by Alan Collins
Mrs Kahn eyed him nervously. “Whom is this man?” she asked.
With little pride now, I replied miserably that he was my uncle.
Siddy, suddenly aware that he had lost an ally and smarting at Ruti’s reference to Mitzi Strauss, said in a matter-of-face tone, “I think the old chap’s passed in his chips, Missus.”
The two of them looked blankly to me for an explanation. Ruti let go of my arm, picked up her father’s walking-stick and gripped it until her knuckles were white.
“I know what he means, Mutti,” she said softly. “He is telling us that Papa is dead.” She repeated the word for dead in German, three or four times. They sat down and Ruti waved Siddy away and at the same time pulled me down beside her. The wave of sorrow that flowed through Ruti and her mother reached me like a tide that washed around and over the three of us. If ever I was going to be a member of that family, this would be the moment. Ruti and her mother were grieving but I felt reborn.
Towards the end of 1940, The Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home for Jewish Children was requisitioned by the government for use as a training centre for army nurses. The committee of the Home, led by the resourceful and indefatigable Rosie Pearlman, persuaded one of the Jewish community’s leading citizens to vacate his North Shore mansion to provide alternative accommodation for the growing number of children that arrived at Circular Quay, some with parents, some forlornly hoping that the remnants of their scattered families would eventually follow them to Australia, a country they could not have pointed to on a map some months earlier.
The enormous Spanish-mission style house, set in a leafy street in a suburb where even Catholics were discreet about their faith, became home to twenty-four children speaking half-a-dozen European languages and as varied in racial characteristics as Norwegians were from Italians.
Mrs Goetz, now the wife of an Australian soldier (even if he did shoulder nothing more lethal than a pick) resigned and moved up to Yass where Bertold drank beer, swore like an Aussie and loaded wheat trucks whilst whistling Beethoven. Wielder of immense power as a corporal, he had under his command private Willi Schlesinger who, despite the extremes of heat and cold, wore his complete uniform on all occasions.
A Mrs Ivy Mackay, late of the Dr Barnardo’s Homes of Essex, England and widowed by a German bomb, was appointed as matron of the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home for Jewish Children, or as it quickly became known to the locals, the Jews’ Home. It would be untrue to say that there was harmony and understanding between the Jewish children and their middle-class Protestant neighbours. Left to themselves, the children would quickly have been absorbed into the life of that small suburban community; prejudice on the part of the adult Christians and the Jewish fear of loss of identity made it almost impossible.
The division showed up in many curious ways. The Jews’ Home, for example, would not shop locally. Their need to eat only kosher food meant that the local butcher could not supply them; the meat came twice a week on the train from a shop in Bondi. By the time it reached the pretty North Shore station, it oozed blood and was usually dumped by irate station assistants in the station’s bike shed to be fetched after school by Bill or myself.
The Saturday Sabbath meant that we could not play in the street with the Gentile children. On Sundays, we would watch them either dressed up and walking to church or going on picnics with their families. At school the next day they boasted of seeing goannas as big as crocodiles, snakes that could swallow a dog whole, and all this in a nature reserve a mile or so from the end of our street! Ruti would turn to me for verification of these tales of the indigenous wild life. As an Australian I was torn between rubbishing these outrageous claims and a nationalistic pride in a fauna of which I had no personal knowledge. On one occasion as we sat close together at the edge of the mansion’s empty swimming-pool, I told her of the huge man-eating sharks that swam off Bondi Beach, and of how I had actually once saved Solly from their massive jaws. I remained her hero only until after dinner that night, by which time Solly had told her, “Jake is bull-shitting you, Ruti — it was me that saved him.”
Her mother visited her every Sunday, greyer than ever, worn out from a week’s work in a factory and ready to collapse into a chair after the long walk from the station. She sewed army shirts for ten hours a day and showed Ruti her bank savings book “Soon, you will leave here my darling and we shall have a flat together.” I felt a knot of anxiety when Ruti told me this; any talk of us being parted filled me with morbid loneliness.
Ivy Mackay, who insisted on being addressed as Matron, took this as a sign of ill health and prescribed regular dosing with cod liver oil. It was her universal panacea. Solly got it for failing to do his homework or his kitchen duties. Manfred actually liked the turgid stuff and grew even plumper on it, supplemented by nocturnal pantry raids and his mother’s never-ending supply of chocolates. Mitzi Strauss worked in a coffee-shop in George Street, bustling around the hissing urns and flirting with the customers, almost exclusively Jewish refugees. They would arrive at the cafe shortly after ten in the morning, their briefcases bulging with documentary proof of their former European status, all of which meant less than nothing to potential Australian employers. They bowed and addressed each other as ‘Herr Doktor’ and condemned the Australian legal, medical and dental professions which insisted that they go back to university to obtain an Australian degree. Many of them worked a night shift in a munitions factory and bemoaned their ruined hands. Mitzi Strauss tut-tutted over them but secretly despised them.
Thanks to Uncle Siddy, there was no shortage of coffee, tea and sugar in that cafe. He had taken to the blackmarket like a duck to water. He and Mitzi Strauss were thick as thieves. Love and the need to make a quick quid drew them together, in business and in bed. Siddy could obtain anything that was scarce, from entire ration books to a tank of petrol; he knew which flats were about to become vacant and where American servicemen could trade cigarettes for liquor. Whatever you wanted in wartime Sydney, ‘Siddy the Yid’ as he was widely known to police and public alike, could get it for you.
As his reputation spread, Mrs Pearlman asked him not to visit Solly and me in the Jews’ Home. I think she disapproved of him as much for his liaison with Mitzi Strauss as for his illicit way of life. He compromised to the point where he drove Mitzi to the Home in his flash car, parked it outside and sat in it smoking a cigar. He would send Mitzi in with a ten-shilling note each for Solly and me. Mrs Mackay, cannier with money than any of her employers were presumed to be, opened post-office savings accounts for us. “Many a mickle makes a muckle,” she quoted mysteriously.
I worried about Solly. Our four-year age gap had grown to an unbridgeable chasm. He was nearly eleven, tall, slim, with a mind like quicksilver and a tongue that would and could lash and beguile you in the one breath. He slipped in and out of trouble effortlessly. Teachers wrote warning notes about him and then tore them up as he promised to reform. Ruti hated him. He stole her brassiere from the clothesline, stuffed his socks inside the cups and strutted around the street with it on his chest.
He had completely eradicated all memories of our past life or at least locked them away, so that any attempts I made to remind him of it were met with a shrug. Uncle Siddy was his idol and Manfred his constant co-conspirator. Mitzi Strauss had virtually adopted him; she divided her gifts equally between Solly and Manfred. I was deeply shocked when she fell into the habit of referring to Manfred as her ‘little mannikin’.
“Don’t you remember anything, Solly?” I pleaded. “What about how Carmel used to call us her ‘little mannikins’, then pissed off and left us with nothing but a bloody tin of plum jam?”
“Why do you keep going on with all that old stuff, Jake? Mitzi’s a bonzer sheila not a bit like Carmel.”
“Well, she’d better not call me her ‘little mannikin’, that’s all!”
Solly smiled a secret smile. He pulled back the curtains of the front room and beckoned me over. Down in the street I could see Uncle
Siddy slumped behind the wheel of a big black boxy car. Curls of cigar smoke rose in the air. A race guide rested on the steering-wheel.
“Whaddya think about that, Jake?”
“It reminds me of the coppers’ car when they took us away,” I said miserably.
He turned on me angrily. “You’d turn cream sour, wouldn’t you!”
He opened the window and yelled out, “G’day there, Uncle Siddy, got a good thing for the fourth at Randwick?”
Siddy waved back at him; Solly turned to me and smirked. “I’ll let you into a secret, Jake — me and Manfred are going to live with Aunty Mitzi in a big house in Bondi!” He did a little jig for joy. “And that’s not all — Uncle Siddy will be there too!”
I hit him, with the flat of my hand, right across the face.
He didn’t cry out; he bit his lip and blinked back the tears. He walked in carefully controlled steps to the door, turned around and said through clenched teeth, “I’m glad you’re not coming with us.”
The room grew dark as I sat on the edge of the bed. I took the mezuzah out of the bedside locker and unwrapped it. Its little eye stared coldly back at me. ‘And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon your doorposts’, the Bible said. Well, it wouldn’t be our doorpost, that’s for sure, I told myself. Inside, on the scrolled parchment, it commanded us to ‘honour thy father and thy mother’ — I couldn’t even manage that. Or was it still required of us, now that they were dead?
I needed to talk to somebody. I thought of Bill, that exponent of rational argument. No, I did not need his cold, objective solutions, always right like a key that fits only one door. I put the mezuzah back in my locker — it posed more problems than it answered. As the stinging of my hand from hitting Solly waned, so did the turmoil inside of me. Slowly I began to realise that what he had schemed for his future was no more or less than what I had wished as a future for Ruti and myself. He had achieved what I had only dreamed of. I was not angry or even concerned at the kind of life he would lead with Mitzi Strauss, Manfred and Uncle Siddy. Worst of all, it did not distress me as it should have, that he calmly assumed that we would be separated. No, I had hit him because his life now had direction and mine had none.
As though through a lifting fog, I heard Siddy’s car start up; there was a cheeky toot on the horn. I opened the window and leaned out. Mitzi was standing by the car door, alternately hugging Manfred and Solly.
“Next Sunday, little mannikins,’ she said over the revving motor, ” Mitzi will come for you und den ve shall haff such fun altogezzer!” Reluctantly, she let the two boys go and climbed into the car. Siddy tooted again, let in the clutch and the huge car shot off up the hill, leaving a pall of blue smoke hanging in the late afternoon air.
SEVEN
Mrs Pearlman arrived at the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home an hour or so before sunset on the following Friday. As she was not permitted to travel on the Sabbath, it was obvious that she would stay until it was concluded at sunset on Saturday. She wore a wide-brimmed hat and in addition to her handbag, struggled with a briefcase quite at odds with her summery appearance She marched up the steps to be met by Matron Ivy Mackay, who conducted her straight into her office. The door closed behind them, leaving the children to wonder why the woman who controlled their destinies should choose this inappropriate time to visit.
The Sabbath tables were already set. Candles had been lit, a glass of wine stood ready beside the sweet Sabbath loaf. Bill, as the eldest male person present, would conduct the Sabbath Eve service at the table. We stood behind our chairs in our usual places, waiting for Mrs Mackay, to whom the Hebrew service was as incomprehensible as her Scottish brogue was to us. Solly and Manfred fidgeted and jostled each other. Bill waited impassively, the prayer-book open on the table before him.
From across the table, I watched Ruti as she played ‘mother’ to the smaller children. The death of her father had created both a bond and a barrier between us. She had pathetically few memorable days to recall of her life with her father. What events she did describe to me were invariably overcast by his constant illness. I would listen to Ruti’s recital with barely concealed impatience, longing for the time when Henry Kahn would be replaced in her consciousness by Jacob Kaiser. Perhaps it was this recurring idea of my being a ‘father’ to Ruti that kept in check my barely understood sexual longing for her. This, and the closeness of our little group in the Jews’ Home made overt feelings something to be avoided.
Ivy Mackay and Rosie Pearlman came into the dining-room. Mrs Pearlman took the reserved place beside Bill; Ivy Mackay went to another table and stood by her chair. Mrs Pearlman tapped on a glass with a knife.
“I wish you all a good Sabbath,” she began. “I have some announcements to make but first Wolfgang will conduct the Sabbath service.” She nodded to Bill, who seemed to grow in stature by being referred to by his true name.
“ ‘And it was evening and it was morning — the sixth day,’ ” he intoned. “And the heaven and the earth were finished and all their host. And on the seventh day God had finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and he hallowed it …’ ’’
The prayer went on to thank God for the deliverance from Egypt and for choosing the Jews ‘‘above all nations’’, for which they were rewarded by being made the eternal keepers of the Sabbath.
How many times in my life, would I wish that God had not set us apart, making life needlessly more difficult?
Bill pronounced the blessing for wine and for bread. Small pieces of the sweet loaf were broken off, sprinkled with salt and passed around the tables. This simple ceremony made me feel as though I was part of a universal family — a family that even included shady dealers like Uncle Siddy.
Minny came in pushing a dinner-wagon of steaming soup. Above the noise of serving and eating, Mrs Pearlman said: “Now, there are lots of stories going around about what is to happen to some of you. Well, I can tell you that for some it is good news and for others — well, it could also be good news, depending upon how they take it.”
Bill was smiling enigmatically; Solly and Manfred looked as though they would burst from pent-up excitement. Ruti looked down at her plate. I stared hard at her, willing her to look at me.
Mrs Pearlman took a sheet of Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home notepaper from her briefcase, placed it on the table in front of her, then ignored it. “First, I wish to announce that Wolfgang’s father has been discharged from the army. As a result, his son will now be able to leave here and once more live with his parents.” She patted Bill on the back and continued.
“Solomon Kaiser — little Solly, as you all know him — has been, er, invited shall we say’’ — she was picking her words carefully — “to reside with Mrs Mitzi Strauss and Manfred.” Mrs Pearlman watched me as she spoke. Despite the rumours that had flown around the Jews’ Home, fuelled by Bill’s silence, Manfred’s sly looks and Ruti’s attempts to keep the conversation inconsequential, I knew our lives were going to change. It was only my own that was still without official direction.
“Our dear Ruti,” Mrs Pearlman was saying in a voice that seemed far away, “will also join her mother who now has her own flat — in Bondi isn’t it, Ruti? — and is now in charge of shirt production at the factory of our own Treasurer, Mr Joe Symonds.’’
Minny came back to collect the dishes. The silence was unbearable. I could think only of that earliest day at the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home when I had lost my temper at the first intimation I had of losing Solly. I would not break down this time; let them all go their own bloody way, I’d survive without them. Bitterly, I searched for something to hate in all of them. Bill, for his apparent ability to ride out any storm, Solly, for his compliant nature, Ruti, for … for not setting up home with me on the shores of Bondi.
The girls left the table and went into the kitchen to collect the main course. Ruti reappeared through the swing-doors with the dishes. S
he served Mrs Pearlman and as she did so, a few words passed between them. Ruti approached me, placed my dinner in front of me and as her hair brushed my ear, whispered, “She has good news for you too, Jacob.”
It was too much to bear. Her nearness, the warmth of her voice, the smell of her freshly washed skin, the gentle curve of her breasts. For one moment, all I loved was so close. In that instant I forgot my bitterness at her leaving. I stood up, wrapped my arms clumsily around her and said softly but fiercely, “I love you, Ruti.”
I was fourteen and a half. Ruti was sixteen. As we stood there, we were ageless, deaf and blind, oblivious to the gasps, cheers and handclaps. A marvellous, pervading warmth enveloped me. It was a feeling I had only known when I used to insinuate my body between the cracks of two giant rocks at North Bondi and the reflected heat of the winter sun was a sensual experience I could not then understand. Now, with our arms about each other, I finally understood.
When the noise died down, Ivy Mackay, belatedly exerting her authority, said, “Well I never! We can’t have that sort of behaviour. Leave the room, Jacob — at once.”
Mrs Pearlman stopped me. “It was beautiful, Jacob,” she said for everyone to hear. “Don’t worry, wait for me in Matron’s office.”
I left the door ajar. I could hear the children singing the Grace After Meals. It was more like a jolly sing-song than praying. My one contribution to the religious life of the children of the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home was to persuade the reffo kids to sing the Grace to the tune of Waltzing Matilda.
Its last notes died away as Mrs Pearlman entered the office. She patted away the last crumbs from her lips and sat down, not behind the big desk but facing me, our knees almost touching.
“You are very fond of Ruti, aren’t you?”
She obviously did not expect an answer but went on: “We are expecting many more children to arrive from Europe, Jacob. The few we can save are escaping from Germany through Switzerland. Australia is one of the last countries that will still accept refugees. The Home has to look after them. That is why we are pleased that Bill and Manfred and Ruti are leaving. We must have their places for the newcomers.” She leaned forward. “So far as Solly is concerned — it was a difficult decision. He wanted so much to go with Manfred and … and well, Jacob, we just could not find a family that could take both of you.”