New book reunites letters of Holocaust survivors that show how ‘unsettling’ it is to be stateless

Goldie Morgentaler was going through her late mother Chava Rosenfarb’s belongings in 2011 when she found a package of letters in Polish. When Morgentaler opened them, she was surprised to see that they weren’t addressed to her mother. Rosenfarb had penned them to her friend and fellow Holocaust survivor, Zenia Larsson.

Rosenfarb and Larsson, who were both from Lodz and who both launched literary careers—the former in Canada and the latter in Sweden—corresponded across continents from December 1945 until December 1971. At some point in the early 1970s, Larsson sent back all of Rosenfarb’s letters, without explanation.

“It caused hurt and was painful,” Morgentaler, professor emerita of English literature at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, told JNS.

“It almost broke up the friends