Overview

"With the addition of two stories, namely, """"The Masterpiece"""", """"April 19th"""" and """"Letters to God"""", this collection makes available in English for the first time a complete selection of Chava Rosenfarb's short stories all in one place. All the stories in this collection deal with the afterlife of Holocaust survivors in North America. Since Chava Rosenfarb was herself a Holocaust survivor who settled in Montreal after the war, she speaks in these stories from personal experience at the same time as she allows her imagination to inhabit the minds of characters far different from herself."

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Reviews

"""Rosenfarb demonstrates that lasting trauma can never be confronted and expunged without a thorough interrogation of the past. Nothing substitutes for such necessary, brutal honesty. That holds true for finely drawn fictional characters and for entire nations as well."" -- The Washington Post Review ""The land of the postscript is Canada, where Rosenfarb eventually settled; and ""postscript"" is the word, as much of the fiction describes figures who saw the remainder of their lives as an afterword to the war....Rosenfarb's characters...embrace life, love, the contemporary world, even while fearing that such embraces are impossible."" -- The Times Literary Supplement Review ""Indeed, the past -- so palpable in the lives that Rosenfarb imagines -- occludes the present and future. And even if Canada offers safety and stability, it cannot provide what her characters seek: oblivion and freedom from the torment of memory."" -- Literary Review of Canada ""This aspect of Rosenfarb's work - her urge to fictionalize what she could simply present as personal experience - is her distinctive contribution to Holocaust literature. The stories' shared themes, rendered through rich character portraits, offer a detailed portrayal of the postwar scene."" -- Montreal Review of Books ""Now, with In the Land of the Postscript, the reader is fortunate to have in Morgentaler a double interpreter--both translator and daughter--someone who has had singular access to, and insight into, the author, her language, and the intense emotions and experiences it conveys."" -- In Geveb Review ""The musical rhythms of [Rosenfarb's] prose are captured by her daughter, Goldie Morgentaler, in pitch-perfect translations and a nuanced 'Introduction.'...Between blank and burnt pages, mother and daughter imprint meaning and memory in In the Land of the Postscript."" -- The Miramichi Reader Review ""[These] are complex, layered stories about guilt and forgiveness, but above all, they are about memory and the impossibility of forgetting certain things -- ever."" -- The Forward Review"

Author Information

Chava Rosenfarb was one of the most important Yiddish writers of the second part of the 20th century. She was born in the industrial city of Lodz, Poland in 1923 and began writing at the age of eight with the encouragement of her father. A survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, of Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, Rosenfarb settled in Canada in 1950, where most of the stories in this collection are set. Rosenfarb's novel, The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto, was awarded the 1979 Manger Prize, Israel's highest award for Yiddish literature. She was the recipient of numerous other literary awards, including a Canadian Jewish Book Award and the John Glassco Prize for Literary Translation. In 2006, the University of Lethbridge awarded her an honorary degree, the only such honor ever accorded a Yiddish writer in Canada. To mark the centennial of her birth, the City of Lodz declared the year 2023 to be The Year of Chava Rosenfarb. Rosenfarb died in 2011.

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