Letter from my Father

by Dasia Black

  The Labour Party’s 1972 It’s Time campaign was a particularly exciting time for the boys, who were then thirteen and eleven years old. We joined throngs of people at the Randwick Town Hall to hear Gough Whitlam speak. Both boys proudly wore their T-shirts carrying the slogan. They were fired with enthusiasm at the coming of a new age. Later as young adults they joined the local youth branch of the party, where they formed the Brothers Block, usually being in agreement on different points of policy, after exhaustive discussions. Coming from a home where the relevance of politics to one’s life was tragically obvious, I found it gratifying that both my sons became interested in the political situation, both local and international.

  After graduation, as they moved into secondary education, I found a satisfying part-time job teaching Modern History to senior students at the nearby Catholic Girls High School. Over a period of two years I studied for a Master’s degree and eventually went on to a PhD. The day I picked up my PhD thesis from the printer, my first thought was that I wanted to show it to my father – and I did. I drove to the cemetery straight from the printer’s, sat by his graveside and showed it to him. He would have been proud and thrilled.

  When the boys were sixteen and fourteen years old, Richard and I decided that we would take them on a trip overseas, to open their eyes to the world beyond their homeland and for an enjoyable experience as a family. I had saved some money from my teaching and could not think of a better way of spending it. We went to all the musts: Florence and Rome; the Spanish jewels of Madrid and Toledo, Seville, Granada and Cordoba; Paris and the South of France; and of course Israel, to meet my cousins. Wherever there were stairs to climb to get to the top of a cathedral, the boys took them, each time informing us exactly how many there were. (Notre Dame in Paris has the most.) We had lots of good hearty meals together in charming little restaurants and bistros, with the boys joining us in a glass of red wine. Dinner was the time when we usually discussed the day’s impressions, including those of people we had met, and planned the next day. This was a wonderful time for us, though as the designated organiser, I became at times rather over-tired.

  While walking in a square in Seville, Spain, we noticed a group of young girls and boys sitting together around the central fountain, as one of them played a guitar. Jonathan approached them and after a brief exchange was handed the instrument. Watching my son play a soulful tune on the guitar amid a hushed group of young Spaniards was one of the trip’s memorable images.

  We tried to visit the Casino in Monte Carlo, but the three males, Richard, Simon and Jonathan, were not allowed in since their Aussie outfits of duffle coats and woollen scarves were not acceptable. Suits and ties were the required attire. We pleaded that we had come a long way – but rules were rules. Decorum had to be maintained.

  In Paris I managed to get tickets at concession prices on a night reserved for teachers and their families at the Opera House. Under the glorious Chagall ceiling we all saw Offen-bach’s Orpheus in the Underworld. We walked back to our little hotel on the Left Bank, carrying the delight of the music, the settings, the dancing and the Opera House itself within us.

  It was in Paris that we realised our sons were no longer children. To my amazement I allowed them to travel to and fro on the Metro without worrying too much. Perhaps the most long-lasting benefit of this holiday was the cementing of their friendship. Since they had to share a room for the first time in their lives, they developed a system of taking turns with the laundry and other chores. They also started calling one another Jim, a bonding term that stayed with them into their adulthood.

  Throughout all these years of bringing up my boys, I saw myself as a sensible mother encouraging her children’s growth towards independence, separating the pain of my childhood years from my role as a mother raising children in safe times in a country far from war. There was, however, always an underlying anxiety. I kept trying to do everything I could to prevent anything bad happening to them. It was a joke among our friends that no matter how short an excursion or outing, Ester could be relied upon to carry a first aid kit. There was disinfectant, in case they fell and scratched their knees, bandaids for everything, gauze to soak up blood, tummy tablets in case someone felt nauseous, suntan cream to reapply regularly on sunny days and always an extra jacket or sweater in case it got cold. When Simon gave his speech at the Town Hall and was instructed to get there on his own by bus, I was worried. Would he get off at the right stop? Would he be safe walking a couple of blocks along busy city streets and crossing a four-lane road on his own, obeying the traffic lights? I could not shame him by offering to drive him into the city, so I let him get on the bus and then followed it in, driving slowly so that I could observe my Simon alight and walk confidently towards his destination. Of course, I never told him what I had done.

  It is difficult to catch the quality of one’s life as a mother, because all the time we are so fully engaged with the daily tasks of providing and caring for our growing children that there is little time left to reflect or question. But I do know that during these years I was full of energy and had a vivid sense of being alive. It was a good time, a time of stability and normal living. I was truly blessed.

  IX

  Coming out of Hiding

  Avoiding confrontation and disapproval was still deeply embedded in my psyche. It was only from the safety of a stable marriage and motherhood that I found myself able to take steps towards liberation from the frightened child who still cowered within me.

  I was asked to contribute a chapter to a book called Light from the Ashes. In it, social scientists who were child Holocaust survivors or refugees reflected on the impact of their experiences upon the paths they had followed in their professional lives. A common theme was the desire to find ways of managing inter-ethnic conflict, as well as discussing how human beings survive under extreme conditions.

  In reflecting on my life, I realised that the motivation for my research on the development of racial attitudes in children was a deep-seated concern and respect for the dignity of fellow human beings, particularly young ones, regardless of the colour of their skin, their ethnicity or their religion.

  Writing the chapter was both educational and painful, since I acknowledged little Ester, so sensitive to any sign of danger, who had quickly learned to fear death and those who were in a position of power to hurt her and her family. She had discovered that calling yourself by your real name, asserting who you were, your religion, beliefs and ideas, were all actions fraught with danger. Survival entailed keeping quiet to fit in with the demands of threatening environments: the forest at night when the Nazis were passing through Mikulince; the Zbaraz ghetto when the SS were hammering at the door; having to pretend to be Stasia, an Aryan child, or later Hedda, an adopted child who must never talk about her natural parents.

  During my period teaching at the Catholic Girls’ High School, an incident occurred that put my growing assertiveness and my determination to come out of hiding to the test. The Cardinal was coming to visit the school. All teachers, including me, were lined up on a central balcony on the first floor of the U-shaped building, with a thousand girls standing in orderly lines in the quadrangle below, gazing up at us. We were told that the Cardinal would walk along the balcony and greet each teacher. At that moment we should kneel and kiss the ring on his proffered hand.

  When he entered, all the students knelt down. So did the teachers, and when he reached them, each dutifully kissed his ring. With my whole being I knew that I was not going to kneel to anybody nor kiss their ring. I no longer had to. As he came closer, I could feel my heart beating fast. I broke into a sweat and went red in the face. There he was in front of me, with his bejewelled hand extended to be kissed. I remained standing very upright, extended my hand towards his and shook it. I was the only one standing, visible to all. He moved on to the next person, unfazed.

  I knew I had shown courage but it was so hard to announce to the world that I was not one of them, that I was a Jew. At the
end of that day I went home, got into bed, covered myself with a blanket and stayed curled up for hours. I could not stop shaking.

  Three years later my restless ambition and need for stimulation propelled me towards enrolling in a Master’s in Education. For my thesis, I chose to investigate whether students’ ability to think rationally could be developed by their study of History. I took a year off work to give me time to research and write it. But then, after steadily working on the thesis for six months, something unexpected happened. I rebelled. I did not want to continue with this topic. I did not care about the subject and nor did I care that I had already devoted half a year to it and that giving it up was not a rational thing for me to do.

  What I really wanted to do was explore how children develop a sense of what is fair, what is right and wrong. Of particular interest was the question of how they judged people distant in place or time as compared with people they knew. I threw myself into my chosen project with great vigour and completed my thesis in record time. Something had shifted in me, though at the time I did not understand how or why. I was beginning to ask myself questions about what mattered to me, what I wanted rather than what was sensible and expected or approved by others. My supervisor at the University of New South Wales noted:

  Originally Ester was conservative in her approach and concerned to have clear-cut guidelines and firm leadership. As she became more involved in Child Development, she became aware that the area contained dimensions of thinking in which she previously had not been comfortable. I admire her willingness to look into this new approach.

  At the end of my studies, I applied for a number of positions to lecture in Education at tertiary level. The first offer came from the Northern College of Education, a small institution that was converting from a teachers’ college into a College of Advanced Education (CAE). I accepted immediately, grateful for the offer. One evening a week later, I received a phone call from the head of Sydney Teachers’ College, an adjunct of Sydney University, also offering me a lectureship. I could hardly believe it was being offered to me, since this was a position to which I had fervently aspired. A good two months before the beginning of the academic year it would have been acceptable to withdraw my acceptance of the first offer. Most people would have done it at once. But beset by doubts I sat and talked with Richard for hours and phoned friends for advice. I argued mainly with myself. Would changing my mind be a nice thing to do? And just as if it were my anxious mother speaking, I asked myself: Where will they appreciate me most? Which job is safer? I did not ask which would challenge me more nor which would in the long-term be more professionally rewarding. So I refused the offer I wanted and took the position that was in my view second-best. It was a bad decision. I became a relatively big fish in a small pond and avoided the challenge of starting as a small fish in an ever-expanding and potentially exciting ocean.

  The job at the Northern College did fit in well with my family responsibilities at the time and indeed I found it rewarding. I became a competent and respected lecturer on Child Development and started doing research in the area. As one of the few lecturers from a non-English-speaking (NESB) background, I was asked if I would like to develop a course in Multicultural Education, in the 1980s an expanding area. The course included examining the impact of migration on newly-arrived migrant students and their parents. My first response was to refuse. This was too close to home. It might trigger unnecessary pain. But I did take it on– and yes, it was emotionally draining. But I was able better to understand my parents’ reactions to being ‘reffos’, the loss of status that my father had suffered and how I was still carrying within me the little migrant girl I had been.

  This work became a passion. I designed research projects, obtained funding and wrote and spoke on the topic, as if driven. Yet here again I found myself in the minority, one of two Jews among a staff of 120. Although I enjoyed the opportunity of working closely and forming friendships with colleagues from an Anglo-Celtic background, many of whom could trace their families back a number of generations in Australia, I was always marked out as the New Australian with the foreign accent. My colleagues were, in the eyes of the world and in their own, the only true Australians. Most of the time I felt that now I was one of them, that we talked the same language, read the same books, enjoyed bush-walking together and shared the same values. It was much more comfortable to ignore the gulf between us. But I knew we were different. Here were people who were living close to the places where they had been born and attended their first schools, who knew their grandparents and for whom continuity of past and future were natural and unexamined.

  Close as we were, how could I and my friend Jane relate to the innermost cores of our lives? She was one of ten siblings all of whom had grown to adulthood together, maintained relationships and lived within travelling distance of one another. She was not bereft of family and did not have that hunger to meet someone who came from the same genetic pool. She was able to assert herself without an instinctive fear of dire repercussions.

  At the same time, I enjoyed being able to move from being an accepted member of this Anglo-Australian group to my group of friends embedded within the Jewish community. It meant, to use a Canadian description, being a double reed, doubly strong. There were instances, however, when I was rudely reminded of the stereotypes my colleagues carried towards a person from a non-English-speaking background. When I was awarded my PhD, my colleagues took me out to lunch in a lovely little café in North Sydney where our campus was located. How nice, I thought, but found their behaviour on that occasion rather strange. Over lunch, nobody mentioned the PhD, nobody proposed a toast to it or me, and I felt resentment that this migrant woman was the first in the group to get her doctorate. What really hurt was that those lunching included my closest friends.

  There was also something else within me that delayed my progress and promotion. On several occasions, the Head of Department approached me to take on the role of Acting Head while he was on leave. Would I take on the School Experience division, dealing with students’ teaching practice in schools? Each time I considered an offer that other colleagues, less qualified than me, would have grabbed, something in me shrank and I said no. I was confident in my academic role as teacher and researcher and quite happy to take charge of a course organising lecture material, training tutors and counselling students. But when these extended into leadership, I found I was frightened. I did not want to take on a position of authority where I might need to take responsibility for making unpopular decisions. I could not stand alone, confront people or make mistakes.

  My fears were not unfounded. Soon after being appointed to a senior lectureship, I ran a workshop for people in my department. Its theme was the pros and cons of being a member of the dominant majority group in society, the ingroup, versus the minority group, the out-group. One of my colleagues, a personal friend whose background was an oldestablished Anglo-Australian family, unexpectedly showed her resentment. She seemed jealous of my promotion and bristled at the fact that I had met the new Vice-Chancellor socially, prior to his appointment. It appeared it was acceptable for her to be nice, in fact most hospitable to the little Polish woman while that little woman was in an inferior position but not when she moved up to one that rightly belonged to my friend, apparently by divine right of birth.

  I delved into the area of prejudice and racism and came to understand that what was holding me back was within me, a type of internalised oppression. But I was no longer that little helpless child dependent on others’ approval and care. I was a resourceful adult who could live with anxiety. I kept putting myself to the test. At a conference dealing with strategies for combating racism, I listened with great interest to the insightful comments of a woman of non-Jewish Polish background. At the end of the session I approached her and introduced myself as Ester. I added that Ester was not, of course, a Polish name and that I was a Zydowka, the Polish word for Jewess. She replied that she knew that and we cordially made a time to meet the
next day to talk about our work. As she left, I turned to my friend Lorna, who was with me, and said I feel awful. I was shaking. I had broken into a sweat and felt quite giddy. We sat down on a bench and she held me while I calmed myself down with deep slow breathing. I told her that I had never before uttered the word Zydowka, a word that in my childhood was associated with death. I was stunned by my physiological reaction. We went on to discuss the sheer power of the word.

  The following day when I met my Polish colleague, I told her about my reaction and asked whether Zydowka had frightening connotations for her. Yes, she replied, there is no worse word in the Polish language.

  The profound shift in my academic work carried over into my personal life. After twenty years of marriage, with my sons on the threshold of adulthood, I rebelled. I was fed up with being so hard-working and responsible and dutiful, and striving to do everything well: motherhood, work, friendship. I had entertained with style, planning menus, decorating tables and even devising topics of conversation to fill awkward pauses. Nicole, my friend and colleague once burst out: For heaven’s sake, Ester, can’t you have any junk in your life? Does it all have to be worthwhile? Go and eat a fat hamburger from MacDonald’s. It will do you good.

  For the first time, I understood her. I was overcome with a great lust for life. I dreamed of passion and lightness. I learned to sail on Sydney’s beautiful Harbour and to ski. I wanted to climb mountains. But every time I said to Richard: Let’s go dancing or We could go skiing, he would reply: You know I hate parties or Skiing is far too expensive. He seemed to prefer sitting at home, doing as little as possible. Compared with his peers, he showed little drive to improve his business and our income. He was a discouraged man.