Bociany (The Library of Modern Jewish Literature) [Hardcover]

Chawa Rosenfarb (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In these two volumes, Rosenfarb--a survivor of the Lodz ghetto and winner of the Manger Prize for Yiddish literature--lovingly re-creates a forgotten world, the Polish shtetl or village of pre-World War II, with its Jewish and Gentile inhabitants, its poverty and longings, its travails and spirituality. In Bociany, which means "stork" in Polish (storks built their nests on the rooftops of the village), Hindele Polin, the scribe's wife, is a larger-than-life good soul trying to keep her family on the side of the living. She cannot, however, conquer consumption, to which her husband and eldest son succumb. Surprisingly, the book is not a sad one, discussing God, suffering, and how to be a mentsh (an honorable person) with grace and charm. Hindele; her son, Yacov; the chalk vender Yossele Abedale; and his daughter, Binele, are all shown to have a place in the village. But even in this isolated agrarian and mercantile setting, Zionism, socialism, Polish nationalism, and secularism are being made known. In Of Lodz and Love, the shtetl mentality gives way to that of the big city. Yacov and Binele make their way separately to the industrial city of Lodz during the first years of Polish independence. There, the would-be lovers learn firsthand about the upheavals that would herald a new Jewish national and political awakening. These two volumes present a superb panorama of Jewish transition from village life to the new challenges of the 20th century. Highly recommended.
-Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, MD
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Bociany ($29.95; Oct.; 432 pp.; 0-8156-0576-5) Polish-born novelist Rosenfarb's impressive urban epic was first published in the 1970s in three separate volumes later collectively entitled The Tree of Life. That trilogy, which won a major Yiddish literary prize, is now available in two volumes (see below) in the author's own vibrant English translation. The first half tells a vivid story of life in a shtetl in the title village during the years immediately preceding WWII: specifically, its a dramatization of the ethnic and religious traditions that form the characters of its winning protagonists, gentle Yacov and his beloved Binele. But the trilogy's great character is Binele's resourceful mother Hindele Polin, a crafty widow whose hard-earned wisdom and plucky survival skills make her a worthy successor to the villager heroines of Sholom Aleichem's fiction. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr (Sd) (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0815605765
• ISBN-13: 978-0815605768
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #470,058 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A "New" World: The Shtetl Revisited, May 29, 2000

By 

Robbi Nester (California, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bociany (The Library of Modern Jewish Literature) (Hardcover)

Discovering a "new" author is rather like discovering a new world. When this author has actually been around for a while, has already written a body of work, but has for some reason managed to escape our attention, this thrill can be even more intense, for a wealth of this writer's other books already exist, just waiting for us to find them. I had this experience recently in reading Chava Rosenfarb's two volume set, composed of Bociany and Of Lodz and Love, which the author herself recently translated from the Yiddish originals.

To say the least, finding a new Yiddish novel is a surprising event since most of us tend to think of such works as a legacy of past generations. It has now been half a century and more since the end of WWII. Most of the masters of this genre writing about the past glories of Eastern European Jewish life have died. But Rosenfarb, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz who lives in Toronto, has apparently been winning acclaim for her works in Yiddish for some time although they have not found their way into the American mainstream book world --until now.

Reading Yiddish works by such masters as Isaac Bashevas Singer, Sholem Alechem, and I.L. Peretz has familiarized Americans with the vanished reality of life in the "shtetl," Eastern European Jewish ghettos that disappeared following the upheavals of WWII.

These novels resemble earlier Yiddish works in that they portray the panorama of life in one such small Polish village, Bociany, which was named for the storks that returned each year to nest in the village. Yet they differ from these earlier works in a number of important ways. Perhaps most significantly, Rosenfarb's novels have a wider scope than those earlier ones by including both the Jewish and Gentile population of Bociany and Lodz in the time just before the Russian Revolution to the end of WWII.

For the first time in a work of this kind, one gets a feeling for the delicate ecology of Jewish/Gentile relations at the time. Just as Faulkner gave us a portrait of the American South in which whites rely absolutely upon blacks, are raised by them and with them, and yet harbor a deep-seated fear of their difference, Rosenfarb shows us a world in which Polish peasants rely upon the Jews in their midst. Yet as in the South, this interdependence ultimately breeds contempt and violence rather than trust.

Rosenfarb personifies this confused ambivalence of the Polish peasantry towards the Jews in her character Vaslav Spokojny, the fire chief, whose surname, ironically, means "calm" or "peaceful." Though he excels at quelling physical flames, Spokojny's is a choleric, unstable temperament. He veers between an obsessive attachment to the Jews of the village and a dangerous drunken rage.

Stylistically, past Yiddish works have adhered to a linear narrative line and omniscient narration, as though it were only possible to tell these stories by maintaining a certain distance from these characters, forever preserved in their vanished world as within a glass dome. However, Rosenfarb's novels dare to explore the doubts and misgivings these characters feel, the untidy complexities of their world. They achieve this by weaving together four narrative strands, telling the story of two families, two generations of Jewish Bociany. In this way, the work's technique harks back to the great 19th century Russian tradition of Tolstoi, but with a difference. This is history from a Jewish --and not incidentally, female-- perspective.

We are very fortunate to have received these novels from the hand of the author herself while she is still alive. Perhaps, with their success, readers like us can induce American publishers to publish Rosenfarb's other, earlier works in English translation. Who knows what other writers, what lost worlds remain to be discovered?

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A literary gem, August 4, 2000

By 

Nachman Libeskind (New Rochelle, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bociany (The Library of Modern Jewish Literature) (Hardcover)

It is amazing that as someone who has lived the story ( I am a 91 yeer old survivor from Lodz , Poland) I could be so fascinated with all the characters. I can truly attest to the fact that this author has captured the authentic spirit of the time, the tensions, tragedies and joys of the people. It is a stunning page turner, which I read 4-hours at a stretch. In my opinion Chava Rosenfarb is in the pantheon of Yiddish authors, right alongside Sholem Asch and Isaac Bashevis Singer. I nominate her for a Nobel Prize in Literature!