INVITE: Chava Rosenfarb Salon with Kathryn Hellerstein & Goldie Morgentaler
Mark your calendars for March 16th at 5 EST & immerse yourself in an unforgettable Yiddish writer's short story--link at end of post.
I can’t wait to give you a special window into the life and work of Chava Rosenfarb, the great Yiddish writer whose collected short stories were recently re-published in translation. I might be a Rosenfarb super-fan—I wrote about her work twice in the recent past. You can check it out here Why This Is the Year to Celebrate Chava Rosenfarb and here Love and Destruction: Reading Baldwin and Rosenfarb.
Chava Rosenfarb’s stories, translated by her daughter Goldie Morgentaler.
My favorite Rosenfarb story is “Edgia’s Revenge”—a haunting, unforgettable story that might be closer to a novella. For months now, I have been haunted by it. So I am excited and honored to host Goldie Morgentaler and Kathryn Hellerstein for a special conversation about Chava Rosenfarb and “Edgia’s Revenge”—and we’ll get a fascinating update about how Rosenfarb is being celebrated in her native Poland today, and then we’ll open it up to your questions.
A link to a PDF of the story is at the end of this post. My hope is that with a month’s notice, you’ll have time to immerse yourself!
About Goldie Morgentaler
Goldie Morgentaler.
Goldie Morgentaler is Professor Emerita at the University of Lethbridge. Her translations of Chava Rosenfarb’s work into English have won several awards including, most recently, the 2019 Canadian Jewish Literary Award and the 2020 Segal Prize for the collection of Rosenfarb’s essays called Confessions of a Yiddish Writer. In October 2024, Morgentaler won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for her translation of the stories in In the Land of the Postscript, including “Edgia’s Revenge”.
About Kathryn Hellerstein
Kathryn Hellerstein is Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Jewish Studies Program. A poet, translator, and scholar of Yiddish poetry, Hellerstein’s books include a translation and study of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern's poems, In New York: A Selection, (Jewish Publication Society, 1982), Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky (Wayne State University Press, 1999), and Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, of which she is co-editor (W. W. Norton, 2001). Her monograph, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987, won many awards including the National Jewish Book Award. She also contributed to American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (University of California Press, 1986).
Works in progress include Women Yiddish Poets: An Anthology; China through Yiddish Eyes: Cultural Translation in the Twentieth Century; and Jewish Women Poets as Translators: Changing Liturgy and Canon. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and many other institutions.
Here is a link to the PDF of the story in English translation, graciously provided by Goldie Morgentaler. If you prefer, you can certainly buy the collection and read it that way—you will not be sorry to have Rosenfarb stories in your home!