Anton, seated beside me, was brimming with chatter. ‘Look, look,’ he cried ardently, ‘we are witnessing an event that should be engraved with golden letters in the annals of mankind. Jews are sitting around a table celebrating Passover, attended upon by an Egyptian crew, descendants of our former masters and pursuers.’ He turned to me. ‘I don’t mean to blaspheme,’ he muttered into my ear, ‘but I must share a thought with you. Do you believe it all really happened, or are we clinging to a cosy fairytale?’
‘Did what really happen?’ I asked.
‘The Exodus. Moses. Everything!’
‘Anton, please, it’s Passover,’ said Esther, who had tuned in to our private exchange.
‘And it will never stop being Passover,’ our shipfriend answered bitterly, ‘not to our dying days.’ He was probably seeing, in the candles burning on our table, the fires that had engulfed his mother’s home.
That night an almost visible heat hung over our sleeping quarters and I couldn’t settle. I walked out on deck to catch a breath of fresh air and there stood Anton Rakow, gazing into the depths of the sea. He greeted me with a dark smile and I embraced him. We leant against the railing in silence for a while. Then, like some homeless wind, he murmured: ‘And they turned my land into a heap of dung, and set the houses aflame, and the days were hot like the desert sand, and the nights a mount of ice.’
‘Let’s go, Anton,’ I urged him. ‘It’s late, very late. It’ll be sunrise soon.’
Melbourne
I had been seasick right throughout the voyage, but when they told me that the most stormy, most perilous stretch of sea lay between Fremantle and Melbourne, I felt as if a ton of bricks had been dumped on my heart. The prospect of having my body entombed beneath the waves was not too appealing. Esther endeavoured to borrow some money so that we could fly from Perth to Melbourne, but her efforts came to nothing. And so, as in the past, we left things to fate. To our pleasant surprise, the voyage towards our final port of call was enjoyable and peaceful.
More than ever before, passengers gathered on the deck, talking about the weather and other trivia, and of course discussing a subject very painful to Esther and me: Family. ‘I’m going to see my sister, I haven’t seen her for six years,’ a short man with a trembling voice shouted happily. ‘And also my uncle, my mother’s brother — he went to Australia in 1939, on the brink of war.’ The man beside him rejoiced at his companion’s good fortune. A young woman nearby remarked, ‘We’ll have a roof over our heads at last, and a warm bed.’
‘And what about us, whom are we going to see?’ Esther asked me, her face clouded. ‘Who will be there to welcome us?’
No one, I admitted to myself. No one, not here, and not back there.
The excitement and the chaos of emotions among those on board grew by the minute as we sailed through the heads and entered Port Phillip Bay. When we touched berth at Station Pier, and people leaned dangerously over the ship’s side, and names were shouted and yells of recognition rang out in the air, I was struck again by a dismal thought: We, Esther and I, are on the wrong ship; we don’t belong, we’re just two peripheral superfluous individuals. Then Esther was pushing her way through the throng, and suddenly I heard her hysterical cry:
‘Quick, Jacob, come quick! Someone is calling out your name!’
I elbowed my way past a couple who were leaping up and down, waving ecstatically, and I peered into the crowd of faces on the ramp below. And there he stood, my little school friend ‘Mendele’ — Mendl Blicblau.
‘Where is your luggage?’ he shouted. I held up our one suitcase above the railing. ‘Is that all?’ Quickly I lowered the suitcase down to him on a rope. We barely had time to say goodbye to Anton, who was continuing on to Sydney.
And a few minutes later, there we stood, shaking hands, squeezing each other’s shoulders.
‘I’ve been informed,’ said Mendl, who never minced his words, ‘that you are entitled to a place in one of our Jewish welfare society’s houses. But you have a choice,’ he continued. ‘You could come to us. I’ve prepared a bed for you in our flat, and temporary lodgings for Esther with your father’s friend Nusbaum, your librarian before the war. He lives upstairs from us.’
Not wanting to burden anybody, we decided on the Jewish welfare’s facilities.
Esther had not met Mendl before and didn’t know that his generous heart was easily masked by a frugality with words; that this was a man who adhered strongly to the economy of language. When we arrived at our temporary lodgings she could scarcely contain her tears of gratitude. ‘There’s no need to cry,’ Mendl assured her, ‘this is a free country. Tonight you’re eating with us,’ he added succinctly. ‘I’ll come for you at six-thirty.’
There were candles of welcome burning on the Blicblaus’ table as we entered their flat that evening. They had once been a family of seven. Four had survived: Mendl, his older brother Lipman, and two sisters, Rózia and Tobcia. No questions needed to be asked. They knew, and so did we.
And all at once it dawned on me that my friend Mendl and his siblings had already managed to replant, in remotest Melbourne, the warmth and decency of their parents’ home; a home where family life was not just an idea but a living thing.
Very few words were spent around the table, and yet there was so much said. The six of us, torn inside out, unable to return to the land of our birth, shared the knowledge that only four years ago we had been shortlisted to die — that our being here on this night was but a miscalculation in one of Hitler’s equations.
I soon discovered how Mendl had learnt of our arrival. He always read the published lists of newcomers, Tobcia explained, and whenever he spotted a name linked to his past, he was there to greet, to offer help, to clasp a hand.
Late that night, travelling back to our lodgings at the Jewish welfare house in Camberwell, my friend quietly slipped a ten-pound note into my pocket. It represented his weekly wages. ‘Please don’t say anything,’ he whispered. ‘You’ll repay me once you start earning money. You have come to a golden land.’
At daybreak the next morning I walked out to an amazingly peaceful world soaked in sun. In all my life I had never seen such lush greenery! I looked about me, took in the quiet, orderly street. A bed of brilliant yellow daisies against a fence caught my eye. Simultaneously, as if in a dream, they seemed to be reflecting my new golden country, my old yellow patch.
Snow on my Windowsill
Three days after we arrived Esther and I both had jobs in clothing factories — where, naturally, the bosses and some of the employees spoke Yiddish. We left the lodgings we had shared with another couple at the welfare society’s house and rented a room in a cottage at 68 Brunswick Road, Brunswick, from a pretty, red-headed divorcee with three beautiful children. The eldest, Kay, immediately began to teach us English songs.
We had come from Italy, where the price of a tram-fare was 500 lire, so when Mrs Francis told us that our rent would be 20 shillings a week, I promptly replied: ‘I’ll give you 25.’
The summer of 1948 was oppressively hot. For days on end, temperatures climbed well past 100 degrees Fahren-heit (40°C). I remember how Esther’s high heels punctured the pavements, and a hilarious radio newsreader announcing, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, another scorcher today. It will be 110 by noon, but I’ll give it to you for 99.’
Air-conditioning at the time was rare enough to be a dream, especially in clothing factories. This made our working day longer than it was. I sat next to a jesting prewar immigrant, Morris, a marvellous fellow who kept everybody’s spirits up. When I walked into our workroom on a Monday morning, he would say: ‘Chin up, man! Tomorrow evening is practically Wednesday, on Wednesday evening it’s already Thursday, and Friday is payday. If Adam had a life like this, he’d never have touched the apple.’ On one occasion he confided: ‘My grandfather, who lost his eyesight to old age, wore a heavy pair of glasses without lenses. If you asked him why, he’d answer, “Well, it’s better than nothing, isn’t it!”’
But when Morris buried his eyes in his work, when he let his needle fly like a kite attached to white yarn, he entered another reality. I would often hear him humming an old Yiddish folksong that carried the scent of tragedy. For Morris dwelt in a sad and murky past. He had come to Australia from Poland in August 1939 — Germany had already made up her mind how to deal with the land of his birth. He left behind a young wife and an infant girl, whose photos he carried in the pocket of his shirt. I realized that all his jesting was a façade, or perhaps a shield not only against collapse but to protect his heartache from intruders. At tea-break, when his joking tongue had run dry, he would divert his moist black eyes from mine in order to forestall any attempt at conversation — as if to plead, Let it go: permit me to suffer alone.
Despite all the settling-in difficulties we experienced in common with most migrants, we loved Melbourne from day one. I said to Esther, ‘How can one handle so much freedom, and such peace?’ We could eat and eat the good, healthy food without upsetting our stomachs, while our red-headed landlady and her children made us feel so at home that we soon became like a family.
One Friday night, after we had lit our candles, there was a faint knock on the door. It was our neighbour from number 66, a woman crippled by some disease; she was wheeled in by a tall man. She had come to beg Esther to let her gaze on the flickering candles for a while. ‘I am Jewish,’ she told us timidly, ‘but I married in a church. This is my husband, he’s Catholic.’ Tears rolled over her cheeks, wrinkled like old parchment. ‘He’s a wonderful, generous man, he looks after me as if I’m the child I never gave him. But the Sabbath candles, these Sabbath candles — oh, how I miss my mother’s Friday nights.’
It’s Saturday, the small hours, Brunswick Road lies enfolded in deep darkness. Suddenly Esther is awake, screaming. ‘They’re chasing me, help, please help me! The bricks are burning, they’re sticking to my feet like leeches!’
Esther’s nightmare was nothing new in her postwar life. It kept recurring, and it wasn’t the only one she had. Whenever her sleep was disturbed by another bad dream, it took her a few days to return to herself.
On one such morning we got up later than ever. There was tension in our small room. Esther stood in a corner, cutting bread on a fruit crate. ‘Will they ever let me go?’ she whispered. ‘Will they, or is this for life?’
Breakfast was sardines in oil, buttered bread and hot milk. To make up for the lost time we ate vigorously, without speaking. The silence was broken only by the music on our radio, and then the voice of our witty announcer: ‘The temperature has already reached 90, and our weather wizards are forecasting 110. But you good people out there know me better, I won’t allow it. Ha, ha, ha.’
It did bring a smile to Esther’s lips; and while she went to clean up in the kitchen, I quickly reached for a rag and wiped the windowsill free of snow.
Conversations
One Sunday morning about six months after our arrival, a young man with bushy hair and urgent eyes came to our door at 68 Brunswick Road. He wore a military-style grey-green jacket over a polo-neck shirt, and a pair of threadbare blue slacks that brushed the rubber thongs on his feet. Across his arm he carried a sheaf of newsprint.
‘Sir, would you like to buy a copy of the workers’ paper?’ he asked politely. Of course I obliged — I thought it was the right thing to do, if only out of gratitude for being let into Australia, though I knew it would be a struggle for me to read it. The following week the man showed up again.
Tutored by our landlady and her young daughter Kay, I was steadily learning to navigate the necessities of daily life in my new tongue, learning to explain myself and even to argue my case a little. So when, on his third visit, the young man remarked that ‘We in our party like to teach,’ I promptly asked, ‘Teach what?’
‘About socialism, sir, and Communism.’
‘No, thank you,’ I answered in my broken English, and tried to point out that in these matters I was already reasonably well taught. ‘I have read Marx and Engels and I do not like them, especially Marx, who said the bill of exchange is god of the Jews.’
The young man was stunned. He apologized forlornly and left, never to return.
Sunday mornings we usually spent at St Kilda beach. After that we would go to the Blicblaus’, where many newcomers just like us had found a home away from home. We would climb the staircase to their flat at 365 Beaconsfield Parade, a building inhabited mostly by Bundists who had lived through the war in Shanghai and, thanks to the generosity of Mina and Leo Fink (who were prominent communal philanthropists), had received small rooms here at nominal rent. These incurable Bundist universalists had dubbed the house ‘Karl-Marx-Hof’, in honour of the Austrian socialists and the original Karl-Marx-Hof, headquarters of the Schutzbund and site of the valiant but unsuccessful stand against the onslaught of Fascism in 1934.
On this occasion, as I reached the first-floor landing we were stopped by Motl Nusbaum, known among our party colleagues as Mottele. He had been a part-time librarian at the Bronisław Grosser Library in my city. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘just the man I want to talk to. Could I buy you a cup of coffee?’
How could I not accept? Signalling to Esther that she should continue on without me, I followed Motl back down the staircase. He was a man in his late forties, of slender build with thinning hair. He was known for his decency and fairness, and for being cautious with words.
‘So tell me,’ he began without preliminaries the moment we had sat down in the restaurant located in the basement of the building, ‘how was it over there? I don’t mean our city, we all know about that; but I’d like to hear from you, my friend Gershon’s son, what happened to our party. I know there are many versions, some of them contradicting others, and I can understand that — we don’t always see things the way they are but how we want them to be. Each version may have an element of truth as well as an element of fancy.’
‘How should I begin?’ I asked myself out loud, while Motl gazed into his coffee, stirring the murky liquid much longer than necessary.
‘Begin at the beginning,’ he suggested. ‘That’s always a good idea. And keep in mind that what was done can’t be undone. One cannot drive a river back into its mouth. What’s done can’t be undone,’ he repeated.
I tried to gather my thoughts. ‘Well, when the Germans marched in, the Bund leadership — like that of the Zionists, Communists and others — canoed into safer waters. Those who couldn’t were murdered outside the city, at Radegast. When the ghetto was established, a few among us appointed themselves as a so-called governing body of the party. Did they do the right thing? Were they politically mature enough to cope with our new reality? Maybe yes and maybe no. I don’t think I’m qualified to sit in judgment.’
‘And where was my old friend Gershon?’ he asked.
‘Father didn’t want to accept any position. He said he was too old, that the situation demanded younger, more daring people.’
‘I see.’
‘But of one thing I’m certain: that Germany’s and Austria’s workers joined the Nazis. And the Polish Socialist Party, whom we considered our trusted allies, kept an undignified silence in the face of the antisemitic plague that engulfed Poland. This had a devastating effect on our morale and damaged our once influential position among the Jewish communities.’
‘And how was it over there in Italy?’ Motl asked. ‘I mean, there are rumours that not everything was as it should be.’
I gave some evasive answer — not because I was afraid but because I didn’t want to hurt this good man, with his unbending loyalty to the Bund.
Eventually I would learn from Mendl
Blicblau that the management of our Roman collective had written to Jacob Waks — leader of the Bund in Australia and a friend of Arthur Calwell, minister for immigration at the time — to revoke my and Esther’s landing permit, on the grounds that I was a renegade. Luckily, Motl Nusbaum was present at that meeting and, in his customary manner, had quietly but firmly stated: ‘Comrades, I will take responsibility for my friend Gershon’s son.’
Berish
He walked in as Motl and I were about to order our second cup of coffee. ‘I’ll have it black,’ he said to the waitress, making himself at home at our table.
Berish, whom I had not met before, was known among his friends as ‘the grey man’, not just because of his grey hair and eyes, and the grey suit he always wore, but because of his sombre demeanour. Berish carried a grudge against his own life. Motl, whom he had befriended in Shanghai during the war years, had told me that Berish had been a noted writer in Warsaw, a member of the prestigious Yiddish Pen Club at Tłomacka 13. At present he was married to a wonderful woman, but was unable to forgive himself for the death of the young wife and baby girl he had left behind in Poland during the war. He thought his happiness was a mistake. ‘Decent people,’ Motl had remarked with a deep sigh, ‘find it hard to forgive themselves their own failings.’ Every year on his little girl’s birthday Berish bought a toy and gave it to a disadvantaged child.
‘And so, what are we discussing here today?’ Berish asked, taking a deep puff of the cigarette that was forever attached to his lips. He needed only one match to light his first cigarette in the morning: the rest of the day he spent in a cloud of grey smoke.
Sunrise West Page 10