Vale Jacob G. Rosenberg

It is with great sorrow that we let you know that Jacob G. Rosenberg died in Melbourne after a heart attack on 30 October 2008. He was 86.  His warmth, his dark ironic humour, his unassuming erudition and above all his wisdom will be greatly missed.
      Jacob Rosenberg was born in 1922, in Lodz Poland, the youngest member of a working-class family. After the Germans occupied Poland he was confined, with his parents, his two sisters and their little girls, to the hermetically sealed Lodz Ghetto, from which they were eventually transported to Auschwitz. With the exception of one sister (who committed suicide a few days later) all the members of his family were gassed on the day of their arrival. He remained in Auschwitz for about two months, then spent the rest of the war in other concentration camps. In 1948 he emigrated to Australia with his wife Esther. Their only child, Marcia, was born in Melbourne. Rosenberg’s poetry and prose have been published in both Australia and overseas.
      Rosenberg’s highly acclaimed memoir,  East of Time won both the 2007 National Biography Award and the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and was short-listed for the Australian Gold Medal for Literature, the Queensland Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the SA Arts Award for Innovation in Fiction.
      The equally moving sequel, Sunrise West, was published last year, and won the 2008 SA Arts Award for Non-Fiction and was short-listed  for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the New South Wales Premier’s Community Award.
      We have lost a friend, a great writer and a remarkable man.

Writer Jacob Rosenberg,
dux of the war’s school of hard knocks, dies at 86

Jason Steger (October 31, 2008 The Age)

Jacob Rosenberg. Photo: Simon Schluter

MEMOIRIST, poet, novelist and Holocaust survivor Jacob Rosenberg died yesterday in Cabrini Hospital. He was 86 and had been ill for several weeks.
      Rosenberg was a unique writer who inspired immense love in readers who delighted in the fable-like quality of his writing, its gentle humour and the depth of his humanity.
      He used to liken his writing to a plant growing in the mud of a dungeon, striving to reach the light from a window high up the wall.
      As a 16-year-old in Poland, he lost his entire family in the Holocaust. But did he hate? “I have never hated anyone – it’s the most destructive thing,” he said earlier this year. “Of course at the moment of cause you hate, when you’re being beaten up and are helpless. But you have to leave it behind.”
      Rosenberg was born in Lodz in 1922. His first language was Polish, his first poetry was written in Yiddish. But the books for which he became best known, East of Time and Sunrise West, his memoirs of growing up in Poland in the 1930s and his experiences in the camps, were written in English, his third language.
      He also published six volumes of poetry, a book of stories, Lives and Embers, and had finished a novel, The Hollow Tree, that is due out next year.
      Melbourne poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe said Rosenberg was a noble soul, “one who swallowed nobody’s easy answers or solutions. His writing salts dignity with wit and unobtrusive learning. Moreover, he was the most dearest of friends.”
      Rosenberg published East of Time in 2005. It won the National Biography Award and the NSW Premier’s literary prize for non-fiction.
      Its sequel, Sunrise West, published last year, won the Adelaide Festival’s non-fiction prize. He called the title a paradox. “I am a paradox,” he said. “I cannot escape the past and I cannot deny the present. I am cursed with a long memory; sometimes I wish I could forget those things.”
      Rosenberg would refer to World War II as where he finished his primary schooling; the ghetto as his high school; Auschwitz, his university; and Mauthausen as where he earned a postgraduate degree in remembrance.
      After liberation in 1945 he lived in a displaced persons’ camp in Italy, where he met Esther Laufer, who became his wife. They migrated to Melbourne in 1948 and had one daughter, Marcia.