Chava Rosenfarb's purpose, she wrote,
was “to discover the essence of humanity…
and see it reflected in the soul of the ghetto Jew
who had been shred of artifice and pretense
necessary to leading a normal life.”

Jews moving into the Lodz ghetto, 1940. Photo by Mendel Grossman or Henryk Ross. YIVO https://yivoencyclopedia.org/search.aspx?query=lodz+ghetto
Overview: My Response to Book II
Book II manages to convey experiences of the Jews, individually and as members of groups, in all their diversity as their normal lives are stripped away. The ghetto experience is portrayed from several imagined vantage points: Bundist, Communist, Socialist, Zionist, Jewish police, the pious, the unbelievers. They are all here, inside the barbed wire.
Outside, the Germans, rarely individualized, are a faceless force, often brutal, a kind of fate – but present only for the time being, since everyone inside speaks of “when the war is over, I will. . . .” Believing the ghetto to be a temporary, very unpleasant happening, they still anticipate that they will most likely survive. The reality of the irregular “selections,” the forced labor, the “massacres,” the random shooting into the ghetto and killing , the ever over-crowding with the transports is there but as part of a dark background. A building pressure.
For the most part Rosenfarb keeps the attention on her individual characters and the events in the ghetto that constantly impinge on and shape their relationships. Reading continues: Yiddish writers, such as Sholom Aleichem, Asch and Czarska, and even the German Schiller. The excerpts on p. 80 are very ironic and also suggest that as the ghetto is a temporary but horrific intrusion into their lives, so the Third Reich is a temporary but horrific intrusion historically into German culture, its literature, music and even its language.
And writing continues, in the ghetto newspaper and in the children’s diaries (p. 204), and in diaries and letters. My notes below concern a few topics for possible discussion in our group meeting on February 19.
What Does Fiction Do Here?
We should talk about how and where we see the writer's purpose-- being expressed, or not:“to discover the essence of humanity and see it reflected in the soul of the ghetto Jew who had been shred of artifice and pretense necessary to leading a normal life.” And we could ask ourselves why Rosenfarb chose fiction as her vehicle. Why not diaries or memoirs which were the more ordinary genres for recording ghetto/holocaust experience? Why not poetry?
What does fiction let her do here? How does it help serve her expressed purpose of discovering “the essence of humanity”?
In a letter late in 1941, the doctor Michal Levine writes of his I-core (IKAR), his essence, and wonders about it to Mira, his lover in Paris to whom he writes but never sends his letters. Why? Who or what is Mira?
While thinking about the use of fiction, we could also focus on points of view expressed in the narration. Rosenfarb employs the usual third-person omniscient point of view but interweaves various first person narration as well (Michal’s letters to Mira and David’s diary). What is gained in those first person narrations that couldn’t have been expressed through the omniscient point of view.
The Artist's Responsibility . . . and Culpability
Consider the remarks of Levine's tubercular patient Winter, a fabulously talented artist who survives by painting portraits of the Nazi occupiers. On p.265, Winter philosophizes about the obligation of artists to document--to “immortalize”--the events through which the Jews of Lodz are forced to live. He also notes the challenges and pitfalls of such an obligation. What are those challenges and pitfalls? This is a recurring theme, as in the characters’ earlier musings, on p.128, about the difficulties of recording life in the ghetto. And in later reflections Rachel and Bunim struggle again and again with the role of the writer.
Metafiction: Making the Historical Intensely Real
Many of these characters are fictional, but a few are based on real people such as the Nazi-appointed Jewish administrator of the ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, and the tormented writer Bunim Berkovitch (based on the real ghetto poet Simkha-Bunim Shayevitsch). And Rosenfarb herself, mentored by Simkha Bunim Shayevitsch as she began writing poetry in the ghetto, is represented by the character Rachel Eibushitz.
Bunim is an important figure in the novel. The actual Bunim was the figure in the ghetto who introduced 17 year old Rosenfarb to the writers’ group. In the novel, his vacillations between the force of hunger on his body (he speaks of the animal, the beast inside him, whose insistent needs define him) and his spiritual needs which are expressed in various ways. These spiritual expressions include reading “religious verses” (p. 66), experiencing the cherry tree in the courtyard (where he and his family occupy a former latrine), appreciating moments of beauty, and writing. He, probably like so many others, shifted within moments and hours from peacefulness to dread.
Dara Horn, in her recent book of essays, People Love Dead Jews; Reports from a Haunted Present, celebrates Rosenfarb's achievement in writing honestly about the horrors of Jewish history. As readers of the first two books, we know that we are not in store for one among the deluge of Holocaust stories with an "uplifting" Hollywood ending. Horn points to the trajectory of the character Berkovitch/Shayevitch as a potent example both of Rosenfarb's depiction of the ambivalent load carried by artists in the ghetto and of Rosenfarb's own artistry. It is worth reproducing a screenshot of what Horn has to say about this:

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