News at Eleven: [Chava] Rosenfarb carried her earliest poems

with her from the Lodz Ghetto, where she was trapped with her family, to Auschwitz, where her writings were taken from her. In a process of reconstruction begun in a German work camp, and then completed after the war in Belgium, she rewrote her early lost works.

Like so much of Rosenfarb's writing, this places a poem like Isaac's Dream--a rendering of the hideous period known in the ghetto as the Sperre, in which 6,000 children were taken from their parents and sent to the death camp at Chelmno--in a remarkable, possibly unique context. In the Yiddish original, a note attached to the poem describes it as having been written on a Thursday, the sixth of September, in the midst of the days-long roundup.

from The Canadian Jewish News: A new view of old poems of Lodz and beyond

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