Edited by Goldie Morgentaler, PhD

Translated by Krzysztof Majer and Sylvia Söderlind

Letters from the Afterlife chronicles the experiences of two Holocaust survivors as they adjusted to life in their adopted countries of Canada and Sweden. Chava Rosenfarb (1923 – 2011), Goldie Morgentaler’s mother, and Zenia Larsson (1922 – 2007) were childhood friends in Poland, lived through the Lodz Ghetto and the death camps together, and parted soon after their liberation from Bergen-Belsen. For the next fifty years, they continued their friendship through letters written in Polish. Despite their continuing traumas and insecurities, Rosenfarb and Larsson went on to become distinguished novelists in their respective languages, Yiddish and Swedish.

After Chava Rosenfarb’s death, Morgentaler found a stash of Chava’s letters to Zenia from 1945 to 1971. By bringing Chava’s letters together with Zenia’s side of the correspondence, taken from the book Zenia published in Swedish in 1972, Morgentaler has created a testament to an emotional attachment between two women writers who had suffered through some of the most horrific events of the twentieth century and emerged with their humanity and ability to love intact.

Goldie Morgentaler is Professor Emerita at the University of Lethbridge, where she taught 19th-century British and American literature and modern Jewish literature. She is the translator from Yiddish to English of much of Chava Rosenfarb’s work, including Rosenfarb’s epic Holocaust trilogy, The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto.

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