Between Sky and Sea

by Herz Bergner

  Text Classics

  HERZ BERGNER is regarded as one of Australia’s greatest Yiddish writers. He was born in Radimno in Poland in 1907, the younger brother of writer Melech Ravitch. During World War I, Bergner moved with his family to Vienna, and then returned to Poland when the war ended. His first book—a collection of short stories, Houses and Streets—was published in Warsaw in 1935.

  In 1938, as tensions increased in the lead-up to World War II, Bergner left Poland and settled in Australia with his wife, Miriam. They lived in Melbourne and had a son, Ephraim. Together with writers Pinchas Goldhar and Abraham Schulman, Bergner began the Melbourne Yiddish literary journal Oyfboy.

  In 1941 he published a second collection of short stories—The New House—which told of the experiences of migrants in a new land and reflected his interest in Jewish integration and the preservation of traditions.

  Bergner’s first novel, Between Sky & Sea, was the first Yiddish novel published in English in Australia. It was translated by Judah Waten, and won the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal in 1948. Bergner won the medal a second time in 1966 for the titular story of his collection, Where the Truth Lies. A second novel, Light and Shadow, was translated into English. It was published in 1960.

  Herz Bergner died in Melbourne in 1970.

  JUDAH WATEN was born in Russia in 1911 and migrated to Australia in 1914. He lived in Perth as a child before moving to Melbourne in 1926, where he became involved with a group of immigrant Jewish writers. Waten wrote novels, short stories and memoirs. Alien Son, his most famous novel, was published in 1952. Judah Waten died in 1985.

  ARNOLD ZABLE is a highly acclaimed novelist. His books include Café Scheherazade, Jewels and Ashes, The Fig Tree, Scraps of Heaven, Sea of Many Returns, Violin Lessons and The Fighter. Zable was born in New Zealand in 1947. He lives in Melbourne.

  ALSO BY HERZ BERGNER

  Houses and Streets

  The New House

  A Town in Poland

  The House of Jacob Isaacs

  Light and Shadow

  Warsaw Stories

  Where the Truth Lies

  Be Human and Other Tales

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Herz Bergner, 1946

  Translation copyright © Judah Waten, 1946

  Introduction copyright © Arnold Zable, 2010

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published 1946 in Australia by Dolphin Publications

  Revised translation first published by The Text Publishing Company, 2010

  This edition published 2016

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Text design by Susan Miller

  Typeset by J&M Typesetters

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication:

  Creator: Bergner, Herz, 1907–1970, author.

  Title: Between sky and sea / Herz Bergner ; translated by Judah Waten; introduced by Arnold Zable

  ISBN: 9781925240450 (pbk.)

  ISBN: 9781921799099 (ebook)

  Series: Text Classics

  Subjects: Jewish refugees—Australia—Fiction.

  Other creators/contributors: Waten, Judah, 1911–1985, translator; Zable, Arnold, writer of introduction.

  Dewey number: 839.133

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  by Arnold Zable

  Between Sky & Sea

  Introduction

  by Arnold Zable

  Between Sky and Sea was first published in 1946. It went on to win the Australian Literature Society’s gold medal for book of the year, but soon lapsed into obscurity. Its republication marks the resurrection of a lost classic of Australian literature, a novel ahead of its time, a work that speaks to the future while it honours the past.

  Written in Melbourne during the final years of the Second World War, Between Sky and Sea depicts the voyage of a group of traumatised Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s terror. The Greek freighter has been at sea for weeks, drifting helplessly in search of a port. The novel presents a microcosm of life in all its facets, from the crippling effects of trauma and the irritations of living in close quarters, to poignant acts of humanity and compassion.

  Herz Bergner arrived in Australia in 1938. He was born in the Polish town of Radimno in 1907. His family settled in Vienna during World War I, and returned to Poland in 1919. During the inter-war years, Warsaw was the hub of Yiddish cultural life in Eastern Europe. Bergner’s older brother, the writer Melekh Ravitch, was the long-serving secretary of the Yiddish Writers’ Association. Almost every Yiddish writer of note spent time in its legendary premises. Bergner’s stories first appeared in Yiddish periodicals in Warsaw in 1928. Houses and Streets, his first collection, was published in 1935. Herz Bergner served his writing apprenticeship when Yiddish literature was at its creative zenith.

  But this was also a time of impoverishment and political turmoil. Hitler had come to power and the storm clouds of war were gathering. Bergner seized the opportunity to emigrate. He settled in Melbourne where there was a small but active community of Jews who maintained Yiddish as their mother tongue. In 1941 he published The New House, a collection of short stories set in Warsaw and Melbourne. The stories reflected Bergner’s recent experiences and those of his immigrant readers. He writes of their journeys and the challenges of adapting to a new life.

  The Holocaust was a demarcation point for Yiddish writers. Between Sky and Sea was one of the earliest fictional accounts of the brutal and inconceivable events of the times. The writing is propelled by a sense of urgency. Bergner wrote the novel in Melbourne as the news was filtering through that a catastrophe was taking place in the Jewish communities of Europe. His people were being enslaved and murdered, or forced into flight. And he was well aware of their plight. In January 1942, Bergner published an essay pleading the case for increased European migration to Australia. Once flourishing Jewish communities, he pointed out, were being wiped from the face of the earth.

  Bergner would have known of the ill-fated voyage of the St Louis, the ocean liner that left Germany in May 1939 with over 900 Jewish asylum seekers on board fleeing from the Third Reich. The ship was turned back from Cuba and not permitted to land in the USA and Canada. The refusal prompted several passengers to attempt suicide and led to a near mutiny. As the St Louis sailed back to Europe, a group of passengers took over the bridge and occupied it until their rebellion was put down. Through intense negotiations and the support of the captain, Gustav Schroeder, the passengers were able to disembark in Antwerp before the ship returned to Germany. Nevertheless, 254 of the passengers perished in the Holocaust.

  The refugees on Bergner’s fictional Greek freighter undertake their voyage several years later, while the war rages. They are trapped between sky and sea, and within the terrors of their recent past. They have lost entire families and witnessed the destruction of their communities. They have wandered through many lands and are tortured with guilt at having been spared the fate of those left behind.

  With each day at sea they edge closer to despair. Their meagre rations of food decrease. Quarrels erupt. Malicious gossip takes hold in the idle hours. Those who succumb to disease are buried at sea. T
he passengers no longer know where they are. They are an unwanted people, and endure racist taunts from some of the crew.

  When typhus breaks out on board, a seaman hisses: ‘Human beings? Important people? You have been thrown out of everywhere and no one will take you in. All doors and gates are closed to you. We can’t put in at any port because of you. Everybody is afraid you’ll get your feet in and never go away.’ The language is apocalyptic. There can be no compromise, no soft landings. The sea is a malevolent force, the sun an inferno, the boat a mobile internment camp. It is a voyage of the damned.

  Yet the work is distinguished by its empathy, and by the resilience Bergner finds in his characters despite the perils they face. He does not idealise his ill-fated refugees, but depicts them as fallible individuals. He writes with irony, psychological insight and compassion. He presents a broad range of characters from the orthodox to non-believers, and exposes their flaws and obsessions, their hopes and uncertainties. He puts a human face to their suffering, revealing both their vulnerability and fierce will for survival.

  And there are moments of redeeming humanity, acts of unexpected kindness. A Greek passenger returning to work in Australia, accompanied by a bride from his home village, converses with one of the refugees: ‘You and me one fate,’ he says, as he points to himself and nods to the Jewish passengers. He identifies with their trauma and sees himself as a brother in adversity.

  Between Sky and Sea deserves its place as a significant Australian novel due to its literary merit and because it remains as relevant today as it was when it was first published. As I write there are millions of people on the move in search of refuge from oppression. Many languish in camps for years on end, while others are en route, prepared to risk all to gain landfall on firmer shores. Theirs are perilous journeys enacted anew in each age. Some make it and some don’t.

  On 19 October 2001, 353 men, women and children, asylum seekers fleeing Iraq and Afghanistan, drowned when their fragile fishing boat, now known as SIEVX, sank en route to Australia. There were just forty-five survivors. Bergner’s fictional account of the fate of the passengers on board the Greek freighter is chillingly similar to survivors’ descriptions of the SIEVX sinking. The two disasters, sixty years apart, one imagined, the other real, encapsulate the universal plight of asylum seekers. They highlight the fraught nature of the journey, and the desperate measures that people take to escape oppression.

  The sinking of the SIEVX was the biggest postwar maritime disaster off Australian waters, yet it has been readily forgotten. This new edition of Bergner’s novel is a timely reminder of the desperation that drives people to risk their lives in search of freedom. It highlights the luck involved in whether one survives the journey. But it is also a matter of government policy: at the time of the SIEVX sinking the Howard government was advising its navy personnel to force boats of asylum seekers back out to sea. Like Bergner’s characters, they were consigned to live in limbo, their goal so tantalisingly close, yet agonisingly out of reach, the sea an insurmountable barrier.

  The sea is a recurring image in Bergner’s work. In an earlier story ‘Ship-brothers’, he dwells on the moment of farewell, when a group of Jewish immigrants casts off from Europe for their voyage to Australia. It is the point of no return. The story foreshadows some of the themes of the novel published five years later.

  Translated by Judah Waten, the English edition of Between Sky and Sea preceded the 1947 publication of the Yiddish language original. Bergner was anxious to reach a wide audience. It was first published by Dolphin, a venture set up in 1945 by Judah Waten and the painter Victor O’Connor, with the aim of printing affordable editions of Australian books with progressive themes. Dolphin was one of the few outlets for Australian literary fiction at the time. One of its earliest publications, Southern Stories, featured Judah Waten’s translation of Bergner’s short story, ‘The Boardinghouse’.

  Waten spoke of the translation process and his friendship with Bergner: ‘We worked together on translations. I didn’t just translate away on my own. Every Saturday we got together. And when you translate, you sort of looked into a word. It’s like performing some kind of surgery.’ Bergner was, says Waten, ‘very odd because he wanted every word translated, and if the number of words came out fewer in English he wasn’t very happy. He never really mastered the English language.’

  Herz Bergner continued to publish Yiddish novels and collections of short stories until his death in Melbourne in 1970. Just one other novel, Light and Shadow, and several short stories were translated into English. Between Sky and Sea remains his masterwork.

  Arnold Zable, 2010.

  Between Sky & Sea

  CHAPTER I

  For five weeks the dirty, old Greek tramp steamer had drifted over stormy waters without sighting land. She creaked with age as she allowed herself to be tossed by the green waves that played with her like young children tormenting a senile old man. It seemed the ship had lost its way and would forever trudge across the seas. Nothing had been seen but sky and sea and the people on deck were weary of gazing into the distance, hoping that a fragment of land would swim into their vision. They were now accustomed to the steely glare of the sun during the day when they could not keep their eyes open, and to the blackness of night when they could not recognise each other. The order that no light was to be shown at night—not even a match was to be struck—had been given as soon as the ship sailed into the open sea.

  On dark nights, when no moon shone, a solid tarry darkness surrounded the ship. She moved slowly like a black hearse and the Jews moved about aimlessly on the deck and the narrow worn steps of the spiral staircase. They groped with their hands as they stumbled against each other, unable to find a place to settle. Men looked for their wives and wives for their husbands. Children who had lost their mothers screamed in the black night and their cries spread fear.

  ‘Mama! Ma-ma! Where are you, Mama?’

  Good friends who talked for hours during the day passed each other like strangers. Suspiciously they allowed everybody to pass, recognising friends only by their voices. A familiar voice brought warmth and drew them together as if in new-found joy.

  ‘That’s Fabyash, isn’t it?’ One man stopped another, touching him with his hands and peering at him. ‘Am I right?’

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s right. It’s me, Fabyash. Why should a man be crawling around so late in the dark? It’s too terrible to believe. You can feel the blackness with your hands.’

  Although the captain had ordered them to stay in their cabins and go to bed early, they could not stay still; everyone was drawn outside. How could they go to sleep so early? From day to day things became worse. Food was supplied twice daily, but the dismal stew was shrinking and getting thinner.

  Overnight new orders were born. Pasted on the rotting, greasy walls of the boat, notices screamed in strange big letters, crudely written. Then, one bright day, they found a new notice. It was cut from ordinary packing paper and still smelled of fresh ink. It ordered that water was to be used only for drinking. And another notice warned the crowd to remain quiet and not become alarmed.

  Instead of calming the passengers, these last words cast a shadow of fear. People began to say that things must be bad: ‘They won’t admit how bad things are!’ The passengers avoided the walls on which the notices were posted, afraid of new menaces. And in order to quieten their fears, they began to creep, uninvited, into each other’s cabins. They talked about the countries they had wandered through since they were driven from their homes, and they outdid each other in knowledge of the new country for which they were bound—Australia. Although no one knew much, or had even heard much, about this new land, each one had a great deal to say about the country, its people and their customs.

  Fabyash knew for certain that the country was surrounded by water on all sides and the people lived by catching fish, which they exported to the rest of the world. He was an energetic young man who always knew more than anyone else and nothing in
the world could surprise him. He knew everything in advance, and he had a wealth of ideas about Australia. But Zainval Rockman could never stand Fabyash’s boastings and with a wave of the hand he rejected this information. He was always looking for an excuse to show that Fabyash knew nothing and was nothing but a blatherskite. This time he really did talk Fabyash down and make him look small. He said that in the new country people made their living from timber. The country is still wild and has plenty of forests, so the people export timber to the rest of the world.

  Hearing this, Mrs Hudess, a Warsaw woman who was proud that she came from a big city, rose from her place. She said neither Fabyash nor Rockman knew what they were talking about. The country rides neither on fish nor timber. Australia is a country like any other, with many big cities. Let Rockman and Fabyash stop talking nonsense andmaking Australia into a rural wasteland.

  In order to support her words she called her two little daughters, who had gone to school and learned something about the matter. She loved to show her children off, whether it was the right time or not. She thought very highly of their talents.

  But the daughters took no notice of their mother. As usual they were busy with their doll, which they carried about with them from morning till night. This doll was the only thing they had saved from the terrible event that had destroyed their home. Everyone had grabbed something, whatever he could, and they had barely escaped with their lives. Now the girls wouldn’t part with the doll; they slept with her and took her walking, holding her hands as if she were a little child. The doll was old and worn and couldn’t close its eyes when it fell asleep, nor could it utter its old cry when pressed in the stomach. The younger child spoke to the doll exactly the way her mother spoke to her whenever she saw her: overjoyed anew that her child had left behind all the horrors and now found herself in a safe place.

  ‘My treasure…my precious.’ The child caressed the doll just like her mother fondled her.