course, there was some food there stashed away beforehand and they prepared it well. So 10 days we were in the scram space and hoping that eventually the Russians would come. You know, the Russians were about 100 kilometers away and that we'd be liberated.

But unfortunately it didn't happen. Around the 23rd of August, one of the German officers measured the walls outside and saw that something wasn't right here. And eventually they removed the commode and they found us. So we were all rounded up and brought to the train station and we were shipped to the train to the Auschwitz. When we were deported, we took our dearest belongings, most necessary ones, and I took

my poems and I took quite a nice package of poems and of course I didn't want to part from them and in Auschwitz during this election they took away our rucksacks and the purses from the women with photos from the past and so on and of course they took away my poems and threw them on a mountain of all kinds of... They took away the prayer books, you know. So there they threw my poems too. We had nothing anymore. Nothing.

Nothing. So that's how we entered the concentration camp. I believed in goodness, like Anne Frank, you know. Anne Frank said that she believes that in spite of everything, people are good at heart. Well, this is exactly what I believed too. But, well, I think that if Anne Frank were asked in Bergen-Belsen if she believed that, I doubt that if she would have said that. She said it when she was in hiding, when she didn't know yet what awaits her, you know. And that was the same with me.

I believed in human beings. And then I went to the camps and then the knowledge about human beings deepened. I wouldn't say that man is essentially bad, human beings are essentially bad, but they are not good either. Mostly they're selfish. Mostly there is the struggle for survival and this is above everything. You're listening to Ideas and to an episode called The Tree of Life Revisited. We're a podcast and a broadcast, heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on U.S. Public Radio, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nala Ayad. I'm Sarah Trelevin and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy.

And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now. The late Hava Rosenfarb won every notable literary prize in the world for Yiddish writing.

She did much of that writing in Montreal, where she lived after the Second World War. In her best-known work, The Tree of Life, she paints an unforgettable portrait of day-to-day life in the Jewish ghetto established by the Nazis in Lodz, Poland. And her writing, recently translated into Polish, is being rediscovered. Producer Alison Dempster visited the CBC Archives to bring us this portrait of Hava Rosenfarb's life, work and memory. In her acclaimed novel The Tree of Life, a trilogy of life in the Lodz ghetto, Hava Rosenfarb stops the story just before her characters enter Auschwitz. The book ends with several blank pages, then an epilogue. When she wrote the novel,

she couldn't bear to follow her protagonists through the gates where she herself had gone in 1944 at the age of 21. The most important thing was to pass the selection. The women were already separated from the men and so the men were in another column. This was a column of women and they picked out those who were for life and those who were to perish. And everybody knew what it was all about. So it wasn't that we didn't know what's going to happen. Everybody knew what's going to happen. And then we walked along the fence until we came to the gate, to the famous gate, you know, with the big inscription, Arbeit macht frei, work makes you free. And there

stood the elegant Dr. Mengele, beautifully dressed, handsome. and another few young officers, German officers. They wore gloves, of course. They won't touch a Jew with bare hands. They pulled out people, left or right. My mother was at age when they should send her for annihilation. We held our mother, my sister, on one side and I on the other. When we faced Mengele, he wanted to pull her out from between us. I said, this is my shvester.

So he asked, Wialt, how old? I think I said 42. And he let her go. That's how we saved our mother. I don't know who dictated me these words. It's a sudden in the madness kind of illumination. So I don't know what happened because we were half mad with fear. It was a great prosperity there in the crematoria because thousands upon thousands of Jews from Lodz arrived.

So when they were destroying people by the thousands, day and night, and we sat in that field and we saw the flames from the chimney, we saw the chimney, we saw the flames, we smelled the smell of flesh and human hair, and we knew we waited for our turn. And then suddenly they probably changed their minds because then the people from Hungary came later on and they took us to a barrack. Then they made a new selection and they picked 500 women. They sent us off to do some labour for the fatherland. Hava Rosenfarb was determined to keep the poems that had been torn from her at Auschwitz

alive in her memory. She managed to get her hands on the stub of a pencil. And I started, and my bank was, I had the upper bank in Zazel, Zazel, the name of the camp was Zazel. And I started in the evenings or after work or before we got down from our banks, I started to write down the poems which I remembered in teensy-weensy letters on the ceiling, on the ceiling above my head, you know, on the boards above my head. And I didn't know any, I want anybody to know, neither my mother nor my sister, nobody. Because if they caught me or if they noticed something, I didn't want them to become involved.

And I wrote them down, I learned them by heart, and I erased them sort of with my hand. And then, after liberation, I remembered these poems. While Hava, her mother and her sister survived the Holocaust, her father did not. Henry Morgenthaler was liberated at the Dachau concentration camp. He weighed 70 pounds. After the war, Henry and Hava reunited in Belgium. They got married in 1949, and a year later they sailed for Canada and settled in Montreal.

Here again from the CBC archives is Montreal writer Elaine Kelman-Naves with a piece of her documentary, The Tree of Life. Hava had begun work on what was to become her magnum opus, her trilogy of life in the Lodz ghetto in Poland. Henry resumed his medical studies, which had been interrupted by the war. At the same time, they scratched out a living. Oh, it was very difficult, very difficult. Henry ran around for a job and he was a shipper.

He shipped parcels. He did all kinds of jobs. And then I went to a factory. Goldie was a year old. I started working to a factory. Goldie was a year old, I started working in a factory and I was awful. I was horrible and I was fired of course, I didn't work so I went to another factory and the owner was a sympathizer with the literature and so on. So he wanted to teach me embroidery and I wasn't good at it either. Gradually her material circumstances improved. Henry qualified as a doctor, but Hava's writing remained at the core of her life. She would rise at four in the morning to write, the only part of the day that was hers alone. Her children, Goldie Morgenthaler and Dr. Abraham Morgenthaler, remember her as being

almost perpetually at work. Goldie Morgenthaler. She was writing all the time, actually. So if I was, I would come home for lunch, let's say from school, and I would say something and suddenly she'd go rushing off to her work desk because whatever I'd said she thought she had to write it down and then she that she would work it into the novel. I guess she was writing her novel at the time. So basically I've always known she was a writer, always. Plus, I mean, when I was at school I went to Jewish school and I was known as her daughter

with great respect because she had a name in the community as a writer. Dr. Abraham Morgenthaler, Hafez's son. As a matter of fact, probably my first conscious memory is sitting in her writing room on the floor and amusing myself with little kire curios or tchotchkes from her desk or from her shelves and watching the sunlight come through and all the little dust motes floating in the air and my mom sitting there and typing away or writing on her typewriter. She wrote, you know, her major book, The Tree of Life, through the first eight years of my life, and many of those were, I was at home with her and I just hung out in her writing room.

Those are very fond memories. This was in an apartment on Dusharm in Uttramur. We had a lot of mice. We had mice in the walls and my sister Goldie would scare the dickens out of me by saying, hear all those sounds? Those are the mice running up and down the walls, and when you close your eyes, they're going to come out and they're going to bite you. You know the apartments in this proletarian section of Utremond. It was sort of a long apartment, a long, dark corridor. And to one side were the bedrooms and to the other side were two smaller rooms and so I had one tiny room and there was a closet and the mice

lived in the closet and I lived near my writing table and these were the best times. Oh, I was so passionate about writing. I wish it would come back to me. I worked nonstop, absolutely nonstop, minus the hours when I had to devote to the family, you know, I got up at four o'clock. And this was the best part, you know, until the children got up. Then I did the most of my work. It wasn't a joy because I didn't

write about joyful things. But there was a certain kind of joy, you know, in just bringing it out of me. I was completely immersed in that other world, but actually I liked living in that world, you know. This was my world. It was my home. It was everything. And it was also writing about it with the awareness that it's gone. So this was sort of a pain and a pleasure.

It wasn't easy. It wasn't easy to do it. But the hardship was not in bringing out the words or the scenes or something. The hardship was the pain, the pain which it gave me, the pain of loss. It was quite an experience writing this book. I was completely immersed in it and I probably neglected the children, neglected my duties because I was so involved in it, you know. It was sort of like magic. The times were gone, and yet I had the capability of going back and

creating this world again. One of the stories from the ghetto that is woven into the vast tapestry of the tree of life is Hava and Henry Morgenthaler's childhood romance. In the novel, the Henry character, a young medical student named David, keeps a journal. Here he writes of going out for an evening stroll with his beloved Rachel.

Rachel is a young writer whose life is loosely based on havas. The ghetto seems quite big, yet we encounter barbed wire at every step. It seems as if it has not only cut the ghetto off from the town, but also from the sky, from the air. I felt like grabbing Rachel by the hand, breaking through the barbed My Rachel. I was at a wedding. The bridegroom did not keep his mouth shut for a minute, constantly laughing, shifting in his chair, kissing the bride and joking with the guests at the table. Then he embraced the bride again and pressed her against his chest so forcefully that I was afraid he would break her in two. The two of them appear to love each other. But is it the kind of love which can resist the dirt and degradation of life in the ghetto? What gives the two of them the courage to undertake such a step?

Is it courage or is it thoughtlessness? I felt Rachel's gaze on me and I knew what she was thinking. How strong is our love? Would its sacredness not drown in the dirt surrounding us? She leaned over to me and whispered, The ghetto is a good test for love. An exam, don't you agree? I was irritated, as if by my anger I wanted to silence the

questions which had begun to nag at me. Perhaps she was right. I did not feel that I loved anyone but myself with a bad animal-like love. You're imagining things, I lashed out. If I don't love you, then I don't know how to call what I feel for you. The most powerful story is the story of my parents, which is probably the most romantic story that I knew.

That I know and that I knew. Here were two sweethearts, adolescent teenage sweethearts who pursued their love for each other. In at least the story goes these very idealistic ways, you know, my mom was this poet already and my dad was this great student and they would have these discussions about all things marvelous and and they would have these discussions about all things marvelous and intellectual. And then the war comes and the ghetto is set up and they continue their relationship under those times of hardship. And then when they finally are discovered in the ghetto as it's being liquidated, their families are hiding together in the same fake, you know, behind the same fake wall.

And so the families are captured and they're sent off in the trains and they go to the camps and they're separated. And my parents go to different places, you know, the men and the women are separated. And then at the end of the war, without a country, without sort of normal communications, without telephones and cell phones and anything like that, somehow the two of them scoured Germany, this big country, looking for each other and they find each other and they get married and they move to a new country. That story, this idea of having been separated and then being free but alone and looking for the other half of the broken heart and creating family somehow out of that

is a very very powerful story for me. Unfortunately it doesn't end well. The Tree of Life was published in Yiddish in 1972. Henry and Hava were divorced in 1977. Henry Morgenthaler. Our ways separated because I think our attitude to the Holocaust. In a sense, she felt she had a duty to be a witness to what happened and to describe it in an artistic way. I wanted no part of the past, of the pain of the past, so I want to live in the here and now. And the past to me was, it's

created nightmares for me, it's created bad experiences. So I wanted to be a person in the here and now and since I eventually graduated in medicine, being a doctor is like helping people. It's like undo the evil that I suffered, you know, being compassionate, being smart and providing good diagnosis and healing people was like part of my way of undoing the evil. And also, I didn't want to live in the past. I wanted to live in the here and now and in the future, rather, whereas Hava lived with the past. So we couldn't communicate on that. It's significant. And when she wrote the book, I didn't want to read it. I didn't want to read it. I didn't want to get back to the

ghetto. I didn't want to. And I regretted it because I guess she didn't like the fact I didn't want to read the work. And so that separated us a lot, you know. Whereas she, to her credit, she did transform the past with beautiful art, and she was a witness in a sense. Her book, The Tree of Life, is a witness to what happened, and she devoted all her energies to that. I think she feels she has a moral obligation to do that. So not only was it a duty to artistically to transform it,

but also to be a witness. That's Henry Morgentaler from a 2001 ideas documentary by Elaine Kelman-Naves. In it, she and Hava Rosenfarb have a remarkable exchange while discussing writing in the shadow of the Holocaust. After I finished reading the Tree of Life, all 1,000 pages of it, despite its devastating subject matter, I didn't feel devastated. I didn't feel disillusioned. I asked Hava how this was possible. No, because I still believe in love. You still believe in love? I didn't feel disillusioned. I asked Hava how this was possible.

No, because I still believe in love. You still believe in love? Yeah, I still believe in love. That as long as there is this spark of love between people, friends or lovers. But this is also, I think, naive to say the truth. It is naive. There is a wish to believe in human goodness, and there is a reality. I think that the Germans were really mean, bad. They were the embodiment of evil.

And yet, I had a German who saved my life. You know, in the camp, there was the supervisor, work supervisor, who shared his lunch, which consisted of a tiny sandwich. He shared it with me and my sister and my mother. He brought us slips from his wife, you know, underwear, because we had nothing underneath our dresses, and he brought it for us and he risked his life, you know, and he was kind.

I don't know, I don't, as far as these philosophies about human goodness and evil, good and evil, I can't come to any conclusions. Hava Rosenfarb spent the last years of her life under prairie skies in Lethbridge, Alberta, where she lived with her daughter. She loved the big sky and wide open spaces. And it was there she received a long-sought piece of paper. I invite Dr. Rosenfarb to present the address to the graduates. At the age of 83, Hava Rosenfarb was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Lethbridge. It is with a sense of immense pride and gratitude that I accept this honor today. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

This honorary degree means more to me than you can know, not only because I am the first Yiddish writer to be honored in this way by a Canadian university, but also because this doctor of laws is the very first university degree that I have ever been awarded. In fact, I could never have imagined an honor that more completely answers my innermost wishes, fantasies, and desires. Because the sad fact is that I never attended a university.

I never sat in a brightly lit classroom absorbing information from professors who were experts in their fields. I never haunted libraries in search of books to help me write my papers. I never stayed up all night working on assignments, nor studied for exams with my classmates. My university was the Second World War.

My classroom was the Lodge ghetto. My teachers were my fellow inmates there, and especially the poets, painters, intellectuals of the doomed writers community. So I am a graduate of the Holocaust, of the death camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. I have matriculated in one of the greatest tragedies known to men.

I have a degree from no other university, at least not until today. And so here I am, a Yiddish writer on the prairies, a Yiddish writer who must depend on translation in order to be read. A Yiddish writer who has longed all her life for a formal education and an opportunity to belong to an academic community.

And here in Westbridge, so far away from where my life's journey began, as if by magic that wish has been granted to me. I wish you all the best, my dear graduates, as you embark on your futures, but please remember that the future grows out of the past, and the past too must be remembered, if only for the lessons it has to teach us, namely what to celebrate and what to fear.

Thank you. Hava Rosenfarb rebuilt her life in Canada, but she was compelled to relive her old one for her art, to bear witness and preserve the memories of those she lost. She died in 2011. She was 87. This was my life. This was my material. And this I had to write about. I had no other choice. This was me.

You were listening to The Tree of Life Revisited. The original documentary, The Tree of Life, was by Elaine Kelman-Naves. Production by Jane Lewis. You can find the full episode from 2001 linked on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. This episode was produced by Alison Dempster. Thanks to the University of Lethbridge and the Merrick Edelman Dialogue Centre in Lodz, Poland. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast.

If you liked what you heard in this episode, check out our vast archive where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. Technical Production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, senior producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.