by Arnold Zable
Several houses further on stands the corner shop. Two storeys and solid brick, it’s a substantial presence. One of the rear upper rooms overlooks Amess Street, directly opposite 212. From there the Nissen home appears ever more tiny.
Sam opens the front gate and steps onto the veranda. He unlocks the door and enters the passage. His suitcase is packed with the piecework that will keep him occupied long after nightfall. The house is empty. Sonia is in hospital. The children have been farmed out. It could be weeks, even months, before the family is reunited. There is no knowing.
He leans in and switches on the lights as he passes the three bedrooms, and the living room, on his way to the kitchen. The house is cold. The lights create a sense of company. He makes himself a quick meal and, after he has eaten, adds the plate to the piled-up dishes.
He goes to the front bedroom, lights a cigarette and sets to work. His mind is focused on the task. He cannot allow dark thoughts. He cuts the cloth with practised precision. He moves between cutting table and sewing machine. And he works fast. Time is money. He lights another cigarette and dismisses his troubles.
He chain smokes late into the night, and is still at work in the early hours. Through a gap in the curtains he can see the corner shop. The grey stucco glows under the street lamps. If someone were standing by the window on the upper floor, they would look down on the light in the front bedroom.
The street is silent. The milkman has come and gone. The night is lost in its own dreaming. And, still, Sam is working.
20
The corner shop is Kurop’s deli. It’s also the Kurop family’s home. They set up shop in 1949 when their son Leon was a baby. Leon is the same age as the Nissen twins.
The Kurops had settled in Melbourne, after emigrating by way of Paris. And before that? It is a long and bitter story. Leon’s parents do not tell it. After all, there’s work to be done. There are children to rear and a business to run; best not talk about it.
The deli is open seven days a week, from dawn till well beyond nightfall. It closes at nine, but that’s not always the end of it. A rapping on the door draws Mr Kurop down the stairs to the double doors that open directly onto the corner, and he serves the customer.
The entire building is given over to business. Goods spill into the back rooms, the backyard and the kitchen. They creep up the stairs, and invade the bedrooms: crates of soft drink, sacks of sugar, bags of salt, barrels of pickled herring, pickled onions and cucumbers. The shelves in the shop are stacked with dry goods, cartons of eggs, bottles of oil, jars of comfitures and honey, tins of smoked salmon, smoked herring and smoked mackerel. Rows of salami hang from strings along the walls like frozen streamers.
In the ice chest there’s cream cheese, milk and butter, and on the wooden counter, bagels and biscuits, and onion rolls, a local favourite. And continental breads picked up at daybreak from Goldberg’s, the bakery on Rathdowne Street, one block away.
The deli is a focal point. They come from across the road: Henry and Leon, sent on errands. From Amess Street, and from all over Carlton, and from further afield: suburbs to the north, Coburg and Brunswick, Preston, Northcote; from Kew and Balwyn to the east; and south, from distant Elwood and St Kilda. Drawn by the kosher goods and the aromas of the homeland.
On Fridays the deli is full. Customers are shopping for the weekend, the Sabbath. On Passover eve it’s bedlam; the Kurops trade till midnight. The rooms are packed with kosher wines and boxes of matzos. The counter is crowded with condiments for the Seder table: hardboiled eggs, a paste of apples, nuts and cinnamon, bitter herbs and ground horseradish—symbols of slavery and the promise of redemption.
From the upstairs window Leon Kurop can see 212, the house opposite. He sees it when he sets out for school, and when he returns. It is there, on the periphery of his vision as he runs with the boys, among them Henry and Leon. Number 212 is a constant presence.
Sonia rarely goes to the shop; she sends the children. When she does step in she says little, one or two words, or a few clipped sentences. She is a sparrow of a woman, thin and frail. A woman in despair, nervous. She shuns company.
Yet in Leon Kurop’s eyes she is the central character in the drama, the driving force. The family orbits her. But at the same time, she is a bit player. Leon can’t figure it out. She is a mystery.
Leon’s mother and father talk of what goes on ‘over there’ in hushed conversations—fights and sickness, bouts of violence. ‘Sonia lies in bed all day,’ they say. Leon hears the arguments, the raised voices and children crying.
Something is wrong, but no one talks about it openly. Asylums are seen as places of detention. Mental illness is a dark secret, a cause for shame. Feared. Hidden.
Leon Kurop recalls the past with a quizzical smile, as if figuring it out in the telling. He adds commentaries and interpretations like a Talmudic scholar. He is passionate about people, and how they cope with life’s challenges. He is generous in his observations. A witness. As he talks, he retains a look of wonder. Sixty years have gone by, and with each passing year his sense of awe increases.
After Sandra is born, Sam Nissen is forever exhausted. He lumbers past with his suitcase. Carlton is a suburb of Jewish tailors setting off for factories at daybreak.
Solly, the oldest, is the zhulik, the larrikin. He runs with gangs. He is the wayward one, on edge. Over the edge. But he has a head for making a living. He gets into trouble, but he’s savvy. He’s the one who will put together the jeans business and set up stalls in the markets, and the one who will begin to lift the family fortunes. He invests. He gambles on property, makes fortunes, loses fortunes—but on balance he is ahead, and counting.
And there are the twins, Henry and Leon. They cannot be contained. Their energy is boundless. They burst out of 212 and into neighbouring houses. They push through the swinging doors of the corner pub to sell newspapers.
They are in search of work, a living. Adventure. By the time they are twelve they’re working for the Kurops: unpacking, shelving, setting up displays, doing some of the lifting.
Paul, the fourth son, is more reserved. Steady. He’s the thoughtful one, overshadowed by the older boys yet self-contained. Independent. He knows his own mind. He will be the one Nissen boy to complete high school and go on to tertiary studies. He is more detached. An observer.
And then there is Sandra: Leon Kurop lights up as he speaks of her. Sandra is the gift. As much as she is a burden, another mouth to feed, she is a jewel to the mother. A girl, a late arrival, but an unexpected blessing. A daughter.
‘Sonia deeply loves this girl,’ says Leon. ‘She is given a gorgeous name. Alexandra. Her mother always calls her by that name. She just simply loved her daughter. After all the travails of life here was this gift of a girl-child.’
Everyone loved her. Her beauty made an impact in the neighbourhood. It softened the picture. ‘But there was a dark cloud hanging over all of us, those who arrived in the post-war years.’
The newcomers settled next door, across the road, and round the corner. They harboured secrets. There were words unspoken, pieces of memory cut off mid-sentence. Concealment alternated with inadvertent revelations.
‘They did not tell; we did not ask,’ says Leon. ‘My parents worked. Everyone worked. There was no time for talk, no time to even sit and eat together.’
The corner shop is a place of work. Everything is given to the business. Everyone has assigned tasks. Leon’s older sister, Vera, arrives home from school and serves behind the counter. She watches the baby in the pram, her infant brother, nine years younger.
As he grows older Leon also works in the business. He ladles bulk honey into jars. He scoops the salt and sugar from the sacks and tips them onto the scales. He empties the weighed portions into paper bags, rolls them tight and seals them.
Leon’s mother has a good head for business. And she makes the sandwiches; cucumber and salami on rye is her specialty. Kosher—spread with fat instead of butter. His father takes care of the
orders. He backs the delivery van onto the footpath. Leon watches him take to the barrels with a hammer. He works the top-hoops off, and liberates the schmaltz herring in brine, a delicacy.
Leon goes with his father in the van, an ancient grey Ford. It has one proper seat, the driver’s. The passenger seat is a biscuit tin. Leon prefers to sit in the back where he performs his little act of rebellion. He chucks eggs through the back door and watches them smash on the bitumen.
But something is not right—for all of them. For Leon it is contained in one haunting memory. He is five years old. It is 19 April: the annual day of commemoration. Families make their way to Lygon Street. They take the tram to the city and get off on the corner of Swanston and Collins Streets.
The Melbourne Town Hall is lit up and people stream towards it. The working day has been cast aside. They are entering another realm, a kingdom of memory. They climb the marble stairway and the well-trodden red carpet. The hall is packed with an audience of two thousand. The grief is recent. Repressed year round, it is allowed to surface on this one evening.
The lights are dimmed. The hall is a dark place, a play of shadows. The six candles are lit. The cantor performs the prayer for the dead. There are speeches. This particular year, a man stands alone on stage. Behind him are the soaring pipes of the organ, and a black banner on a black curtain, with white Hebraic characters that call for the remembrance of the six million. The man is reciting a poem in Yiddish. The poem details the horrors. The audience is ghostly silent.
He comes to a part about a child who is shot and killed. At that moment there is a shriek, just one voice, one woman—a scream of terror. It reverberates in the hall and strikes fear into the heart of a five-year-old boy.
Leon shakes his head and falls silent at the memory. He props his elbows on the table, and raises his folded hands to his chin. He remains quiet for a good minute.
When he resumes talking, he chooses his words with care. He is speaking of the collective—of the boys on the block, of his sister, of the Kurops, and the Erlichs, the Simons, the Segals, the Listers and many other families in Amess Street and beyond, who found their way here to the ends of the known Earth in the wake of an event they called the Annihilation.
He is speaking of the Nissens.
‘You knew there was stuff,’ he says. ‘You knew it was sensitive territory. You had to tread carefully. You could only venture there briefly. And you could never get to the core of it.’
There was an unspoken pact. The parents protected the kids and the kids protected the parents. It was an accord, governed by instinct and the need to regroup, to get on with it.
‘There was something else,’ says Leon. ‘Most of the families had been reduced to just two generations. The grandparents had disappeared. Their fate was rarely mentioned. And our parents appeared prematurely aged.’
Only years later, when the parents had performed their duty, and their children had brought up their own children, only then can the children pursue the stories. And only then are their ageing parents willing to answer some of their questions, and, in their answers, uncover tale after tale of loss and sorrow, vanishings, and of survivors’ returns to unmarked graves in homeland cities and villages. Fragments of information, finally pieced together.
The Kurops’ tale is uncanny, with parallels to the tale of the family who lived in the house opposite. Like Sonia, Mrs Kurop was born in Ukraine. She was older than Sonia. In 1938, she gave birth to her daughter, Vera. Mrs Kurop’s first husband was conscripted and killed in action, in the siege of Stalingrad. Her parents perished in the massacres at Babi Yar, a quarry on the outskirts of Kiev. Like Sonia, Mrs Kurop wandered about the Soviet interior during the war years.
Mr Kurop, like Simche, was born in Poland. He left a wife and two young children in Lodz to flee east when the Germans invaded. He was assured that the occupation would soon be over, and advised to pave the way for his family and send them later. His wife and children perished.
Leon Kurop’s parents met somewhere in Russia. Leon does not know where. He was conceived in Poland and born in Paris, and the family flew to Melbourne three months later. ‘Is it any wonder the stories were suppressed?’ says Leon. ‘Yet, despite it all, they made a life. And there were moments.’
On summer nights Mrs Kurop sits in front of the shop on a biscuit tin. She seeks relief from the heat. One by one they join her. Each time, another biscuit tin is added. One becomes two becomes three until there is a row of people sitting. The row curves round the corner from Pigdon to Amess Street. They converse in Yiddish, their lingua franca.
The children roam free. They play British bulldog. They kick newspapers rolled tight and secured with string—paper footballs. They chalk tennis courts on the road, and they move in and out of the houses. There is the Palace Cinema, three blocks east on Nicholson Street. They go to the Saturday matinee, and on the way home, on the low brick wall, the boys ape the antics of cowboys.
And, always, there are the twins. Leon and Henry. They can barely contain their energy. They are in the narrow passage at number 212. They place a foot on each wall, and wedge themselves across the hallway. They are climbing the walls, inching upwards, sliding back down. Laughing.
‘The parents are in despair,’ says Leon, ‘but in the boys something’s going on. There is action. You’ve got a house full of chaos—a genuinely poor house, the poorest in the neighbourhood—and boys deprived of the kind of affection we expect in today’s world. Yet there’s laughter, stuff happening, a joie de vivre; the boys can barely wait to get out there.’
The twins are everywhere. They know how to get around. They are confident. The neighbourhood is their territory. The doors of many houses are open to them. They are without guile or malice. They know how to draw people to them. They are in training. They are becoming boxers. Their wins are mounting. Their photos appear in newspapers. They are stars on TV. Legends in the making.
There are teenage girls on the block who detour through the lane each evening to stop by the Reads’ back wall. They look around, to make sure no one is watching, shift a half-brick that has come loose, and peek into the garage to watch the twins train and admire their muscles.
Now, decades later Leon Kurop retrieves the images, sets them loose, and shakes his head in wonder.
21
Henry and Leon are in a hurry. Evening is approaching. The street is filled with children playing. Number 212 is receding and 166 approaching. Sculpted urns flank the high pediment. It’s the most impressive house on the block—towering over the surrounding houses.
The twins stop by the side entrance and knock on the door. Peter answers. He walks with them to the backyard, and into the garage. Then he puts them through their paces. The sweet science is the twins’ salvation. Peter is their mentor, and old Mick his assistant.
The Reads do not ask questions. Private lives are off limits. As long as the boys are willing to put in the work, that’s all that matters. The kids have got promise. They’re committed. ‘We can make fighters of them, put them in the ring, and train them to keep it simple. Uncomplicated.’
Mick was a knockabout guy, Peter will say years later. He made a buck whatever way he could, and he grabbed his chances. He was born in Tassie, but raised in Richmond. A city boy. He walked out of home at sixteen, back in the 1920s.
He wanted to be free of the paternal yoke. He wanted to test himself. He left the big smoke and made his way hundreds of kilometres north to Moama, on the banks of the Murray. He joined the gangs constructing railway tracks, and lived with his fellow workers in tent cities.
The tents followed the tracks, dismantled and re-pegged as the line moved onwards. Mick grew tougher; his muscles hardened. His face took on the lines and creases that would mature with his sharp angular features into a weathered handsomeness.
He returned to the family home five years later. Elegantly dressed, independent in spirit. Lobbed back, just like that. ‘I’m home,’ he says, as if he’d left the house that m
orning. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
He worked at odd jobs, did stints in factories, and briefly joined his dad in his scissor-sharpening business. ‘There’s a long family history in this,’ says Peter. ‘You can trace it back to the Reads in Ireland. I guess it was in the genes to work with steel and keep the edges sharpened.’
Mick worked on the hand-propelled grinding wheel. He turned it while his father ran the blades over the surface. Sparks rebounded off their protective goggles. Mick still yearned for independence, and he broke away to set up his own business. He did the lot—picked up the orders, sharpened, hopped onto the pushbike and returned the scissors to the barbers and tailors who were his clients.
He became so strong on the bike he turned professional, and earned enough points one year to be judged the Fitzroy Cycling Club champion. At anything physical, Mick was a natural.
The business expanded. He took in the scissors of textile factories. ‘All the big ones,’ says Peter. ‘You name them, Mick did the sharpening: Yakka, Julius Marlow, Fletcher Jones, the Commonwealth clothing factory, which had over a thousand machines, with two scissors allotted to each machinist.’ Mick had so many orders he couldn’t keep up with them. He progressed from bicycle to motorbike for the pick-ups and deliveries.
For a time he rented a store in Hardware Lane in the city. Barbers would drop in for a chat. But they took up too much of his time, so Mick closed the shop and went back to working from home. He had little time for idle chatter. As the business grew, he took out a lease on the two-storey house in Amess Street. He set up the workshop at the rear of the house, accessed via the side entrance.
There are parts of the story best not dwelt on: a wife, two children, a son and daughter. Peter was born in 1938. The marriage broke down when Peter was four. His grandmother looked after him until he was eight. When she died, he moved back with Mick. And that’s how it stayed, father and son, Mick and Peter.