"Late Mail from Lodz" and THE TREE OF LIFE
Reviewed by Irena Kohn (Mar / Apr 2006)

"Late Mail from Lodz": Chava Rosenfarb's Literary Witness Account of Jewish Life in the Lodz Ghetto, Book Two

THE TREE OF LIFE: A TRILOGY OF LIFE IN THE LODZ GHETTO. Book Two: From the Depths I Call You, 1940-1942. By Chava Rosenfarb. Translated from the Yiddish by the author in collaboration with Goldie Morgentaler. Terrace Books, University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. 408 pages. Book Three forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in October 2006.

"There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. And that claim cannot be settled cheaply."

-Walter Benjamin,
"On the Concept of History"

The Lodz Ghetto was not only Europe's longest surviving Jewish ghetto under Nazi occupation, it was also its most hermetically sealed. Isolated in the poorest parts of the city, with armed guards stationed at its barbed wire perimeter every 50 to 100 meters, the ghetto was virtually impenetrable from inside and out to anyone but Nazi authorities. Houses and buildings around the perimeter of the designated ghetto area were razed to create a barrier between the ghetto population and the rest of the city. Both Nazis and Volksdeutshe ("ethnic Germans"-non-Jewish Lodzhers who bolstered their social status under the Nazi regime by proclaiming German heritage)1 populated the homes and businesses from which the city's Jews had been forcibly removed. As there were no sewers in Baluty, invisible escape from the ghetto was impossible. The replacement of Reichsmark and Zloty (German and Polish currencies which were forbidden to Jews) with "Rumkies"-a ghetto currency that was completely valueless outside the ghetto-forced ghetto incarcerants to participate in the perverse ghetto "economy" through which the Nazi regime forced enslaved Jews to purchase substandard and inadequate supplies of food with the pittance they "earned" as slave-labourers for the Reich. Newspapers in the ghetto were forbidden, and mail was heavily censored by the Nazi regime; only postcards written in German were permitted to be sent out of the ghetto. Trapped in a remote area of the city, and surrounded by hostile forces, ghetto incarcerants were left to wonder if anyone outside the ghetto could know what was happening to the Jews imprisoned there, or if they ever would.

Book Two of Chava Rosenfarb's Tree of Life follows Lodz Jewry into the ghetto and tracks the ghetto's subsequent sealing on May 1, 1940. We enter Book Two through the letter of the young doctor Michal Levine who is preparing to move from his home in the city to the designated ghetto area. To his beloved, who has managed to leave Lodz before Nazi occupation, Michal writes: "Dearest Mira, This is the fourth letter that I haven't mailed to you. In my breast pocket I have the other three and this one will share their fate. They lie on my heart, warming it ? Perhaps one day I will show you all these letters. But that day seems remote and for the time being I am talking into a void-talking to myself."

In a post-Shoah world, any reading of The Tree of Life is necessarily haunted by our knowledge that as readers of this 20th Century novel, we come to the events of the Lodz Ghetto, and of European Jewry, as belated witnesses. Rosenfarb's retroactive witness account allows us as privileged observers to visit the once sealed-off and invisible world of the Lodz Ghetto, permitting us to witness belatedly the material conditions and human relationships that existed there, through the eyes and voices of a host of characters who inspire our admiration, but to whom we can give no solace. The moment has passed, the call from the depths have gone unanswered, unheeded. It is this "haunting" that constitutes the extraordinary power of this novel. Written in the present-tense of ghetto time, the voices in The Tree of Life do not recede into the past; they speak to us with present-day urgency.

Rosenfarb's novel reminds us that despite the Nazi attempt to reduce the richness of Jewish life to the desperate and doomed struggle to meet basic needs, even on the bitter and brutal terrain of the Lodz Ghetto, amid hunger and death, significant, tender life was possible. Book Two grants us a kaleidoscopic first-hand view of ghetto life through the eyes of such characters as the young writer Rachel Eibeshutz, the father and husband Itche Mayer (and his four sons, one Zionist, two Bundist, and one Communist), the industrialists Adam Rosenberg and Samuel Zukerman, and the poet Simcha Bunim Berkovitch, as they struggle to adapt to ghetto conditions, and as their perspectives on events and their role in them changes over time.

Book Two portrays the harsh conditions of Lodz Ghetto, and how these conditions transformed people, for better or for worse. Hence, we are privy to the changing inner and outer life of Miss Diamand, the assimilated Jewish high school literature teacher who is not spared from ghettoization by her love for the poems of Julian Tuwim or her views on the Yiddish language and culture as a form of Jewish "backwardness." We track Rumkowski's "apotheosis" from reviled, sycophantic prewar fundraiser for a Jewish orphanage in Helenowek to his newfound "status" as Nazi-appointed Jewish head of the Lodz Ghetto and self-professed saviour of Lodz Ghetto Jewry. We observe the blossoming of the carpenter, Itche Mayer, from harried father and husband to political activist and community leader, on the fruitless soil of the ghetto. "This was not the Itche Mayer of bygone days, not even the Itche Mayer who belonged to his wife Shayne Pessele or to his sons. This was both a sick and a renewed Itche Mayer whose existence had become dissolved in the general tragedy, who took upon himself the duty of doing something for his brothers in 'work and want.' After he lived for so many years as a sympathizer of the Bund, as a reader of all sorts of tales about heroes and revolutionaries, he now suddenly felt the Bundist and revolutionary, the fighter who had for so long lain dormant within him."

Significant details of everyday life, such as the operation of clandestine schools and libraries, accounts of what people in the ghetto were reading, of what news filtered in on illegal radio receivers, of the Yiddish vernacular for typical events in the ghetto, are rendered with arresting vividness and accuracy. Events large and small, from Rumkowski's public speeches to his private baths, from the carpenters' strikes, the establishment and liquidation of the Gypsy Camp within the ghetto, from the situation of the Western Jews deported into Lodz Ghetto from the German Protectorate (later referred to by ghetto inmates as "Yekes")2, to the shooting of a nameless boy, reading a book by a well, shot on the spot by a passing Nazi irritated by the tranquility of the scene, command our attention as readers and as belated witnesses.

Not only is this novel a document of material conditions and significant events in the history of the ghetto, but also one of the social, cultural and political history of Lodz Ghetto Jewry, its remarkable continuation and violent abbreviation in the ghetto. Many of the novel's characters-like the carpenter Itche Mayer, the street singer Shiele, the artists Winter and Guttman, the poets Sara Samet and Simcha Bunim Berkovitch, have a self-authored, documented legacy well outside the novel, for example, in the postwar memoirs of Yankl Nirenberg, in the song repertoire of the street singer Yankele Herszkowicz, in the surviving drawings and painting of the artists Israel Leizerowicz (pictured in the foreground of the photo on the cover of the novel), Yitshok Brauner, and Szimon Szerman, and in the great works of Yiddish poets such as Miriam Ulinover and Simcha Bunim Shayevitch. Rosenfarb had casual acquaintance with some of these figures, and intense, sometimes lifelong relationships with others, and she renders these figures lovingly, yet with clear-eyed complexity. Much more than a simple chronicle or imaginative speculation, The Tree of Life is a multi-voiced eyewitness testimony, an elegant orchestration of lost and surviving Lodz Ghetto voices that instills in the reader the type of admiration that guarantees Rosenfarb's characters and her work a significant afterlife in the collected memories of the Shoah. The culmination of this trilogy will be available to readers in Book Three, to be published in October 2006.

Irena Kohn's article on a children's album from Lodz Ghetto appears in the January 2006 issue of Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, published by the School of Literature of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.