Sunrise West

by Jacob G. Rosenberg

  After Klaus had successfully discharged his mission, he began to rely more and more on his Jewish ‘assistant’ because he knew that Nahum was the finest craftsman in the land. When the Germans finally pulled back from Warsaw they took Nahum with them, hoping there would still be another chance to make supermen out of cripples. But the war had turned; now, every general wanted to pass for a miserable private. Nahum was placed in a camp somewhere in Austria, from which he was liberated in the early days of May 1945 by two American Jewish paratroopers, with one of whom he would remain in contact for the rest of his life.

  Clothiers

  It was almost immoral for a clothier not to take his morning break in the Tango coffee shop in Flinders Lane, at the heart of Australia’s haute couture. On my third visit I had the good luck to encounter a man whose voice I heard before he emerged from a haze of cigar smoke. ‘You must be new,’ he said. ‘So what are you having, white? — or just black, like me?’

  He didn’t give me a chance to answer. ‘This is a marvellous place, my friend. You may not realize, but you’ve just entered Melbourne’s sartorial bazaar. Here, my boy, if you watch with your ears, you can pick up the quixotic whisper of a swift silver needle, the golden gossip of a rising Midas, the sigh of a sucker gone to the wall...’

  And so, between a sip and a sip, a wink and a hint, I learnt that in this establishment, Albert — clothier, manufacturer, fashion designer — was like an all-knowing sage. He was in his mid-forties, tall, effervescent, not ugly but certainly not handsome, with ginger eyebrows and moustache, and yolky hair slightly balding at the top. He sat as if posing for a painter, his unbuttoned camel coat revealing a brown suit and a green silk cravat, while the manicured little finger of his left hand was adorned with a chunky ring. From his language, his wit and his manner I conjectured that he must be a bohemian-turned-businessman. What attracted me was his sense of humour and, as I soon discovered, his ability to laugh at himself.

  ‘Fashion people,’ he told me once, ‘whether men or women, are divided into three categories. The first sleep with their buyer — this, my friend, is the aristocracy and against them there’s no hope of competing. The second entertain the models — they have a great time, but finish up as beggars. And the third are the puritans — they are the bribers.

  ‘I have done well, my friend,’ he went on in his deep, resonant voice, ‘in fact, very well. And do you know why? Because I worked on all three fronts. But to follow my example, one must be an artist, a clown — and clowns, my boy, make everyone laugh but themselves. So devise a smoother way for yourself than mine, and you’ll be a happy man.’

  Needless to say, from our very first encounter Albert became my coffee companion. The moment the arms of the factory clock pointed to 10 a.m. I was off to meet with this witty new acquaintance.

  ‘I can tell you,’ Albert confided during one of our early get-togethers, ‘some of the people who frequent this coffee shop could be world-famous magicians. Anyone who can’t make warm buttered rolls from frozen snow, so to speak, is wasting his time in the rag trade. You see that man over there, hunched over a fashion magazine full of ladies’ swim-wear? His name is Laurence. He may give you the impression that he’s reading, but he’s not. He’s actually undressing each girl on every page. He touches their breasts and private parts, makes them promises, invites them to bed and has a ball. Walter Mitty type, if you know what I mean.

  ‘Before he arrived in this country Laurence was a lawyer, but here they wouldn’t let him practise his profession. So he became a milkbar owner, and then a clothing manufacturer. I must say he did quite well, though of course he didn’t have a clue about the fashion industry. Future scholars will be amazed at how former lawyers, architects and doctors became the foremost clothiers in Australia, while the true tailors eked out a living behind their dusty sewing-machines.’

  And Albert proceeded to tell me the later history of the fellow in question. ‘Laurence was quite smart and did rather well, as I said. But who’s to know why a man who has a sweet wife and a fine little boy, and has bought a nice house in the suburbs, would start entertaining a young girl — one of his models, an innocent, willowy blonde fresh from modelling school?’ Here Albert grew pensive and scanned the smokefilled void. ‘Yes, my boy, innocence has been the cause of many a tragedy. Smart Laurence lost his head, took Innocence interstate, wined and dined her, till finally she opened.’

  ‘Did his wife ever find out?’

  ‘Of course. She took their boy, their house and his money, and left. As for the blonde — she soon found someone else to tango with.’

  My Husband’s Son

  The clothing industry was permeated with a myriad of interesting characters. Kurt Timber was a man of medium build, with eyes like bullet holes and a scalp like a polished mirror. He had made a miraculous escape from the land that, for twelve years, was absent from the map of civilization, and arrived in Melbourne at a time when peace had hypothetically been granted a place around the table of the family of nations.

  His background was in business, and no sooner had he sniffed out the possibilities of the moment than he opened a small ladieswear shop in Collingwood. His wife Dora, a stout, wise and good-hearted woman with a pleasing manner, helped Kurt to build up his ‘Emporium’, but his ambitions reached far beyond Collingwood: he dreamt of establishing himself in Footscray, Moonee Ponds, Bendigo, Ballarat, and other working-class areas, upholding an old bourgeois maxim: Work with the poor, and you’ll drink with the rich. Needless to say, this burning desire to climb to the apex of his trade gave him sleepless nights; maybe as a diversion, or perhaps as a means of lulling himself to sleep, he fathered three boys.

  Kurt, opinionated and cocksure, was only an outwardly happy man. My link with him was commercial, yet between a word and a word I realized that he was not too fond of family life. Possibly his natural urges had trapped him into a marriage he soon regretted. He once asked me if I was married, and without waiting for my answer observed that family wasn’t everything, that a man should aspire to shine in society.

  One had to admit that Kurt knew exactly what to buy and what not to touch. Consequently his enterprise grew from month to month until finally it became an enormous success. This prosperity must have proved too much for Dora to handle, so after consulting with her husband and securing his approval she became a full-time housewife and mother to their three toddlers. As a result of Dora’s withdrawal, Laura, a popular 25-year-old salesgirl, took her place as manageress. She was a modest young woman, with a pallid face that belied a pair of dark, almost beckoning eyes, and a light coquettish walk that made her behind wiggle provocatively.

  Although Kurt had a razor-sharp mind, he somehow kept forgetting to settle his accounts. One had to send him reminders, and eventually turn up at his shop — though in the end everybody was paid, for Kurt was no swindler. But because his business had grown so formidable, he was always short of cash. Besides, despite now having outlets all over Melbourne, he insisted (doubtless for superstitious reasons) on retaining his original Collingwood shop as his central office.

  On one occasion, hoping to obtain an order, I went to see him with some new samples. As I entered the Collingwood shop, Jayne, the senior saleslady, a worldly woman, gravely pressed her finger to her lips and pointed at the stud wall that separated Kurt’s office from the commercial floor space. At that moment I heard Laura’s unmistakable but suppressed voice, as if smothering a cry. ‘What was that?’ I whispered. ‘They’re resting,’ Jayne murmured with a mischievous smile.

  Not long afterwards, for no apparent reason, Laura suddenly disappeared from the scene — she simply vanished, like a phantom. The clothing world was abuzz with rumours: Laura had been sacked! She had suffered a nervous breakdown! She had slashed her wrists! When I eventually quizzed Jayne, she again pressed her finger to her lips (though there was no one else around) and whispered, ‘Resting.’

  About a year later, Laura — looking worn out, thin and paler than ever —
reappeared as suddenly as she had vanished. Her eyes still held that tantalizing gaze, and life at the Collingwood shop seemed to return to its former saunter. Kurt was doing so well that he soon found a place among the community’s officialdom. Evidently, the old precept had lost none of its lustre: The man who counts is not the one who writes the book, but the one who writes the cheque.

  And so, finding himself in clover, Kurt happily undertook a combined business-and-pleasure journey to America — but sadly arrived back home in a coffin. He had not been particularly well-liked, yet his demise had a dampening, dispiriting effect on the whole community. Hundreds of people attended his funeral and there was an abundance of heart-wrenching valedictions.

  I consoled Dora by letter, and the shattered Laura in person. After a while Laura, with whom I had become quite friendly, told me that she had been notified by Kurt’s solicitor, a certain Harold Kent, that it was in her vital interests to show up at the reading of Kurt’s last will and testament.

  So she had arrived at the firm’s city offices, holding tightly to her little boy’s hand, and nervously climbed the marble steps leading to the lawyer’s first-floor rooms. She had gathered up her courage, knocked on the heavy, ominous-looking door, and pushed it open. To her astonishment, there was Dora, walking towards her with open arms and a forlorn smile. She escorted them in; then, pointing to the frightened child, announced: ‘Mr Kent, please meet my husband’s youngest son.’

  Trojan Horse

  At about this time I made the acquaintance of a leading rabbi, a great Talmudic scholar. We were both members of a writers’ club and our love of Yiddish helped to cement a friendship, though we never became what you might call bosom buddies. After all, he knew that I dwelt outside his religious equation, that I came from the far-removed opposite end of the ideological spectrum.

  Whenever we met, he never stopped questioning me about how it had been over there: incarceration, abandonment, loneliness, and then, when all hope had vanished, when life was ebbing away by the minute — freedom! ‘Did you not see God’s hand in that?’ he asked me.

  ‘Rabbi, I don’t mean to offend,’ I replied, ‘but for a man who saw his parents, siblings and thousands of little children exterminated like rats, to believe that God had a hand in my liberation is not only to acknowledge His betrayal but to exonerate men’s villainy.’

  And I proceeded to tell him how, right after the war, as our survivors emerged from the camps into a desolated and meaningless world — a world in which Hitler had almost succeeded in reversing creation — the idea of converting began to spread. Forget the rabbis, the synagogues, the teachings of a Torah that had failed to fulfil its promises; let’s join with the greater majority, the broader river, the mainstream. Evidently rumours of such sentiments, which seemed to be gaining ground in the DP camps, reached the author and poet known in Yiddish literature as a prince of dreams, H. Leivick (Leivick Halpern). A man of profound piety yet something of an iconoclast as well, he sped over to Europe from his home in New York. I remember his pale, thin-lipped, anguished face, his fathomless eyes, and his poignant message: ‘What then?’ his dramatic voice had rung out. ‘Are you prepared to reward Hitler with a post-humous victory? Those who convert are turncoats who spend their lives in castles of their own ruins. Ruins forgotten by time. Such people are guilty of nothing less than self-annihilation!’

  ‘Rabbi,’ I told my companion, ‘these words, especially the last, sent an anxious shudder through the crowd that day. It was as if a forest of scraggy trees had suddenly detected the footfall of a logger.’

  And I described how Leivick had maintained the flame of his unappeasable message, as though fighting for his very life. At one point, he had shouted that a few misguided zealots had smuggled a Trojan horse into our midst. ‘I know we were betrayed,’ he had declared with a quiver in his voice. ‘I know. But what some of you intend to do, my friends, is self-betrayal — the worst form of betrayal. And meanwhile, not too far distant from here, the desert is ready to be turned into a green oasis and awaits us like a longing mother with open arms. Better times are coming, times free of want and fear!’

  I was nearing the end of my story. ‘Rabbi, as the sky is my witness,’ I concluded, ‘no sooner had Leivick mentioned a world without fear than the whole emaciated, destitute throng burst spontaneously into Hatikvah, the song of hope...’

  The rabbi had been listening intently without interrupting. Now, as I was about to take my leave, he touched my shoulder. ‘Wait, this will only take a minute,’ he said. I paused on the threshold.

  ‘Your Leivick, may God bless him,’ he said, ‘was doubtless a wise and most devout man. But let me paraphrase some older words of wisdom: Judaism can not become more Jewish if the whole world embraces it — and even less so if the whole world rejects it.’

  The Voice

  It is impossible to account logically for some of the impulses and imaginings that dwell at the fringes of a person’s consciousness.

  A young man with whom I had gone to school invited us to his wedding. It took place late one Sunday afternoon at the Bialystoker Centre in St Kilda. When we arrived the sun had already set. All the guests without exception were camp survivors. In a festive mood and with shining faces we sat around white-covered tables drinking each other’s health. It was a world we still didn’t understand...

  And if we did understand (asked a voice within me), could we change anything?

  Years ago (I replied) we believed we could, and we would.

  Mere illusions, hallucinations, mirages (the voice argued). Surely everything must be clear by now! Life is like a chameleon, a harsh school where you sit in a different class every day presided over by an invisible teacher, who will never reveal his curriculum in advance. All that his students can do is improvise, or mimic the mistakes of their predecessors.

  Remember the story your wife repeated for the hundredth time this morning? (persisted the voice, making itself comfortable between Esther and myself) About the way little Aryan kids outside the Warsaw ghetto spun around on a carousel, singing, while Jewish children were jumping from burning three-storey buildings into the flames of the ghetto streets?

  Please, we’re at a wedding (I pleaded).

  I don’t care (said the voice).

  Esther looked at me. ‘What don’t you care?’ she asked.

  I ignored her.

  Words, words (continued the voice) — they don’t determine anything. One day all words will disappear from language.

  What a strange, monstrous thought!

  Not at all, not at all. Rather, it’s a new panacea I’ve invented. Utterances without meaning!

  Can’t you leave me alone? (I was growing impatient with the voice.) Can’t you please take a holiday? I’d like to forget you, at least for a year or two.

  No. A man can escape anything but himself.

  But am I not entitled to a shred of happiness?

  Yes. Though the Bible tells us (chanted the voice), A thistle in Lebanon sent a message to a cedar in Lebanon: ‘Give your daughter to my son in marriage.’ Then a wild beast in Lebanon came along and trampled the thistle underfoot.

  I can see that you’re intent on ruining even the merest morsel of my enjoyment.

  Enjoyment? Bah! (sneered the voice) All pleasures are flimsy, transient. They are like dew on a hot summer’s morning. I spoke to God Himself and He made it clear. Our people are so marvellously patient, they wait and wait for His promised spring. And even though they know it may never come, still they wait. And do you know why our benevolent God makes us wait forever? Because He knows that the expectation is sweeter than the reward. Nothing on earth can escape its fate (the voice went on, drilling its message mercilessly into my heart). In the end, the tormentor no less than the victim disappears into the same black hole.

  Voice, please! Spare me your sombre ironies.

  Have a sip of your wine. I am not convinced that tragedy is free of irony.

  What? (I was becoming angry with th
e voice.)

  You heard. Do you want proof? Do you want me to finish their job?

  Hold it, hold it! Don’t you threaten me. Melbourne is no place for suicide. If I didn’t do it over there, I’m not about to do it here.

  You’re right, you won’t.

  No mad promptings of yours, no taunts (I declared defiantly), can ever douse the flame of life inside me.

  Sure, sure. Dawn uncannily conceals the strands of darkness, and darkness cheats the light. Nothing will alter that. Can you recall your joyous silver-white birches under your blue unblemished August skies? Then, the unexpected blood-red rain on the morning of the first of September? And soon after that, the black-edged rainbow on your windowpane?

  There were black rainbows before, and there will be black rainbows again.

  But yours may never be repeated, and do you know why? Because your fate was planned, down to the last detail. Not even God’s own Adversary could emulate such infamy. People nowadays, especially in the lands of those heinous deeds, are not too fond of plain words. Such words rob them of their sleep, they would rather turn aside — it was all God’s will, they tell themselves; didn’t the condemned go willingly by the trainload to meet their Maker?...

  Esther seemed visibly disturbed. ‘Jacob, what’s wrong?’ she whispered. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘With you, my dear,’ I replied half-heartedly. ‘Always with you.’

  ‘You haven’t said a word to anyone.’ Esther bent closer and tenderly took hold of my hand. ‘Wake up,’ she smiled. ‘Listen... You’re going to become a father!’