The Prayer House of Chava Rosenfarb: Poetry, Religion and the Shadow of the Holocaust

Abstract

This article focuses on the poetry of the Yiddish-Canadian novelist and poet, Chava Rosenfarb, a Holocaust survivor and author of The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto. Rosenfarb is known primarily for her novels and short stories, but she is also an accomplished poet. Although a lifelong atheist, several of Rosenfarb’s poems centre on religious themes, specifically on how Jewish traditional belief and the Jewish longing for God are nullified by the fact of the Holocaust. This theme, which balances between the longing for faith and the acknowledgement of its impossibility is movingly expressed in two of Rosenfarb’s poems, ‘Isaac’s Dream’ and ‘I Would Go Into a Prayer House’. Using these two poems as prooftexts, this essay will analyse the religious poetry of a secular author who is also one of the last Yiddish-language writers.