Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  First to greet her there was always her favorite creation, Samuel Zuckerman. Born of Chava’s memories of the rich men of Lodz, Samuel was a “salon Zionist” and heir to a fortune, a Polish patriot who dreamed of Israel for other, poorer people; he couldn’t bear to think of leaving Lodz. His passion was writing—a history of the Jews of Lodz, 250,000 of them, living in a city then known as the Manchester of Poland for its forest of smokestacks.

  But Samuel never got to tell the story. The war always came, and the barbed wire of the ghetto always crept up around him, and Samuel always betrayed Chava. Every day Chava wrote, he betrayed her. He joined the Judenrat, the Nazi-controlled Jewish government of the ghetto. He gave in so easily that Chava—sitting in a pool of dim light before dawn, speaking aloud as if Samuel were before her—wondered if she’d ever really known him, if her creation was really her own. That raised an interesting question, one that made Chava’s pencil pause on an alef or a beyz or a giml. If she, the creator, had no power over her creation, what was the good of being an author?

  The novel she was writing, Der boym fun lebn (The Tree of Life) would chronicle the five and a half years leading up to the ghetto’s final “liquidation” in 1944; other than that unavoidable end, Chava had no clear plans for what would happen to any of her characters. She knew she could not save them, from themselves any more than from the Germans. One day, though, Samuel abandoned the Judenrat and its privileges, and joined his fellows’ suffering. He rescued himself. For that Chava loved him.

  After Samuel came Adam Rosenberg. A pig to Samuel’s peacock, he was even richer than Samuel, his mouth “filled with a treasure of gold teeth.” But he was hollow, an obese man stuffed with nothing. “Puffing and panting,” wrote Chava of Adam at a ball, “he pressed his immense belly to the frame of his skeletal wife, [as] her protruding shoulder blades moved in and out, up and down, like the parts of a machine.” Adam loved machines more than people. And he hated his fellow Jews, their flesh his flesh, nearly as much as he did the Nazis. But Chava spoke with him as she did with Samuel, and she listened to him as attentively as she listened to Rachel Eibushitz, a tall, handsome teenage girl with wide, gray-green eyes, the same color as Chava’s. It was Rachel who allowed Chava to write about all the others. Like Chava, Rachel realized early on that she was different; while others simply suffered in the ghetto, she watched. She was fascinated by their suffering and by her own, as alert as Adam to all the symptoms of humanity, but entranced, not revolted.

  At first Rachel wrote poems about the people around her. When poetry seemed too delicate, her lines too easily broken, like bones grown brittle, she wrote stories. And when those became ashes, she wrote only in her mind, words without form. After it was all over—the ghetto, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen—in a tiny room in a small, warm apartment during the cold mornings of Montreal, Rachel—Chava—wrote The Tree of Life.

  WHEN THE SUN ROSE it would be time for Chava to wake her children, Goldie, born right after Chava had arrived in Montreal in 1950, and a younger son named Bamie. Chava would send Goldie off to school, then set Bamie on the floor of her study with a pile of toys and continue writing while he played. Bamie was a builder. As Chava worked, miniature towers and fortresses rose from the floor around her. The two silently worked through the morning, writing and building. At noon Chava dressed and took Bamie to the park, returning from Lodz to Montreal until the following morning. But once Bamie was old enough to follow Goldie to the local Jewish day school, Chava could continue writing throughout the afternoon. She’d finish each day’s work after her children were in bed and her husband, Henry, who had sealed the war away from his present—Henekh in Lodz, in Montreal he was Henry—had fallen into resolutely untroubled sleep.

  From the early 1950s to the early sixties, then through several years of revision before her novel’s publication in 1972, Samuel and Adam and Rachel and the dozens of others from the ghetto whom she brought back to life—for a time, at least—were her most constant companions. “I lived with them. When they died, I wept. I wept many times. When I wept, I did not write. I did not believe I should write in that mood. I was describing, reporting. My work demanded that I be more objective than tears.”

  Chava was seventy-four years old. She colored her hair red; she wore pearls to greet me. In the warm afternoon light of her living room, her high cheekbones and a mask of rouge almost lent her the appearance of youth. Her gray-green eyes, outlined sharply in black, were eager. The face around them was forbidding. She spoke in a deep, slow, accented English, punctuated by a laugh that sometimes drew you in, sometimes slammed shut in your face like a gate pulled closed with a clang. When that happened she’d toss her head to the side and the light would glint off the perfect white of her eyes and she’d lean back, holding her grin for too long. She had been forgotten; she wanted to be remembered; but she was wary of the price of resurrection.

  THE JUDGES WHO IN 1979 awarded Chava the Itsik Manger Prize, Yiddish literature’s highest award, spoke of her as a savior: “During the years when the Jews of Eastern Europe rose from the ashes to a new life, the appearance of the young Chava Rosenfarb was . . . a miracle of continuity and creativity in the Yiddish language. It awoke in us the hope that she brought with her the promise that the storm-swept tree of Yiddish literature would flourish again.”

  It didn’t. I learned of Chava’s writing when, after college, I took a job at the National Yiddish Book Center, in Amherst, Massachusetts, an organization created as a repository for the thousands of Yiddish books discarded from urban libraries or packed up by the children and grandchildren of Chava’s generation, most never to be read again. The Yiddish Book Center gathered the books and redistributed them to the university collections that would have them and built museum exhibits designed to open the books to people who could no longer read them. The Book Center sold books, too, Yiddish literature in translation and new titles inspired by the wonders of a lost language. The best sellers were cookbooks and compilations of folksy curses and bubbe-mayses, grandmotherly wisdom, with titles like From Shmear to Eternity and Just Say Nu. The Book Center also carried a stack of Chava’s Tree of Life, translated, no less, the work of the last living great Yiddish novelist. When I was there they never sold a copy.

  The Tree of Life, three volumes in its Yiddish edition, had in English become one massive, 1,075-page, poorly printed tome, shortened by a crude translation. In 2004, the University of Wisconsin Press began re-publishing The Tree of Life in three volumes, the translation adapted by Chava’s daughter, Goldie Morgentaler, a Yiddish scholar.* But whether in its original Yiddish or its clumsier English, The Tree of Life stands as perhaps the most completely detailed literary depiction of life in the Nazi ghettos. It is, in the words of one Yiddish critic, “unbearably sad.” The novel follows the lives of ten main characters and a dozen minor ones through the year before the war, then into the ghetto until its liquidation in 1944. The only nonfictional character in the book is Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, a German-anointed king of the ghetto, the head of the Judenrat established by the Nazis to keep order in the Lodz ghetto and transform it into one of their most profitable slave labor factories. Chava introduces Rumkowski before the war as, in his own eyes, a misunderstood leader, “carried away by his own rhetoric . . . as if he saw himself addressing a crowd of thousands.” He believes he can restore the Jews of Lodz to an Eastern European version of biblical greatness, if only the richest among them will supply the funds for the orphanage under his control. He is, writes Chava, “a sentimental Polish patriot who loved children”—literally and brutally. But Rumkowski the molester is also Rumkowski the prophet, “his magnificent head held high, the silver hair disheveled, the bushy eyebrows pointed, he looked like a high priest blessing his people with the bloodred dust of flowers”—roses that he has crushed in his hands as he loses himself in his vision. He sees—he is the only character to grasp the full scope of Hitler’s power and ambition—but he does not compreh
end. In Chava’s rendering he is a man who both craves power (and its privileges, its immunities) and sincerely believes that by offering sacrifices to the Nazis—one thousand heads a day and more during the deportations—he will save a remnant. Unlike Chava he believes he can rescue them.

  I asked Chava if she loved Rumkowski as she did Samuel and even Rachel and Adam. She sneered. “Of course not!” She paused and took a sip of coffee. “But I know him.”

  As much as The Tree of Life plumbs the depths of collaboration, it explores the ethics of art in the presence of atrocity. Even artists—or, maybe, especially artists—face charges of betrayal. A painter is disdained by his colleagues because he makes portraits for the Nazis; he responds that his work hardly differs from that of a doctor: “Let’s not kid ourselves, by bringing a Jew back to health, you only fix a machine that works for the Germans.” A teacher finds herself denounced by her students for participating in musical events sponsored by Rumkowski. “Culture in the Ghetto is a sin!” they shout. Rachel, still in school, finds every literature class turned into an argument over literature’s right to exist at all. The lesson of the ghetto, insists one classmate, is that art is nothing more than a refuge for those who crave predictability, an alternative to real resistance. “Art is rebellion,” Rachel counters. “A desire to correct life.”

  But Rachel has her own doubts. “Take the form of the novel,” she says:

  the fact that it must have a beginning, a middle and an end. Life is not like that. Beginning and end are birth and death. But in between, life flows sometimes in waves, sometimes in circles, sometimes it moves forward, sometimes it’s still. . . . There’s a lot of non-narrative in life, while in the novel . . . the story must keep going. The new novel, of the new times, will have to free itself of that harness. Take life in the ghetto, how ought one to write a novel about the ghetto? Perhaps in such a manner that the reader will throw it away half-read. Or perhaps so that the reader should not tire of reading it over and over again.

  Ghettoniks often spoke of a “new world” that would follow the war; they couldn’t imagine that the old one would survive. Zionists planned for Palestine, socialists for revolution, writers for a new literature. I asked Chava if The Tree of Life had fulfilled Rachel’s hopes. No, she said, those were a luxury of the ghetto. Modernism went up the chimney; postmodernism is its ashes. She has nothing to offer now but her witness, the martyrdom of Rachel and her “new literature.”

  THE HOLOCAUST DID NOT make a writer out of me,” said Chava. “It had nothing to do with me being a writer.” Chava’s father had hoped that his first child would become a poet since the day she was born in 1923. “He was a dreamer, a romantic.” Raised in a shtetl, he embraced the Bund, a Jewish socialist movement, and moved to Lodz. “He discarded his religious attire and became a modern man. He started to read literature, and he wanted to write. But he thought he was too uneducated. He wanted me to fulfill his dreams.”

  Instead of dolls Chava’s father gave her notebooks. When she was eight years old, he took one filled with her poems and asked a poet who frequented the café where he’d become a waiter to read it, as anxious as if they were his own words. The poet told him that he couldn’t say whether Chava would be a great writer because she was a child, and all children are poets. But yes, he said, there seemed to be promise. At school Chava excelled, equaled only by the student who shared her bench, a precocious boy named Henekh (later Henry) Morgentaler. When they finished their primary schooling in a dead heat, their teachers decided to give them both prizes. Awarding Chava hers, they accidentally called her Chava Morgentaler. She liked that. The two became a couple, green-eyed Chava and clever Henekh with his dark, arched brows. In The Tree of Life she describes a romance between Rachel and a boyfriend named David, “standing with his arms outstretched to [Rachel] under the awning which protected ‘their’ imported-food store. She took [a] jump, [a] step and found herself in his arms. ‘Hold me tight!’ she exclaimed, warmth spreading all over her. Smothered by his embrace, she panted, ‘Not so tight! I can’t breathe!’”

  By then—1940—the German occupiers had squeezed the city’s quarter million Jews into a small slum, the new Lodz ghetto. Henekh Morgentaler’s father had been among the first taken by the Nazis; his sister escaped to Warsaw. His family gone, he spent most of his time with the Rosenfarbs. But even as the ghetto pressed Chava and Henry together, it began pulling them apart. Henry despaired. Chava flourished even as her once full body grew bony and spare.

  “Usually when you’re hungry you don’t talk about art,” she remembered, echoing a line from her book, “‘Inter arma silent musae,’ as they say. ‘In war the muses are silent.’ And it’s true. But not for the Jews. The Jews could discuss poetry and art on an empty stomach.” And politics. Chava followed her father’s lead into the socialist Bund. She compiled a secret library for her comrades, going from door to door asking for books she would then loan out from her parents’ apartment. She collected more than three hundred volumes. Poets and historians and novelists and musicians were all reduced to the same simple genre, survival. They’d gather in small rooms and sit close for heat and chant their work like lamentations.

  “What a weird long poem it was!” observes a character in The Tree of Life, crowded into a room in which a poet named Itka, her milk white face and blank, staring sky blue eyes lit by the flames of an open oven, speaks her poems:

  It seemed to wind around the roofs of houses, to sing around the church with its red turrets and the dead clock, to describe the sick crows, each crow a house in the ghetto. The spread wings of the crows were the roofs over empty nests. The poem sang about a bed used for firewood. The words of the poem filled the bed with the bodies of a man and a woman. Then it spoke of the fire which devoured the bed; the voice seemed to jump along with the bed into the blaze, roaring from inside with a wild awesome roar and abandoning itself to a hysterical frenzy, unbearable to listen to.

  So poetry became to Chava. “One day I suddenly felt cramped. I had to break out of the confines of the poetic form.” She began to explore the psychology of those around her, wondering why one thrived as another wasted away; what it felt like to steal food from a friend; to take extra rations from a parent you knew couldn’t afford the loss; to fall in love with someone who was going to die; to desire another’s emaciated form; to imagine a future. She studied the Germans, too, and the Jews who helped them, her contempt giving way to fascination and then a strange and awful empathy that terrified her and drew her closer. What would it feel like to live on the other side? “Before my eyes there rose another fantastic sight,” writes a doctor in The Tree of Life. “I saw a town outside the ghetto: the churches, the streets, the tramways, and nearby, the barbed-wire fence, a snake striped with poles running past the very front of the house. I leaned out and saw a green uniform, the muzzle of a gun, a helmet. It occurred to me that the German soldier must be unbearably hot, dying for a drink of cold water.” Chava started to plan a novel about Hitler, told from his point of view, the führer as filtered through a red-headed Jewish girl in the ghetto.

  To the Bund “Jewish” was a nationality, not a religion, but Chava wanted that, too. The Germans had imposed on a Czech rabbi the job of creating a museum of the Jewish life they were strangling. They gave him the art and books they’d looted and a building to put everything in. Then they left him alone. The rabbi decided to bring the Torah into the ghetto. Before the war the Torah was a book for educated men who knew Hebrew. Now, the rabbi thought, everyone needed it. He would begin with the Psalms, 150 poems that contained all the states of the soul: gratitude and despair, joy and fury, vengefulness and mournfulness and sorrow and endurance and awe. But ordinary people, the men who were workers, not rabbis or rich men, and all the women, couldn’t read them. Hebrew was a holy tongue; they knew only Yiddish, dismissed as a jargon, a poor man’s stew of German and Russian and Polish and some Hebrew. So, the rabbi decided, the Psalms mu
st go into the stew. He began translating them.

  But the rabbi was a refined man, his knowledge of mameloshn, “the mother tongue,” rooted in proper German. He needed a real Yiddish writer to help him. A Yiddish writer? They were all dead or dying. “I could do this for you,” Chava said, her voice wary and her tone that of a businesswoman, speaking the language of starving people. In exchange for her help, the rabbi would give her a few hours a week in his warm office and all the coffee she could drink, supplied by the Germans. Deal. He would also teach her, a girl, Torah. She would accept that, too.

  Soon Chava was going to the rabbi’s office several times a week—not for the coffee, or the warmth, but for the Psalms. First she fell in love with the rhythm of the words as they flowed in a halting trickle of half Yiddish from the rabbi’s tongue, then faster, through her pen and onto the page, remade, reconstituted according to her imagination, a collaboration between the psalmist, the rabbi, and Chava. Their structure entranced her, the way they were shaped and the way she shaped them. She saw them, her channeled poems—Chava’s Psalms—as vessels made not to contain God but to express by their very form what she preferred to call beauty. G-d, said the rabbi. Chava would smile; the pen was in her hand, not his, and she saw beauty, not God. Beauty, not God, sustained her.