by Alan Collins
Minny brought in two cups of tea. I said, “You and I always seem to be drinking tea when my life is about to change.”
“Oh, you remember that day when the police sergeant sent you to me?” Mrs Pearlman took a notebook from her brief case. Without raising her head, she said, “We, that is to say, the committee have decided that you should become an apprentice.’’ Her voice became toneless and formal. “We have arranged with Grayson and Roberts of — ”
“What’s an apprentice?” I interrupted.
“Well, it’s a young person who goes to work and is taught a trade.”
“Ruti says she is going to university — does that mean she is more cleverer than me?” I spoke badly deliberately to emphasise my point.
Mrs Pearlman, although childless, had learned enough of the tricks of children to know when she was being provoked. She ignored my bad grammar. “No Jacob, it is what her parents wanted for her. And why her mother works so hard,” she added. “Now, where was I? Ah yes, Grayson and Roberts of 188 Sussex Street in the city — they are printers and do all the work for the Home.” She referred to her notebook. “You will become an apprentice printer. We have arranged for you to leave the home on Monday week and you will board with Mrs Rothfield at 22 Waverley Crescent, Bondi Junction.”
Of all that stream of instruction Mrs Pearlman had just issued, all that penetrated was the news that I would be moving to Bondi Junction, a short distance from where Ruti would be living. I could see her now — in her bathing suit, her body lying on the beach beside me, the sun coating that pale European skin. In the winter I would show her my secret places in the crevices of the rocks where the sun reached but the wind could not. I would walk with her to the top of the cliffs on the south headland where our father had laboured — and died. But I would never ever show her The Balconies and its mean house-of-cards rooms.
“Wake up, Jacob!” Mrs Pearlman was tapping me on the knee with her notebook.
I said, sullenly, “Is that the good news?”
She looked quite disconcerted; it was not what she had expected from the recipient of such charitable foresight. She asked me if I was worried about Solly, was I frightened to leave the Home, did the idea of going to work upset me? To all these questions, I shook my head. “Well,” she said, “that’s it then; you may go back and tell the others of your new start in life. And always remember, you owe it all to the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home.”
Perhaps Mrs Pearlman was right about the debt. My apprenticeship as a printer’s compositor awakened a creative streak in me that I had not known existed. I learned quickly and enjoyed reading the type in reverse and from right to left. The foreman was a wizened man in his sixties who addressed me variously as Jack, Jake, and occasionally as Ikey, especially when I made a mistake with the change after buying the journeymen’s lunches. The employees were mainly old men called out of retirement to take the places of men who went to the war. At lunchtime they would scan the newspapers for the names of those missing in action.
I represented something inexplicable to them. Jews they knew as the businessmen who came into the printery and ordered work, as bookies whose pictures appeared on the sports pages, with names like Solomon and Eizenberg tagged to them. They shopped at Danny’s Bazaar in Bathurst Street. “I beat him down a quid on an overcoat,” one boasted.
“How come you’re not like them?” one of them asked me, the machinist who operated the huge, noisy flatbed printing press.
“Like what?” I asked nervously.
“Leave the kid alone” the foreman said. “What he means,” he said kindly to me, “is he didn’t expect to find a …”
“A Jew boy working and getting his hands dirty,” I finished for him.
“Well, that and then there’s those reffos coming here. All they seem to do is sit around and drink bloody coffee all day long.”
If I was a puzzle to them, I was no less an enigma to myself. The men’s crude arguments had driven a wedge between myself and the Schlesingers, Mitzi Strauss and even the Kahns. How many kinds of Jews were there? I longed for somebody to talk to. I felt as though I was entering a minefield where I could be shattered by Jew and Gentile both.
That night at dinner, I said to Mrs Rothfield, “What do you think of Gentiles?”
“Dreck!”
“What does that mean?”
“Dreck!” she repeated. “In Yiddish it means shit but a lady shouldn’t say such a word.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m a lady — ach, I see what you mean, Yakov. You haven’t got eyes? You don’t see them drunk on every corner? You don’t see them beating their wives?”
“Have you seen them, Mrs Rothfield?”
“Already he answers my question with a question! Eat, my boy, eat and don’t drink and don’t go out with shiksers!”
That expression I knew from the days when Uncle Siddy swanned around with Gentile women. Mrs Rothfield had, with this one word, discounted all non-Jewish women as being inferior — worse! — forbidden in the same way as proscribed, non-kosher food.
Apart from Carmel, I’d had very little contact with Gentile women; the ones I knew best were the three or four who worked in the bindery of the printery. They were invariably kind to me, offering me cakes that they had baked or a sandwich, lifting up a corner of it to assure me there was no ham in it. One of them, a gaunt woman with fiery eyes, included a religious tract from the Watch Tower Society with her gift of cake.
Much of the printing done by Grayson Roberts was for the many Masonic Lodges. The brochures included quotations from the Old Testament which dealt in detail with the building of Solomon’s Temple. The foreman assumed that I, as a Jew must be an expert on the subject. All I could add to his store of knowledge was that a cubit was as long as a man’s forearm, information I had gleaned with great difficulty from Mr Klapper when discussing the size of Noah’s Ark.
Outside the printery I led a solitary life with only the vitriolic tongue of Mrs Rothfield to contend with. My meagre wage went to pay my board and left me with a few shillings a week. I joined a local penny lending library but soon tired of the shelves filled with romance and detective novels. One day, as I walked down George Street in my short lunch break, I discovered the Sydney Municipal Lending Library. It occupied the upper floors of a huge wine cellar. The combined smell of fermenting wine and musty books was enough to entice me inside. Once there, I was lost in the tall stacks, where men in overalls like myself were selecting books. The classifications seemed endless — fiction, classics, history, politics, religion — I did not know what to choose.
A man in a boiler suit was watching me. After a while he came up and said, “A young fella like you should be reading about the struggle of the working classes.” He propelled me along the aisle then stopped and took down a book. “You need this, comrade, and you’ll understand about the great class struggle.”
It was Robert Tressall’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
The story concerned a bunch of house painters, plumbers and carpenters who worked somewhere in England and were always grumbling about their hard life and poor pay. It must have been about 1912 or so. The building firm that employed them was crook, the work was done on the cheap and the men were usually sacked at the end of the job.
The story was unremittingly gloomy. The central character was a painter named Frank Owen, who when I later became more politically aware, I recognised as being an anarchist. But now, as I read the book, it aroused a mass of confusing thoughts in me. For one thing, Frank Owen was anti-religious, or, more specifically, against Christianity, at whose door he laid all the blame for social inequity. Fat, pompous parsons were forever telling the workers to ‘know their place in life’. They sided with the employers, preaching the ‘dignity of labour’ to men who more often than not had no job anyway, The workers, who even at my young age struck me as a spineless, whingeing lot, accepted their misery and ridiculed Frank Owen.
The book bore no relationsh
ip to me or the people I worked with at Roberts and Grayson. My workmates were well paid; they were skilled tradesmen who had money to bet on the races, take their families on picnics and go once a week to the pictures. And they all belonged to a union. I was careful not to be seen reading it at the printery.
Tressall called his workmen ‘‘ragged trousered philanthropists’’ because they ‘‘quietly submitted like so many cattle to their miserable slavery for the benefit of others, but defended it and opposed and ridiculed any suggestions for reform’’. The book was sprinkled with lines such as … ‘‘Mother, how many more days do you think we’ll have only dry bread and tea?’’ Well, Solly and I had been better off — we at least had plum jam to spread on ours!
My head was now stuffed with newly acquired, half-understood expressions such as Capital and Labour, Socialism, Private Ownership of Property, Shared Wealth and Strength Through Unity. I rolled these terms around on my tongue, waiting for a chance to use them. As we sat in the lunchroom at the printery, I listened to the men’s conversation. It was very disappointing. If they were not preoccupied with the war, the talk was of the weekend’s sport or the weather. If they told a joke I was sent out on some spurious errand. The leading machinist, I discovered, was also the printing union representative. I could not join because I was an apprentice. I took false courage in speaking to him because his name was Frank, the same as the hero of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
“Are you a Socialist, Mr Williams?” I asked him.
“Is the Pope a Jew, son?”
“I don’t think so, Mr Williams.”
“Right, and I’m no bloody Socialist either, Ikey.”
“Why? I mean, I’ve been reading this book and it says that all the workers in the world should unite and share — ”
‘‘Oh yeah, says who? Look, I’ve got this nice little home in Marrickville that used to be me mother’s before she passed on and you’re trying to tell me that I should share it with any bugger that calls himself a bloody Socialist!’’
He calmed down, patted me on the shoulder and told me that when I was old enough I should vote for the Labor Party, “and keep your trap shut about Socialism, Ikey. I’m not saying you had anything to do with it, but it’s an International Jewish Plot!”
I was not game enough to remind him that in this printery which thrived on Masonic work, he had also condemned Catholicism as an international plot.
In desperation, I turned to Mrs Rothfield, notwithstanding her demonstrable passionate prejudices. Nervously I asked her if she knew what socialism was. She pointed to a picture on her mantelpiece of a youngish man in working clothes, leaning on a shovel. I asked her who it was.
“Who else?” she replied with a shrug. “My husband — may he rest in peace.” I had not associated Mrs Rothfield with a man who did physical work.
“Was he like my father? I mean, did he have to do that sort of work because of the Depression?” I asked. “Or was it because he was a Socialist?”
“Oy, Yakov, you don’t know much about anything do you? What did they teach you in the Home? Only how to pray like a Yid? Nothing about your history?”
She took the photo down and propped it up against a vase. From the sideboard she produced a photograph album. Sepia pictures showed a stony landscape and in the far distance, a valley with tall trees. In some of the pictures men with rifles slung over their backs laboured alongside women; men in Arab headdress sat on horse-back and watched.
Mrs Rothfield’s stubby finger pointed out her husband to me. “And that’s me beside him,” she said triumphantly. “I too was a Socialist. We lived together on a kibbutz in Palestine. For fifteen years we sweated it out there, battling Arabs, mosquitoes, the British, Turks — it was never-ending.”
As she turned the pages, tents gave way to stone huts, rows of fruit trees appeared and I could see children playing. I still had no idea what this had to do with Socialism.
She shook her head in wonderment at my ignorance, putting it down to Australia being so far away from the things that were important in life. “Look Yakov, a kibbutz is a collective farm where everyone is equal and everyone gets an equal share of what the farm produces. The trouble, my boy, was that the people who made up the kibbutz — in Australia you wouldn’t hire them. They knew nothing about farms. Like my husband and me — we came from Warsaw, a big city, bigger than Sydney. Oh, we were Socialists all right, straight out of the book!”
She snapped the album shut. “Nu Yakov, what else do you want to know about socialism?”
In my quest for knowledge about socialism, the tally was one in favour (Frank Owen) and two against (Frank Williams and Mrs Rothfield). I decided if I were to become a socialist, I would neither work on a farm like the late Mr Rothfield, nor be like poor Frank Owen who died of consumption, ground down by rapacious English landlords. There had to be a more congenial way to become a socialist; the Municipal Library had been the vehicle which had brought me this far; perhaps it would take me the next step along the way.
My search was temporarily interrupted by the printery enrolling me at the technical college to learn more of my trade. I became immersed in the world of the typographer and engraver, the papermaker and the inkmaker. Caslon and Plantin, Caxton and Merganthaler were milestones not only in the history of printing but in my own wish to learn of the present by studying the past.
When the term at the technical college ended, I went back to the Municipal Library. I had not taken out another book since returning The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It had been classified under Fiction; I found a section headed Social, but it dealt with customs and had books that showed beautiful bare-breasted native women carrying jugs and baskets of fruit on their heads. Not one of them bore any resemblance to Mrs Rothfield’s pictures of herself as a young woman.
At the inquiry desk I asked about books on socialism. A woman scribbled down some numbers and pointed vaguely towards the window. The intricacies of the Dewey Catalogue System were quite beyond me. Disheartened, I returned to the counter and found various leaflets advertising public meetings for Soroptimists, Theosophists, Unitarians, Fabian-ists and Communists. Most of the meetings took place on Sundays in the Sydney Domain, a place the men at the printery had told me was full of metho drinking derelicts. As I moved away from the counter, the woman beckoned to me. She took in my overalls and ink-stained fingers.
“Would you like to go to an interesting meeting, with young people of your own age?” she asked.
I nodded. She reached under the counter and gave me a leaflet, poorly printed in red ink on cheap paper.
“It’s not far from here — just down Market Street, near the wharves. It’s called the Eureka Youth League.”
“What’s it about?”
She folded the leaflet up quickly and told me to put it in my pocket. “Read it when you get home, sonny,” she said conspiratorially and dismissed me from her mind.
I showed it that night to Mrs Rothfield.
“Dreck!”
“Why?”
“Communists, you schlemiel,” she yelled. “Not in my house, thank you very much!”
“Where does it say Communist! All it says is that they are showing a film on Russian agriculture and …” I ran my finger down the type — “how the collective brings in the harvest in the Ukraine. Isn’t that what you used to do in Palestine — the collective — the kibbutz?”
Mrs Rothfield shook her head; she popped a sugar cube into her mouth and drank a glass of lemon tea with the spoon still in it. She peered at me over the top of the glass. “Yakov, my boy, from my mouth to God’s ear. Let me tell you: we were socialists. They,” she stabbed the leaflet “they are Communists, no better than the Cossacks who murdered us in Russia.”
I felt tears of frustration filling my eyes. Whichever way I turned I met with bigotry of one kind or another. Mrs Roth-field hated the Gentiles and the Communists; Frank Williams hated socialists and Catholics and the International Jewish Conspiracy. In my
little world bounded by Bondi and the Sussex Street printery there was enough hatred and conflict to stoke a thousand consuming fires. I wanted to withdraw from it all. The safest place I knew was the deep crevices in the rocks at North Bondi where only the warming sun could get me and the bitter winds of prejudice could never reach me. A place I would only share with Ruti.
EIGHT
I was a little ashamed that my thoughts had turned to Ruti only at a time of confusion and self-doubt. In the first few months of my apprenticeship, with its unaccustomed long working hours and so many new things to learn and remember, I would collapse into bed at the end of the day, exhausted. Mrs Rothfield taught me to play gin rummy and how to eat the claggy dish called cholent without actually gagging on it.
I had started work towards the end of summer. The winter months seemed interminable, punctuated only by excitement at new things learned in my trade. The smell of ink, the thrashing noise of the presses, the lines of type that grew under my hand — listening to the conversation of grown men — my head could contain no more at one time than all this. And yet I knew I needed company, someone of my own age.
As if in defiance of the prevailing morality that frowned upon meetings other than those ordained by religious groups, the Eureka Youth League met on a Sunday afternoon. In a firetrap of a building a dozen boys and girls in their early and mid-teens sat on the floor in front of a single cone radiator. The boys seemed to be wearing the clothes they went to work in. Everyone had a red-and-black enamel Hammer and Sickle badge. I had come dressed in my best clobber. (I realised too late that Mrs Rothfield had tricked me into this to cause me the maximum embarrassment).