The Tree of Life, Book Three: The Cattle Cars Are Waiting, 1942-1944

by Chava Rosenfarb

Overview

The third volume in this powerful trilogy, The Cattle Cars Are Waiting follows the tragic fate of the inhabitants of the ghetto. Chava Rosenfarb, herself a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, draws on her own history to create characters who struggle daily to retain a sense of humanity and dignity despite the physical and psychological effects of ghetto life. Although the novel depicts horrendous experiences, the light of faith in the human spirit shines through every page.

Winner, Georges Bugnet Award for Best Novel, Writers Guild of Alberta

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299221249
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	08/04/2006
Series:	Library of World Fiction , #3
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	388
Sales rank:	465,133
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Chava Rosenfarb is a Holocaust survivor who has published poetry, prose, and drama in both English and Yiddish. Her English titles include Survivors: Seven Short Stories; Bociany; and Of Lodz and Love. She now resides in Alberta, Canada.

Editorial Reviews

"A stunning example of how artistic and literary forms can accomplish things not possible through conventional forms of historical memory."--Outlook Magazine, Vancouver

"Defiant, she [Rosenfarb] insists on finding humanity in privation, and keeping alive a creative spark, no matter how many tears are shed on it. . . . Meticulous in her rendering of daily life."--Montreal Gazette

"Rosenfarb has the artistic power to bring out, in magnificent language, the moral strength of the Jews, of the human being in general. . . . In this work about the tragic period of the ghetto, everything vibrates with hot, sharp realism. The desire for life passes through the entire work like a red thread."--Jacob Lev, Undzer Shtimme

From the Publisher

Originally published in Yiddish in 1972, this final volume of a trilogy depicting daily life in the Lodz ghetto recreates the frantic desperation as thousands of Jews were forced to board cattle trains bound for Auschwitz. Revisiting characters from the first two books, Rosenfarb-herself a Lodz ghetto and concentration-camp survivor-gets very close to the horror. Adam Rosenberg, who once owned the biggest factory in town, hides under an assumed name and shovels excrement for a living until he is found out and becomes an informant, identifying other Jewish industrialists and sniffing out their hidden valuables. The poet Bunim Berkovitch discovers that his wife and children, including a newborn, have been arrested while he was out fetching their potato ration. And the hated leader of the Jewish Council who composes the dreaded transport lists can't save himself or his loved ones when the ghetto is "liquidated." In this third volume, the prose is denser, the translation more ungainly, and the plotting more chaotic than in the previous two volumes (also available from Wisconsin), but it carries potent witness. (Sept. 20) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly