Letters from the Afterlife

Extraordinarily little has been written about how women who survived the Holocaust dealt with life after the war, with the trauma of their immediate pasts, and with the debilitating sense of alienation they felt in a changed world. Letters from the Afterlife chronicles the experiences of two female Holocaust survivors as they adjusted to life in their adopted countries of Canada and Sweden, where they knew neither the language nor the culture.

Childhood friends in Poland, Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson lived through the Lodz Ghetto and the death camps together, parting soon after their liberation from Bergen-Belsen. For the next fifty years, they continued their friendship through letters written in Polish, their only shared language. Despite their continuing traumas and insecurities, Rosenfarb and Larsson went on to become distinguished novelists in their respective languages, Yiddish and Swedish. In 1972, Larsson published her own side of the correspondence translated into Swedish, which caused a temporary rift in their enduring friendship.

Letters from the Afterlife, with evocative translations by Krzysztof Majer and Sylvia Söderlind, makes these letters available to an English readership. Rosenfarb’s daughter, Goldie Morgentaler, provides an introduction that establishes the importance of the correspondence from both cultural and historical perspectives and an epilogue that continues Rosenfarb and Larsson’s story after their written exchange was abruptly but temporarily suspended in 1971.

“Letters from the Afterlife offers a deeply intimate view of the lives of two Jewish women writers working in two very different national, cultural, and literary contexts. This book highlights the disruptions that transformed the lives and literary careers of post-Holocaust Jewish writers and documents Rosenfarb and Larrson’s post-war decades of trauma, recovery, and artistic creativity.” Jan Schwarz, Lund University