My Mother’s Life

How Chava Rosenfarb survived the Lodz ghetto to write a masterpiece about the experience

The three volumes of my mother Chava Rosenfarb’s The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto chronicle in precise, unflinching detail the destruction of an entire Jewish community during the Holocaust. 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. 

When The Tree of Life was published as Der boym fun lebn in 1972, the Yiddish press immediately acclaimed it as a masterpiece, repeatedly emphasizing its unique place in the literature of the Holocaust. Isaac Jonasovitch, writing in the quarterly Folk un Medine (Tel-Aviv, Summer 1975), announced that “The Tree of Life is a work that surpasses everything that has been expressed up to now on the tragedy of Eastern European Jewry, or more precisely, surpasses everything that has been written in prose on this topic.” And the jury that unanimously awarded Rosenfarb the 1979 Manger Prize concurred, noting that The Tree of Life “is a work that rises to the heights of the great creations in world literature and towers powerfully over the Jewish literature of the Holocaust, the literature which deals with the annihilation of European Jewry, in particular Polish Jewry.” Numerous other international prizes were conferred on Rosenfarb for this novel, including the Canadian Segal Prize and the Argentinian Niger Prize.

Yet despite the excitement in the Yiddish press, in the world at large the novel went unheralded and largely unknown. In effect, it suffered the fate of the language in which it was written. Its very strengths—the all-encompassing epic structure, the complexity, the detail and the length—made it a difficult book to publish in a non-Jewish language. While Der boym fun lebn was soon translated into Hebrew as Ets hahayim, for many years the English translation could not find a publisher. Finally, in 1985 Scribe Publications of Melbourne, Australia, brought out the novel in English, but without distribution rights in North America. The Australian edition also eliminated the introduction and compacted the novel’s three volumes into one large tome. In 2004, 32 years after its initial publication in Yiddish, the University of Wisconsin Press began publishing a paperback reissue of this Australian edition, this time returning to the original format of three separate volumes. That version is now available in North America. I am Chava Rosenfarb’s daughter and the co-translator with her of The Tree of Life. It is my fervent hope that on the heels of Yom HaShoah and as we approach the April 19 anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, this novel will serve as a reminder, not only of the dark days of the past, but of the ability of literature to both recreate and transcend them.

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