Dr. Goldie Morgentaler (English) has received a $21,230 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant to further her work on the life and writings of Dr. Chava Rosenfarb, a world-renowned Yiddish author, poet and Holocaust survivor who happens also to be Morgentaler’s mother.
Rosenfarb’s work has won many international awards, as well as an honorary degree from the U of L, but it is little known outside the sphere of Yiddish literature.
Morgentaler is looking to bring a greater awareness of her mother’s work to English-speaking audiences, as well as to chronicle the dramatic events of her mother’s early years in Poland, her incarceration in the Lodz ghetto and in the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz, Sasel and Bergen Belsen.
As well, Morgentaler will be gathering information on the people in Rosenfarb’s life following the war, her marriage to Henry Morgentaler, and her relationships with members of the Montreal writing community in the 1960s and 1970s.
She will further chronicle the correspondence relating to her mother’s life-long friendship with a British soldier (now deceased) who liberated Rosenfarb from the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Rosenfarb passed away in 2011 at age 88.