The Tree of Life, Book Three

June 12, 2006
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.