Goldie Morgentaler Publishes "Letters from the Afterlife", Exploring a Post-Holocaust Literary Friendship
Last June, Professor Emerita Goldie Morgentaler released Letters from the Afterlife, a powerful new publication from McGill-Queen’s University Press. The book chronicles the decades-long correspondence between two female Holocaust survivors—Chava Rosenfarb, a celebrated Yiddish author, and Zenia Larsson, a Swedish sculptor and novelist—who sustained their friendship through letters written in Polish, their only shared language.
Extraordinarily little has been written about how women who survived the Holocaust navigated life after the war, coped with trauma, and faced the alienation of rebuilding in unfamiliar countries. Letters from the Afterlife offers rare insight into these experiences, tracing Rosenfarb and Larsson’s emotional and intellectual journeys as they adjusted to life in Canada and Sweden, respectively—countries whose languages and cultures were initially foreign to them.
Childhood friends from Poland, the two women endured the Lodz Ghetto and Nazi death camps together, parting ways after liberation from Bergen-Belsen. Despite the physical distance, their friendship endured for fifty years through written correspondence. Both went on to become distinguished literary figures in their adopted languages, Yiddish and Swedish. In 1972, Larsson published her side of the correspondence in Swedish, a move that temporarily disrupted their bond.
This English edition, with evocative translations by Krzysztof Majer and Sylvia Söderlind, brings their letters to a wider audience. Morgentaler’s introduction situates the correspondence within its historical and cultural context, while her epilogue continues the story beyond the letters, reflecting on the complexities of memory, trauma, and reconciliation.