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Dr. Goldie Morgentaler, Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge, will discuss the novels of Yiddish-Canadian novelist and Holocaust survivor Chava Rosenfarb, who lived in Lethbridge for several years and was awarded an honourary degree by the U of L in 2006. She passed away on January 30, 2011.
Despite living most of her life in Canada, all of Rosenfarb's novels are set in Poland, where she was born and from which she was forcibly deported when she was sent to Bergen-Belsen, in what is now northern Germany. Morgentaler will focus on Rosenfarb's attempts to recreate the lost world of Jewish Poland in her novels, while living in what she called "the Canadian reality" that included the slowly disappearing world of her once-vibrant Yiddish language.
"My university was the Second World War. My classroom was the Lodz Ghetto, my teachers were my fellow inmates there — and especially the poets, painters and intellectuals of the doomed writer's community, incarcerated between the barbed-wire walls of the ghetto, who accepted me at a very early age as a member. So I am a graduate of the Holocaust, of the death camps of Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. I have matriculated in one of the greatest tragedies known to man. I have a degree from no other university. At least, not until today."
from Chava Rosenfarb's convocation speech
Galt Museum link: http://galtmuseum.com/programs-cafe-galt.htm
Contact:
Bev Garnett | bev.garnett@uleth.ca | (403) 380-1894 | galtmuseum.com/programs-cafe-galt.htm