Out of Tune

by Margaret Helfgott

  After leaving Palestine, my father ended up rejoining the navy. In the early 1930s this took him to Australia, where he decided to settle, becoming a naturalized Australian citizen in 1936 at the age of thirty-three. Before that my father had paid one more brief visit to Poland; he missed his family, particularly his mother, whom he still cared deeply about in spite of having run away.

  Once in Australia, he went to Melbourne, a place where many of the Jews from Czestochowa and nearby towns went to in those days. What usually happened was that someone from a particular town, often when fleeing pogroms, arrived in a certain city and then wrote to his friends and relatives to come out and join him there. Thus many Polish Jews bound for Australia ended up in Melbourne while Jews from Hungary, for example, tended to go to Sydney. The Jews would build up a landsmanschaft, an informal organization for Jewish people who came from the same town in Poland. Self-help has long been a very strong trait of the Jewish people: with the huddled, supersupportive communalism of the Diaspora, one could say the shtetl was the epitome of self-help, and these traditions were continued in Melbourne and Perth.

  By the time my father arrived, the Jewish community in Melbourne was already well established, having been officially created in 1841, which was only six years after the foundation of Melbourne itself. In fact, two of the fifteen members of the Port Phillip Association who founded Melbourne in 1835 were Jewish, and since then Jews have done extremely well there. Indeed, the city’s two most honored citizens, Sir John Monash and Sir Isaac Isaacs, were both Jewish. When Monash (who commanded the Australian and New Zealand forces during World War I) died in 1931, tens of thousands of people lined the route of his state funeral procession in what was one of the biggest funerals Australia has ever witnessed. Sir Isaac Isaacs—the son of a Polish-born tailor who went on to become Australia’s first native-born governor-general—also received a state funeral. There were several other prominent Jews. For example, Edward Cohen was mayor of Melbourne in the 1860s, and Sir Benjamin Benjamin was mayor in the 1880s.

  On arriving in Melbourne, my father lived in a little cottage in Pigdon Street in an area called Carlton, near the center of the city. Carlton used to be a poor working-class district full of Jewish refugee families, but today it has become a fashionable neighborhood, filled with designer boutiques, spaghetti bars, and ice cream shops. Peter tried his hand at a number of trades. He started a clothing company called Original Suits and he opened a tailoring factory, primarily for the manufacture of ladies’ clothing, in a little lane at the top of Bourke Street in the center of Melbourne. My father would cut, design, sew, and make up garments, as well as deal with all the mechanical aspects of the machinery. (It was very common for Melbourne Jews, particularly at that time, to work in the garment industry.)

  By nature my father was a very creative and enthusiastic person, always thinking up new schemes. Among other things, he invented a pressing machine for ironing clothes. The machine was designed to lift up the very heavy irons and presses used in tailoring factories, thus taking the weight off the person operating the iron. My father’s machine was fairly successful and he sold at least twenty. He also invented a special kind of boiler.

  He tried his hand at a number of inventions, but he didn’t make much money from them. He also had several partnerships over the years, but his businesses were usually failures. As his good friend Ivan Rostkier recalls, his trusting personality meant that even though some of the businesses went well, his ideas were often copied by others and he was taken advantage of.

  Although it was reasonably successful at first and he employed twelve people there, his clothing factory eventually went bankrupt. My father, who was very good at adapting to changing circumstances, then turned the premises into a coffee lounge. A self-taught musician, he used to entertain the customers in the evenings by playing the violin and piano and sometimes also singing. The place was apparently very successful and people have often talked to me about its enjoyable atmosphere and lively ambience. “It was the hot spot of Jewish immigrant life in Melbourne,” one of my father’s old friends told me. It was also of great significance because it is there where he met my mother in 1939.

  My mother, Rae, was the eldest of five children. She was born in 1920, her brother Morry was born in 1922, her half-brother Johnny in 1924, and her two younger half-sisters Gutka and Henya in 1926 and 1928. My mother’s father, Mordechai, was a very poor tailor. The whole family lived in a three-room flat in Czestochowa and Morry and Johnny had to sleep together in a box. In the daytime, Mordechai would close up the box and convert it into a work top for cutting coats and doing his tailoring work. My mother shared a small bed with her little sister Gutka.

  After the widespread pogroms in Poland in 1936, and with Hitler intensifying both his expansionist and his anti-Semitic policies, Mordechai was desperate to flee Europe. He decided the family should move to Australia, where a brother of his had already settled and could secure them visas. But my grandfather didn’t have enough money to buy tickets for everyone, so it was decided that he should travel first with the older children, and that Rae’s stepmother Bronia and the three younger siblings would follow them a short while later.

  My mother, Mordechai, and Morry bade an emotional farewell to the rest of the family, confident they would soon be reunited in Australia. But with the outbreak of war the other half of the family became trapped. It was not until 1946 that Bronia (having survived Bergen-Belsen) and Johnny (who survived Buchenwald) were finally to make it to Australia. The two youngest girls, Gutka and Henya, were gassed to death in Treblinka.

  But my mother sailed from a port near Gdansk on the Baltic Sea on November 6, 1938, and arrived in Melbourne seven weeks later, on Christmas Day.

  It was at his coffee lounge one evening when my mother went to go dancing that she first met my father. Dances were often held there in the evening, when the place changed from a serene central European-style coffeehouse to a boisterous dance hall. My mother loved to dance, especially to the kind of music that was popular at the time: waltzes such as Strauss’s “The Blue Danube,” big band music such as Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” and “Moonlight Serenade,” or the swinging sounds of Benny Goodman. My mother says that the dances held at my father’s coffee lounge were grand affairs, with the upbeat music and lively crowds mingling to produce a superb atmosphere.

  When Peter saw Rae, who was seventeen years his junior, he fell for her at first sight, an attraction and love that was to remain steadfast for the rest of his life. My mother, then eighteen, was exceptionally pretty, with dark wavy hair and brown eyes. Peter was short and stocky. He had a round face and wore glasses, which were often perched on top of his head; he had thick curly hair (similar to David’s) that was to thin out over the years, and clear intelligent blue eyes that were completely lacking in guile. He was of pleasant appearance, though not especially handsome. My mother tells me she found him good-looking, and was dazzled by his charm and fascinating conversation, and was happy to accept his invitation to dance.

  My father courted her assiduously for five years, of which they went out for three, until they got married in 1944. According to my mother, my father had a few girlfriends before he met her, and she had been out with a few boys, too, but once they met they had eyes only for each other.

  “I had other proposals of marriage,” my mother told my brother Leslie and me recently, “but I wanted to marry only him, and he wanted to marry only me. He was helpful and considerate, whether in carrying my bags, taking me shopping, buying me flowers, or going out and buying me oranges and squeezing fresh juice for me. He was very solicitous and used to treat me like a queen.”

  About their marriage she said, “Peter was a very good husband. More than this he was also a good friend. When I met him I was actually pretty run down, worried day and night about my family in Poland, and working extremely hard to save money to bring them out to safety. Peter would comfort me; he was so tender and reassuring. He used to call me his litt
le ‘Pupechka’ [a word derived from Polish, meaning ‘doll’]. He was like a rock of stability and loyalty to me. And he remained so throughout the rest of his life.”

  Initially my mother’s father thought Peter might be a bit too old for her but in the end he gave his permission for them to get married. The wedding, in the Carlton Orthodox synagogue in April 1944, was small, with about thirty guests, and was followed by a reception in a nearby hall. “It was the happiest day of my life—the only sad note was the absence of our missing families in Europe,” my father told me many years later. After more than a quarter century of wandering, Pinchas Elias Helfgott had finally found a wife he loved and was ready to start a new life with a family of his own.

  3

  FAMILY LIFE

  I was born in March 1945, the eldest of five children. Next came David, born two years and two months later in May 1947. Leslie arrived in 1951, Suzie in 1953, and Louise, who is fourteen years my junior, in 1959. Unlike elder children in some families, who can be jealous of younger arrivals, we were all very excited and thrilled about each new addition to the family. The atmosphere in our house was warm and vital and we all got on well with one another. David and I in particular were very close and did many things together from an early age.

  In accordance with Jewish custom, David was named after my father’s father and I was named after my father’s mother, Malka, which means “queen” in Hebrew. However, growing up in Australia, it was thought best to anglicize my name, so I became Margaret, which is actually on my birth certificate although Malka remains my Hebrew name. My second name, Chaya, is that of my maternal grandmother and is also Hebrew. It means “life.” David is both my brother’s Hebrew and English name, and he wasn’t given a middle name.

  Some of my earliest memories, from when I was about three years old, are of my father singing me lullabies as he gently rocked me to sleep. His and my favorite was “Ma Curly-Headed Babby,” which is a wonderful old African-American plantation song. My father would take me on his knees and hold me in his arms and sing me its sweet-sounding words and melody. He seemed to know instinctively how to put a young child to sleep with the sounds of the music.

  Although my father had left school at fourteen when he ran away from Poland, he had a great respect for education. He was an autodidact—most of the knowledge that he acquired was through his own interest and motivation—and he read a great deal. His native languages were first Yiddish and then Polish, and he had taught himself to read and write in English in his twenties. He loved reading books on physics, astronomy, nature, and so on. He encouraged all of his children to read, not only factual books but great literature, too—French writers such as Rolland, Zola, and Flaubert and Russian novelists such as Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky. The love of reading that my father instilled in me as a child has continued to this day, and I still read at least one novel every week, as well as much nonfiction.

  The extent of my father’s self-education was remarkable. He came from a background that was in many ways unworldly. Until he ran away he had been to a heder, a Jewish religious school at which practically no secular studies were taught. His own father’s reading was mainly limited to the Torah (the five books of Moses) and the Talmud (the collection of writings constituting Jewish civil and religious laws). Yet Peter was very intellectual, very musical; he was creative, an inventor, a passionate lover of life, and an idealist. At the same time, he was very conscious that he should help my mother with the cooking and shopping. He had felt uncomfortable as a child in Kamyk, where his father spent much of the day praying while his mother did all the housework.

  He was always teaching us things, but in a very natural way. He used to point at the stars and tell us about astronomy. He told us which was the closest star, how many light-years away it was, what it was called. He explained how the atom is constructed and about molecules and protons and neutrons. And all this he taught us at a very young age, when I was about ten. He had a remarkable ability to explain even the most difficult and complicated scientific facts in a very clear and comprehensible way, and we would understand in an instant what he was talking about. We would sit around the kitchen table and he would draw us a chart on a piece of paper. Once I remember him cutting up a cake as a way of trying to explain how the atom could be split. “Isn’t it incredible?” he would say, his eyes lighting up with awe as we sat there gripped. I tried to imagine just how minute these little particles that we couldn’t even see were. I often wish that the teachers I had later had explained things as well as my father did when we were children.

  He also taught us all to play chess. We would play with him or play among ourselves. These games were not only a lot of fun—we often held friendly family competitions—but I think that in many ways they actually prepared us for life. Chess always requires planning your next moves, charting out a course of action: life requires such forward-thinking, too. My father explained in a fascinating way what each piece could do, what powers they were invested with. These games—David and myself, Dad and David, Dad and myself, and so on—were an integral part of growing up in the Helfgott household.

  My father’s great love of life extended to animals and nature, too. He would buy David and me all sorts of books on animals, especially ones about the big cats (lions, tigers, leopards) and we all took a great deal of interest in the cat world. Our house was always home to many ordinary domestic cats. At one stage we had six, including a mother cat that had litters from time to time. As kids we spent a lot of time playing games with the kittens. David loved cats— they used to sit on top of the piano while he played—and as an adult, he named his cats after composers, Debussy and Rachmaninoff.

  And of course, above all, Dad taught us music, which I shall discuss in Chapter 5.

  My father also placed great stress on the importance of physical education. David in particular became very strong physically. He could walk up and down on his hands for about a half hour nonstop in the backyard. My father taught us how to do this and David’s powers of balance were quite remarkable. Nowadays, David still does a lot of exercise; he goes swimming for lengthy periods almost every day and is very fit.

  As children, we were constantly doing somersaults and exercises. Cartwheels were my favorite—I imagined I was a Russian acrobat. Later, in Perth, my father actually built a couple of parallel bars in the backyard. He used to whirl himself around them, even though he was over fifty—he had learned how to do this in the circus. Though we didn’t manage that particular exercise, David and I were very conscious of keeping fit. As far as I’m aware, the habit of walking on the hands was unique to our household in Melbourne and also later in Perth. No doubt this helped David build up very strong hands for the piano.

  We lived in a number of homes growing up, all of which were rented. It was in fact my brother Leslie who bought the first Helfgott home years later in Perth—my father contributed to the cost of Leslie’s house but the bulk of it was paid by Leslie, who earned the money by traveling to the north of the state to work as an electrician, which paid very well.

  In Melbourne, we lived in an apartment on Glenhuntly Road in an area called Elsternwick. The apartment had a big living room and a dining room connected by double glass doors, which my father removed in order to put up a swing. We had lots of fun taking it in turns to swing around at home.

  I also have particularly fond memories of Friday nights during my childhood. Friday night was always party night. Even though he was a man of modest means, and often went through periods of financial hardship, my father would always arrive home from work on a Friday night with sweets, cakes, soft drinks, chocolates, and all sorts of goodies, and we had these wonderful parties. Dad wasn’t a religious person—in fact quite the opposite—but he nevertheless chose to hold the parties on Friday nights, when Jewish families would come together for a meal at home to celebrate the beginning of the Sabbath.

  We were really quite poor growing up. For many years, we didn’t even have sufficient ga
s or electricity for hot running water. I remember as a child we could have a bath only once a week and had to make do with a wash in cold water on other days. Having a bath was a big event and the whole procedure of preparing it took hours. We had to chop the wood in our backyard, stoke up a fire, wait for about an hour until the water got hot, and then fill up a bath. My father did most of the work but we helped with the chopping sometimes.

  The first time we had hot water heated by gas was many years later when we moved to South Perth; it was like a miracle. Even now I regard hot water as something to be treasured: the luxury of just turning on a tap and having hot water gush out. On the other hand, chopping the wood was very good exercise and could be fun—except when the ax got stuck in the wood and my father had to come and pry it out.

  Although we may not have had all the little luxuries that many other people take for granted growing up, our childhood was certainly never boring—there was music; there were political and philosophical discussions; there were animals, astronomy, chess—always something interesting and lively going on. The atmosphere at home could hardly have contrasted more completely with that depicted in Shine, where our house is portrayed as being very dark and oppressive. In the film, my father’s entrances are often accompanied by ominous music and fearful glances. To describe my father as a “tyrant” or “brutal,” as critics and journalists who know him only through the film have done, is a total travesty of the truth. To describe him as “slightly less lovable than Himmler” or speaking like the “führer” is quite absurd.

  In fact we had a lot of freedom as children, so much so that David and I used to draw all over the walls of the lounge with crayons and pencils, making an absolute mess. But we were never told off for this. It didn’t seem to worry my parents and they didn’t mention it.