'Smoke Rising Day and Night': Exploring Chava Rosenfarb’s Implicit Mysticism in "Edgia’s Revenge"

The author notes that the central preoccupation of Chava Rosenfarb’s 1994 short story “Edgia’s Revenge” is an escape from a perceived outward Jewishness. He explains that Rosenfarb’s protagonist who is never afforded this vital flight is one of the story’s key dramas that plays out in the form of a power dynamic between two Holocaust survivors, Rella and Edgia, who reunite in Montreal. On the surface, the author maintains that this failure can be attributed to Rella’s anxiety and guilt about her former role as a kapo at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The author argues, however, that Rella’s failure to rid herself of her Jewishness and her past is exemplified through the use of mountains (including Mount Royal) as sacred zones in “Edgia’s Revenge.” Chava Rosenfarb (1923-2011), a Holocaust survivor and Jewish-Canadian author of Yiddish poetry and novels, and a major contributor to post-Second World War Yiddish literature, immigrated to Montreal in 1950, where she lived for fifty years.

Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes

Vol. 32

37-52

Fall 2021

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