(Re)Claiming Motherhood in the Wake of the Holocaust in Chava Rosenfarb’s ‘Little Red Bird’ and Valentine Goby’s Kinderzimmer

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhile saving women and children first is standard practice at times of historical upheaval, during the Holocaust women and children were often killed first, and pregnant mothers and small children were sent to the gas chambers upon arrival at the Nazi camps. This fundamental reversal of traditional values has not yet been granted enough attention, which is why this study examines two narratives that tell the survivor's story through the lens of motherhood and the woman's body. Valentine Goby's Kinderzimmer (2013) draws on archives and survivors' testimonies about a 'children's room' located in Ravensbrück between September 1944 and March 1945. Goby's narrator is modeled on Madeleine Roubenne, a French survivor, yet, interestingly, Goby rewrites Roubenne's story into a more 'successful' version of motherhood. The short story 'Little Red Bird' (2004), written in Yiddish by Jewish-Canadian author, Chava Rosenfarb, who is a Holocaust survivor herself, alludes to the Little Red Riding Hood and follows an Auschwitz survivor obsessed by her inability to bear children, which she attributes to being haunted by the ghost of her five-year-old daughter killed in Auschwitz. The story stages the destructiveness of PTSD through Manya's obsession with motherhood that results in her fantasy of stealing a baby from a maternity ward and her failure to assist her dying husband. Both narratives thus testify to the intrinsically gendered character of Holocaust experience and problematize gender in the context of Holocaust through examinations of (non-)motherhood and the female body. While for Rosenfarb's narrator, surviving means to counter the effects of Nazi policies that specifically targeted women for their reproductive capacities, for Goby's narrator foster motherhood enables survival. Both texts are thus read here in the light of the complicated re-gendering and cathartic/pathological aspects of motherhood brought about by Holocaust trauma.