Letter from my Father

by Dasia Black

  Our friends from Stuttgart met us in Sydney and we stayed with them for the first few weeks. They had a flat in Botany Street, close to Bondi Junction. I was reassured that this busy shopping centre attracted many other Jewish migrants and was walking distance from a synagogue. This was where I met the first Australian girls and boys of my age, living in the next block. They were the children of migrants who had arrived two or three years earlier.

  Within a month, Father found a two-bedroom apartment which could be made into a comfortable home. It had an eatin kitchen and a medium-sized balcony. It was on the second floor of a block of flats built of bricks in a suburb called Ocean Heights, with extensive views of Bondi Beach. We could walk there and from the balcony look down on the red roofs of Bondi’s bungalows, their windows at night aglow with lights.

  The blue of the sky and the sparkling ocean confirmed that we were now in a new, clean continent. My father’s eye for quality and beauty had brought us to this place. He would try everything to bring a smile to my mother’s often sad face. Our new home’s only disadvantage was that the balcony was also open to lashing rain and howling easterly winds, which limited our use of the outdoor space.

  For the first time in my life I had my own room. There was a sofa bed that folded up during the day so there was enough space for my books. It was a place where I would be able to entertain my friends. My room also contained a table that could be extended, at which we ate our Friday night dinners.

  My parents furnished the spacious lounge in traditional style and decorated it tastefully, displaying the Meissen porcelain figurines they had brought from Germany in a glass-fronted cabinet. The lounge was always neat and clean, qualities with which my mother was preoccupied to the point of obsession.

  Within a few weeks of settling into our new home, Mother fell ill. She had to have a gall bladder operation. I was desolate, copying Mother’s feelings. She saw herself as Cassandra, finding what was dark and tragic in the happiest circumstances. I confided my feelings to my diary:

  The gallstones are causing my mother a lot of pain. She does not allow herself to be comforted and sees the worst ahead of her. That hurts my heart at its deepest. Oh God, is it not enough that I have lost one mother, that another one will be taken from me? If there is a God in this world then this would be impossible. I cannot bear to see how my poor mother suffers.

  Fortunately, she recovered well after the operation.

  My father set about selecting a school for me with the naïve approach of a new immigrant. There was never any doubt in his mind that I would go to university. However, with his experience of living in Communist countries, he thought that in a workers’ country such as Australia, claiming proletarian roots would gain one a place at the best institution. So when asked by the Department of Education what he wanted me to be, my father said: a seamstress. As a result, I was enrolled in the local Home Science High School, walking distance from our flat, rather than the academically selective Sydney Girls’ High School to which my high score in the entrance exam entitled me.

  I will never forget my first day at my Australian school. With my long plaits piled on my head in Gretchen style, I wore knee-socks when everyone else wore them short, and a dress with a pleated skirt, and carried a large umbrella. My classmates gazed in amazement at this apparition from Outer Space. And that is how it felt. Ester was again in a foreign land, with a new language, new customs and who knew what values?

  In my vocational high school there were Jewish girls and one very special gentile girl, Julia. I was, however, in most ways the odd one out in this non-academic school. Because of the solid grounding I had received at my German high school in academic subjects such as History and Geography, and my parents’ insistence on excellence, I had no difficulty achieving high marks. Some of my envious Australian classmates teased me about being a brain, a nasty put-down in this environment. I became Dux of the school within eighteen months of our arrival and won many prizes and awards. But I would cringe when outsiders asked which school I attended. I would feel the brief moment of reappraisal on hearing that I was not at the selective Sydney Girls’ High, and was painfully conscious of the tone of surprise as soon as I mentioned the name of my school.

  Sadly and paradoxically, when after eighteen months the Department of Education offered me a place at Sydney Girls’ High on the basis of my excellent marks, I refused the offer. I shrank from the idea of leaving my now-familiar class and learning once again how to behave in another new setting with new girls and different teachers.

  One continuing problem was my name and hence my sense of identity. When I enrolled as Ester Hadasa Einleger, I was told that this was not a name, but a short story. It was too long, too hard to pronounce, too troublesome in every way. It had to be shortened and anglicised. I chose the name Hedda after the little girl I had met in the camp in Hlubatin, during our escape from Poland to West Germany. My parents agreed to also change our family name to Engel. At home I was still called Ester. I resented being called Hedda, a name that was not mine, just as I did when I was supposed to be Stasia during the War.

  In further attempts to remake me into an Australian girl, my waist-long plaits were cut off. At no stage did I even think of protesting. But I was impressed by other girls and boys with similar backgrounds who, supported by their parents, insisted on retaining their awkward names. After all, we were no longer under Nazi occupation and having a Hebrew name did not put one’s life at risk. But of course the name Hedda did not make me Australian. My Polish-German accent, the way I dressed and my manners all shouted foreign!

  My successes were a source of pride and joy for my parents and they ensured that their friends noticed. I always enjoyed learning and over the years developed sufficient confidence to know that if I worked, I would succeed. On the few occasions when I failed, I was devastated.

  My teachers were also pleased with the quality of my schoolwork but the policy and the attitudes of the school ensured that ‘Hedda’ did not at that time develop the confidence to emerge from hiding. Before special occasions such as Anzac Day, that sacred day for Australians, we would all be asked to write an essay, with the best being read out at a school assembly. Mine was frequently chosen, but I was not encouraged to read it out, because of my accent. The teacher would arrange for another girl to read my words. I never protested nor questioned their right to do so. I was keenly aware that I was a foreigner, colloquially a reffo (refugee) and officially a New Australian. I was terrified of standing out. The chatty, cheerful little girl from Beit Bialik, at home among her similarly displaced friends, had disappeared. I was an adolescent keen to please and anxious to avoid fuss or trouble, ever-watchful so I could make sense of unfamiliar ways and fit in.

  There was nobody to guide me on how to become a real, not just a New Australian. Once in my first year at school, we were returning from Sports’ Day at a local oval when the bus suddenly stopped and everyone, teachers and students and even the bus driver, got out and ran to a corner building where a radio was blaring. Looking around, I saw that the streets were deserted. I had no idea what was going on. Nobody had said anything to me as they scrambled out. I was left sitting on my own at the back of the bus, half-terrified, half-puzzled. I was relieved not to hear any bomb blasts. After what seemed ages, but in fact may have been about fifteen minutes, everyone piled back into the bus, talking excitedly. They explained. On this first Tuesday in November 1951, the Melbourne Cup was run. The whole country stopped for, of all things, a horse race.

  My mother dressed me in good taste. This meant the conservative, daggy clothes of a European girl, totally out of kilter with the trendy taffeta skirts and nylon stockings of the new friends I made. Mother insisted I was not to wear anything white since it dirtied easily and was not practical. My father forbade the wearing of lipstick, common among my friends as we approached the age of fifteen. In his firm opinion, it was worn only by tarts and whores. I started going to parties and teenage dances, but was extremely self-
conscious about my accent, the way I dressed and my rapidly-developing acne. I loved dancing but often at these functions, no boy approached me. I was too serious. I would want to disappear off the face of the Earth in shame and humiliation. I felt unseen and very much an outsider.

  It was also obvious that my growth spurt had finished at the age of fourteen. I was going to be short, five-feet-nothing among all those giant blonde Australians. With the lack of size came poor posture. Once a boy asked me why I always looked down at my feet as I walked. And then came the final blow. My eyes were tested, my short sight discovered and I had to wear glasses. I wore them only when it was unavoidable, such as while looking at the blackboard at school. Otherwise I moved about the world seeing everything in vague outline.

  Nor was I good at sports. I enjoyed being coached in tennis until the day the teacher commented that I played cute tennis. That was the end of tennis for me. Physical education lessons were a nightmare. Hurling myself over a vaulting horse was totally beyond my abilities, but I was required to repeat my hopeless attempts over and over. To avoid the humiliation of it all I would try to hide in the toilet or pretend to be menstruating. Sometimes I succeeded.

  At the Home Science High School, Home Cooking was a compulsory subject. It was the one area in which I just scraped through. In the Cook an Apple Pie test, I could only manage to knead very lumpy dough, which I covered with overcooked apples, or rather an apple puree. The home science teacher declared: This is a disaster and completely inedible.

  I had been a pretty child. Now I felt neither pretty nor attractive. I did not like what I saw in the mirror. It was all too stressful. Often I was overcome with a sense of hopelessness and would weep for no apparent reason. I became restless. My prim, anxious, conservative mother was not a person with whom I could share my fears and feelings about my awakening sexuality. She certainly was not someone who could help a young girl move gracefully towards womanhood. One day she commented insensitively that I had an inferiority complex.

  During the awkward beginnings of my new life in Australia, I missed not being able to disappear into the familiar world of a Karl May book so much that Father asked some friends migrating from Germany to bring one for me. I was reunited with my old friend. When I felt happy I would put on a dance performance for my parents, to music such as Rimsky-Korsakoff’s Scheherazade, using an array of scarves to make myself look mysterious. On evenings when my parents were out, I listened to radio shows such as The Quiz Kids and dreamed about my future, wondering what I would achieve and what would make me really happy. How could I make the world a better place? When would I make firm friends? I thought continually about going to Israel to help my sisters and brothers build our new homeland

  My father, the educated, cultured lawyer from Poland, had a dreadful time. The refined Polish which had shaped his identity was no use to him in the new country. His English expression was poor and did not allow him to express his lucid and sophisticated thoughts and observations. He became a partner in a shop selling ladies clothes, a frock shop as it was called at the time. His customers were mainly migrant women. It took him nearly one-and-a-half hours to travel there every day. He, and later my mother, would catch a bus to Central Station at 6am, and then take a train to the shop so they could open up at 8am. His partners were much more experienced businessmen, street-smart in ways which my father found puzzling. To other Australians, my beloved father was just a reffo who spoke broken English.

  My mother brought in extra income by doing finishing work on brassieres for a lingerie manufacturing firm. She would sit for hours bent over her task, sewing and then threading the needle for the next bunch. Money was always scarce and she would walk blocks to a shop where fruit such as apples and oranges could be bought for just a few pennies cheaper. Only occasionally, on very special occasions, did she manage to serve us a small bowl of that most precious of fruits – strawberries. My parents did not complain about the hard work or the long hours but what upset my father deeply was the humiliation of not being articulate in English. This held him back in studying and qualifying for a profession, such as Accounting, as did some of his friends. At only forty-six he needed an occupation more suited to his abilities and interests.

  There was one place in which the fine mind of Mr Einleger and the wit of his wife Gita were cherished. These were the weekly get-togethers, usually for afternoon tea, with his friends, mostly fellow lawyers who had also studied in the famous Jagiellonian University in Krakow. With their wives they would meet at each other’s flats which were appointed with fine, often hand-made furniture and new white goods in spotlessly-kept kitchens. These were people who were finally establishing roots. Every purchase had to be of superior quality, so it would last.

  Impassioned political debates would rage, before and during afternoon tea. The central themes discussed were the Cold War and, of course, the War and its aftermath. What John Foster Dulles, Molotov, Truman, Eisenhower, the German Chancellor Adenauer and Stalin had said on a particular occasion and its implications were discussed in minute detail. Books were exchanged and appraised according to the political leanings of the author. All these people, having experienced and survived two totalitarian ideologies, Nazism and Communism, appreciated democracy and understood the forces that undermine it very well.

  It was not all talk of politics, of course. Information on government regulations, the workings of the Australian system, the education of their children, where to shop and who was the best dressmaker, were eagerly exchanged. The wives would bake (and sometimes secretly buy) rich cakes, and prepare herring or Russian salads of hard-boiled egg and potato. Chopped eggs and liver were served as appetisers before getting down to the serious business of cake and more cake with coffee or tea, served on fine European china. After the visitors left, the fine china and silver would be packed away, covered with plastic to protect it.

  These were also the occasions at which details of their children’s high marks in academic subjects were exchanged. Unlike at our schools, prowess in sport was ignored. A favourite expression in Polish, genialny, described a particularly high-achieving son or daughter. It means possessing the qualities of genius.

  Occasionally we took a break from striving to do well. Our month-long summer holidays were spent with another family at a rented cottage in the Blue Mountains. Our parents would cook and play innumerable rounds of cards. We teenagers, girls and boys, would congregate at the large swimming pool in Blackheath to talk about our schools and what we wanted to do as grown-ups. We also went horse-riding along the safe local tracks from one Blue Mountains town to another. This was the only sport I enjoyed.

  I began to make friends not only with my fellow reffo kids but also with girls whose parents had migrated before or at the outbreak of War, when they had been two or three years old. These girls spoke accent-free English and had read or been read the same nursery rhymes and songs and stories as other Australians. They were told by their parents that it was their duty to be nice to foreign kids like me.

  One thing that remained stable in my life was my deep respect for my father. We liked to go hiking together and learned over time to see beauty in the subdued colours of the Australian bush. At first we looked for the vivid greens of birch and pine trees and for flower-strewn meadows. We found instead dry she-oaks, fragrant eucalypts and twisted casuarinas, or tiny bush orchids and lacy grevilleas, golden and pink. We needed to learn to penetrate the strong white light of the southern sun to appreciate their shape, colour and delicacy. It took five long years before we developed Australian eyes not only for the fauna but also the exotic birds and animals, the multi-coloured lorikeets and rosellas and the kookaburras. At the zoo we marvelled at the platypus, wombat and the kangaroo. My father’s awe and wonder at these amazing new creatures inspired me. He was opening our eyes to this new world on whose shores we had landed. He wanted to learn and understand its history and architecture and the strange habits of its people, such as the ubiquitous Hello, love said to str
angers. He would stand enthralled, watching through a peep-hole in a rough fence what was going on in a vast building site, curious about the way they constructed tall buildings.

  VI

  Becoming a Grown-Up

  At age sixteen things improved for me. My skin slowly cleared and I found friends, all children of migrants who

  shared my interest in serious reading, bush-walking and talking politics. About this time I joined the Zionist youth group, Betar, where we listened to lectures, danced, sang and talked and talked about anything to do with Israel. My fellow idealists became the core of my social life. We organised camps for younger children, cooked together and thought of ourselves as real contributors to the future of the State of Israel and, by extension, the Jewish people.

  As part of this process we were encouraged to engage in self-disclosure sessions to gain understanding of our goals and how to achieve them. At one of these I surprised and disturbed my companions and even myself when, amid their declarations of what they wanted to achieve in the wider world, I came out with: I want to marry and have children. They were not impressed. How bourgeois and boring, they responded.

  In Betar, I could be myself: Jewish, Zionist and a reffo. In this group I was an insider rather than odd. Within the wider Zionist movement, however, Betar was not mainstream as were Habonim and other socialist groups. So again when I told people that I had joined Betar, I experienced that familiar look: You are not one of us.

  One fellow member who became a close friend was Daniel, a student of the piano and composition at the Conservatorium. He had erudite views on many topics and an original way of looking at the world. He not only started taking me to concerts and teaching me how to listen to music, but for a while was enamoured of me, writing beautiful love letters in magnificent prose. He told me that he loved my joie de vivre and the liveliness expressed in your eyes. I luxuriated in his friendship but was not interested in being his girlfriend. My parents liked him and would always welcome him warmly, seeing him as a good prospect. Daniel did wonders for my self-esteem. I started thinking of myself as an attractive young woman, though my shortness and need for glasses (still worn only when absolutely necessary) continued to bother me. I learned to flirt and boys called me a tease, something which I in my utter innocence did not understand.