Between Survivors

Whether written with the wax tablet of the ancients, an ink pen, a typewriter, or an electronic keyboard, the epistolary novel has ebbed and flowed over the centuries. The tradition that in modern times began in 1740, with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, has flourished more recently through the work of Thornton Wilder, Saul Bellow, Alice Walker, and John Updike. The advent of email and text messages is only the most recent threat to the canon of collected letters, but still the genre endures. Indeed, the British writer Robert Harris mixed real letters with fiction in his luminous Precipice, published just two years ago. Without the actual notes that the prime minister H. H. Asquith sent to his far younger paramour, Venetia Stanley, during the dangerous summer of 1914, the novel would not soar or sparkle as it does.

Letters from the Afterlife is not fiction, though its protagonists, survivors of the Lodz ghetto and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, were both novelists. Indeed, there are countless novelistic elements to the letters that make up this unusual volume. Political intrigue, terror, captivity, endurance, hopelessness, friendship, travail, romance, frustration, alienation, reconciliation, guilt, adultery, reunion — they all appear in the words exchanged over decades by Chava Rosenfarb, quietly part of the postwar Montreal literary scene, and Zenia Marcinkowska, who published in Sweden under the name Zenia Larsson.

As non-fiction written in the tone of fiction, this isn’t yet another book about female peril and perseverance in the Holocaust years, though there are shards of peril and ample portions of perseverance in these pages. Rather, this is a book about what happens after survival: How the second beginning offered by chance and caprice is turned to account. Whether the sweet futures that Holocaust prisoners dared to dream actually came to pass. And how there never really is a post-trauma time of pure serenity and beauty.

These correspondents clung to life, only to discover that their reward was life itself, with its many challenges and sorrows. Making that point — and arranging the letters so they lead the reader slowly but masterfully to such a conclusion — may not have been what initially prompted Chava’s daughter, Goldie Morgentaler, a translator and University of Lethbridge emeritus professor, to undertake this project. More likely, she was moved to set forth a remarkable tale of female friendship in which she was a cameo presence herself and, once she came of age, presumably an observant witness. For most readers, that insight — the notion that Judy Garland had it dead wrong when she sang in 1939 that somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue — likely will come as an unanticipated sad but rich dividend. That is the true though sobering reward for moving from letter to letter, from year to year, from captivity to freedom, joy to despair, love to betrayal, precarious physical state to health, and then, in time, to old-age fragility and the death that ends the exchange and the book.

With the help of Polish and Swedish translators, Morgentaler pieced together her mother’s letters and the letters that Zenia published in 1972. In so doing, she realized, as she puts it in a very useful introduction, that “what differentiates Zenia and Chava from others like them is that the experiences they have lived through make creativity an imperative as a way of exorcising and coming to terms with the past.” Zenia did so in sculpture as well as in writing; Chava in, among other ventures, fiction and Yiddish poetry.* But coming to terms with the past clearly involved holding fast to the Lodz friendship that shaped their pre-Holocaust past and, in special ways, their post-Holocaust perceptions. Theirs was “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.”

In a way, this book illuminates what anyone who has met Holocaust survivors swiftly comes to understand — an appreciation that, because of the immutable passage of time, fewer people will now acquire first-hand as those who avoided death between 1933 and 1945 die of natural causes. For the fortunate few who experienced and then survived the Shoah, there never really is a postwar. The war and the drive to exterminate Hitler’s sworn enemies rages within them, as a fire of anger and mystery that smoulders until they die. For Zenia, that occurred in 2007. For Chava, it was 2011.

“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner tells us. “It’s not even past.” The past for these pen pals was a prism through which they viewed the present. In their letters, they examined their own lives, reflected on their despair, urged each other on. A year after liberation, Chava told Zenia, “Life has shamelessly uncovered even the deepest secret corners in our very selves.”

Throughout, they recalled their friends and acquaintances, some of whom perished in the camps, and they exchanged news growing out of their discovery of those people’s fate. In 1946, for example, Chava wrote to Zenia from Brussels: “I also wanted to inform you that Srulek Ptak and Lola Galusz are alive.” Both women eventually published books, the Holocaust coursing through their pages as it did through their memories and their bodies. They never did escape the war. In 1961, Zenia wrote to Chava:

In paragraph after paragraph, they relived the green shoots of their friendship in dark places of horror that Hitler’s minions, carpenters, mad scientists, excavators, and exterminators created for ends — not for beginnings. Yet the two managed to have second beginnings in unfamiliar settings, Zenia in Sweden and Chava, eventually, in Canada. “My friend, it has been almost three years since we separated,” twenty-six-year-old Zenia wrote to twenty-five-year-old Chava in 1948. “And three years at our age is a long time. Even more important is the fact that I have during these years started on a new, unknown path. And I know that I have changed a lot. Perhaps for the worse — hardly for the better.”

They struggled with the distance and differences between them. They had new homes, they faced difficulties in assimilation, they experienced hardships. It wasn’t until 1967, seventeen years after she settled in Canada, that Chava told her friend how unsettled she felt. “I still feel like a stranger here,” she wrote. It had been three years since she’d moved to Mount Royal, on the island of Montreal. It was a green and pleasant place but not without ghosts and not without anxiety. “I don’t participate at all in Jewish life, nor in the life of my country or my city. The friendships I once had were shallow, so I didn’t try very hard to keep them — so today I don’t even have those.”

The years passed; the gaps between the letters and, in a way, between the women grew. One of the most affecting moments came twenty-seven years after the war, in 1962, when they wondered — worried — about their conduct toward each other. Here is Zenia, employing Chava’s Polish name:

Chava responded nine weeks later, reflecting “on what I was like during the time you describe” and acknowledging that she was “more aggressive, courageous, and independent.” She recalled how she “believed in love, in justice, in mankind” (echoing Anne Frank’s sentiment: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”). Chava wrote that even in the hellscape of Bergen-Belsen — where “I saw so much horror around me, so many corpses”— she believed “nothing could happen to me or to my loved ones.” That was then. “Today I am a different person — cowardly, withdrawn, pessimistic, and aging,” she wrote. “I don’t believe in anything, and least of all mankind.”

It’s as if an anomie had come over Chava, growing with the years. Was it post-Holocaust syndrome, not unlike the post-polio syndrome that appears decades after a person has contracted polio? Or was it a toxic mix of her past, her husband’s pattern of adulterous behaviour, and their marital troubles? Was it simply the life that was saved experiencing the vicissitudes of life itself?

There is a surprise ending, or perhaps more accurately a surprise that dares not speak its name in the actual pages of the book. Readers of these letters might linger on the familiarity of the name on the cover: Morgentaler. Those of a certain age, and perhaps others, may find it poignant that Chava’s wandering husband, the father of the editor of this book, was Henry Morgentaler, Canada’s abortion rights crusader. An intriguing synchronicity, you might say, for these letters give a powerful, distinct meaning to the term “pro-life.”

*The printed version of this review incorrectly described Chava Rosenfarb as a translator. The magazine regrets the error.