Things Could Be Worse

by Lily Brett

  If it was so easy for a good, kind person like Mrs Cunningham to be an anti-Semite, said Morry Lipshutz, what hope was there for the world?

  The company went to Solly Nadel’s for their Christmas holidays every year until 1959. By then they had a bit more money. Things were looking up for most of the group. The Smalls and the Pekelmans were partners in a knitting factory. Mr Bensky owned Joren Fashions, a small factory that manufactured ladies’ suits. Costumes, Josl called them. Pola and Moishe Ganz already had six machinists working for them at Champs Elysees Blouses, and Mr Berman wholesaled plastic bags. Joseph Zelman was the wealthiest of the group. He was already building his sixth block of flats. He bought the land, built the flats, and sold them as they were being built. He worked day and night. He undercut his competition by settling for a smaller profit. In 1959 he was on his way to banking his first million.

  In 1959 the company went to Surfers Paradise. They rented four units in the same block in Cavill Avenue. Mrs Bensky brought her own frozen chicken stock. Mrs Zelman brought six pounds of lean beef, which she made into three big klops on the first day. One klops for lunch, and two for later in the week. Mrs Ganz stewed a big pot of apples and baked a sponge cake, and everyone felt at home.

  They ate their meals outside, around the swimming pool. At night they walked along the beach. For Mr Bensky, the highlight of this holiday was the matzoh brei that Mrs Zelman made for everyone most mornings. Josl was the first at the breakfast table each morning. He looked so happy eating the matzoh brei that Mrs Zelman thought she could have happily made it for him forever. Some men, she thought, are so easy to please.

  Surfers Paradise, the company decided, was a very successful holiday place. They went there often after that.

  The company had other memorable holidays. They went to Rotorua in New Zealand. They had mud baths and mineral spas. Mrs Bensky loved this. She sat happily for hours covered in hot mud. Josl had to be ordered into the mud. He hated it. On the second day Josl sprained his ankle, and had to spend the rest of his New Zealand holiday doing what he liked best. He lay on the bed in the motel room and read detective novels. He finished a book and a box of chocolates a day.

  Mrs Ganz and Mr Zelman went to the mineral baths together. Mrs Bensky was worried. She feared that the attachment between them was more than it should be. No-one else appeared worried.

  In New Zealand the company discovered duty-free shopping. All the families came home with new cameras.

  In 1982 the company went to Israel. They had planned this trip for months. Mr Bensky was in charge of the itinerary. They stopped in Las Vegas on their way to Israel.

  Mr Bensky was one of the keenest card-players of the group. He loved to gamble. Mr Zelman and Mr Pekelman thought that Las Vegas wasn’t really on the way from Melbourne to Tel Aviv, but they kept their thoughts to themselves.

  Josl Bensky was deliriously happy in Las Vegas. He lost at blackjack, he lost at roulette. He lost playing chemin de fer and five card stud poker. He played the poker machines in the main gambling hall, and he played the mini poker machines in the toilets. In two days Josl Bensky lost $700. ‘Las Vegas’, he told everyone in Melbourne when he got back, ‘was the best part of the trip.’

  ‘There’s too many Jews here for me,’ said Izak Pekelman in Israel. ‘I don’t feel so good among so many Jews.’ The rest of the group thought that what Izak said may have sounded a little strange but, in different ways, they all knew what he meant.

  Renia Bensky stayed in the hotel room with the flu for most of their three weeks in Israel. Genia Pekelman wouldn’t go to the pictures, or to the theatre, or to any concerts. ‘If it’s all the same to you,’ she said, ‘I would prefer to stay in the hotel. It makes me too nervous to be with a crowd.’ To her husband Genia said what the others had understood she was trying to say: ‘Izak, I can’t stand being in the middle of so many Jews. It makes me too nervous. What if someone starts to shoot at us? It reminds me too much of too many things.’

  George Small couldn’t eat anything in Israel. ‘This is not what we ate at home in Poland,’ he said. ‘This is the food of Arabs, not the food of Jews.’

  In Mea Shearim, the Orthodox area of Jerusalem, Josl Bensky bellowed: ‘Who do they think they are, these Orthodox? What are they doing? Why do they have to draw such attention to themselves? Where in the Talmud does it say you have to wear such a long black coat, and the short black trousers, and the black hats? This is the modern world, not the old world. Stupid bastards. They cause trouble for everyone. Haven’t the Jews had enough trouble?’ By now Josl was almost in tears.

  That night the company were having dinner in Jerusalem. A group of Orthodox young men came and sat at the next table. Josl looked at them and said loudly, ‘Oy, I’m going to vomit.’

  Mr Berman liked Israel. But Chaim Berman was a quiet man. He always agreed with the majority. He kept to himself the elation that he felt at being in the homeland of the Jewish people. He loved the robustness of the people, the honesty, the lack of artifice. He loved the commitment and the loyalty. Chaim thought that it was a privilege to live for an ideal, and in Israel people were living for an ideal. They had, Chaim Berman thought, something more valuable than central heating and new television sets.

  Pola Ganz had hoped that she would be able to find Chaim Berman a new wife in Israel, but after a few days Pola decided that a Jewish woman from Melbourne might be more suitable.

  ‘You have to be careful with these Israelis,’ she said to Ada Small. ‘We wouldn’t want to find Chaim a wife who married him because he owns a nice house and a good business in Australia.’

  Ada Small agreed that they had to be careful.

  The group visited a kibbutz in the Negev. They all loved the kibbutz. They were very impressed by the size of the kitchen, and the laundry facilities. ‘Did you ever see such a stove in your life?’ said Joseph Zelman. With all his blocks of flats, Joseph knew about kitchens.

  ‘Australia is paradise,’ Josl Bensky said on their last night in Israel. He raised his glass and proposed a toast to Australia. ‘To Australia,’ they all chorused.

  In Israel, Renia Bensky had become increasingly agitated about Pola Ganz and Joseph Zelman. Several times, she thought, she had caught them looking at each other tenderly.

  By the time she was back in Australia, Renia Bensky was sure there was a heat between Pola Ganz and Joseph Zelman. And Renia Bensky felt hot watching them.

  ‘Poor Mina Zelman,’ Renia said to Josl. ‘She hasn’t suffered enough? It wasn’t enough what she did go through in Bergen-Belsen? Now she has to have a Romeo for a husband? And what about poor Moishe Ganz? Maybe he is not so intelligent as our dear Joseph Zelman, but he has always been a first-class husband to Pola. The trouble with Pola is that she doesn’t know when she’s got something good. She is always looking for something new. She says to me, “Oh Renia, I’ve found a new hairdresser. Oh Renia, I’ve found a new dressmaker. Oh Renia, this manicurist is better and cheaper.” Now, whatever Joseph Zelman has got in his trousers is something Pola Ganz thinks is better than what she’s got at home.’

  Renia knew that after the war there were strange and hasty alliances formed. Women married for security. Men married mothers. Strangers married strangers. People were starved of comfort, companionship and affection. Odd matches were made. There was not always time to wait for love.

  Young girls married older men. Students married their teachers. Neighbours and cousins got married. Everyone was in a hurry to begin a normal life.

  Dead wives, dead husbands and dead children were present at many of these marriage ceremonies.

  Renia decided that something had to be done about Pola and Joseph. She hired a private detective. Two weeks later, the private detective gave Renia a photograph of Joseph Zelman sitting in his car outside Pola Ganz’s house. Renia felt very pleased with herself.

  It was Easter, and the company went to Olinda. Renia packed the photograph carefully at the bottom of her suitcase. She hadn’t told Jos
l about the detective.

  In Olinda, it seemed as though it was going to be another nice Easter break. The group settled into their holiday routine. They ate nice big breakfasts, they went for walks, they sat in the autumn sun. They had good lunches, a nap after lunch, another small walk and it was time for dinner. After dinner they played cards. After three days they were all in good spirits, and felt invigorated by the country air.

  On Sunday night, Renia showed Ada Small the photograph. Ada didn’t say much. ‘Why have you got a photograph of Joseph in his car?’ she asked. Renia explained the location of the photograph, and its implication.

  Ada Small went straight to Pola Ganz. Pola laughed and showed the photograph to Moishe. Moishe looked carefully at the photograph. He didn’t say anything. Later, he said to Josl: ‘So what, what does that photograph prove? Nothing.’ Josl had to agree.

  Nobody mentioned the photograph to Mina Zelman.

  ‘She’s got enough trouble,’ said Ada Small. ‘She’s so tall. At her height she would never find another husband.’

  Pola refused to speak to Renia Bensky. Renia tried to explain that she had done this for Pola’s own good, but Pola wouldn’t even come near her.

  ‘If she is going to be so unintelligent about this,’ Renia said to Josl, ‘she can go to hell. I am finished with Pola Ganz.’

  The atmosphere became so unpleasant that the company left Olinda a day early.

  What was really shocking about all of this, Ada Small said to her manicurist, was that Renia Bensky and Pola Ganz had almost been machatunim. There was no word in English for machatunim, Ada explained. Machatunim was the word for the relationship between a couple’s parents-in-law. Renia and Pola were almost the mothers-in-law of each other’s children. Renia’s daughter Lina had almost married Pola’s son, Sam.

  There was an unspoken, unanimous decision among the company not to tell the children why they were no longer friends. The children had to be protected.

  One of Lina’s colleagues at the law firm where she worked told her that she’d heard a rumour that the rift between Renia and Pola was caused by Renia’s accusations that Pola had committed adultery with Joseph Zelman.

  Sam Ganz laughed when Lina told him. ‘My mother, having an affair? You’re joking. She goes to bed in flannel nightgowns and wears face cream, throat cream, neck cream, arm and leg cream. As a kid, I used to watch her hop into bed and wonder why she didn’t slip straight out again. There must be another reason Renia and Pola aren’t speaking.’

  Mrs Zelman also wondered why Renia and Pola weren’t speaking. Maybe Mrs Ganz had done something she shouldn’t have been doing with Mrs Bensky’s Josl. She wouldn’t put it past that Pola Ganz to meddle with someone else’s husband.

  Mr Zelman and Mrs Ganz also stopped speaking to each other. ‘He was a rotten lover,’ Mrs Ganz said to her sister. ‘He wore his socks to bed.’

  The company collapsed. Mr Small and Mr Pekelman and Mr Berman met Mr Zelman and Mr Ganz to try and patch things up. They agreed that it was important to forgive and to forget. To make a fresh start. But the women wouldn’t budge.

  Moishe Ganz believed his wife, and wouldn’t hear a word against her. Josl, although he thought that Renia shouldn’t have interfered, knew that she didn’t do it out of malice.

  People took sides. Mr and Mrs Small sided with the Ganzes, and Mr and Mrs Pekelman stayed loyal to the Benskys. Chaim Berman remained friendly with everyone.

  For thirty-two years the company hadn’t missed a Saturday night at the pictures. Now they stopped going to the pictures. They stopped playing cards. They stopped going out for supper. They stayed at home.

  Mr and Mrs Small and Mr Berman took short walks around Caulfield, but their hearts weren’t in it. The Zelmans tried to learn bridge, but everyone else at the Herzl Club could play well, and they gave up. Izak Pekelman took up golf. He dropped it a week later.

  At weddings, barmitzvahs, engagements and anniversaries and birthdays, people knew to put the Benskys and the Ganzes at different tables.

  Genia Pekelman talked separately to Renia and Pola. She begged them to make up. She said to each of them, ‘Couldn’t you just put this behind you and make a new start?’ That approach hadn’t worked with Genia’s daughter Rachel, and it didn’t work with Renia and Pola.

  Genia tried again. ‘If you can’t be friends, at least don’t be enemies. Let us all go out together again, and maybe things will get slowly better. And we will be a group again. And people will stop talking about us. And if things are not as good as they look, at least it will look as though they are good.’ Genia’s mother used to quote this old saying to her. It had a melodic lilt in Yiddish that got lost in the translation. Nothing that Genia Pekelman said moved Renia or Pola.

  This was the price of success, thought Genia. This is what happens when you can afford to hire a private detective. Life used to be so straightforward in the old days in Melbourne, thought Genia.

  When they first came to Australia, some of them had lived two families to one room. Even the most comfortably off of the group, the Smalls, lived in a room at the back of their factory.

  On weekends all their children played together. Now, when Genia reminded Rachel that Jack Zelman was unattached, Rachel replied, ‘I hate Jack Zelman.’ Rachel and Jack had played together so nicely when they were small.

  Genia had thought that she had created cousins for her Rachel and her Esther in Australia. A new family. She thought that the company and their children would regard each other as family. As cousins, aunties, uncles, nephews, nieces. As it turned out, none of their children were friends, except for Lina and Sam. And now the company themselves were no longer friends.

  They had all ended up, Genia thought, in the same position that they had been in in Germany after the war. No family. No close friends. At least they had their children. But the children were another story. Even the children had brought them troubles.

  Soon, Genia thought, they would all start dying. And they would die alone. One of Genia’s most comforting thoughts had been that she would never have to die alone. Not like the hundreds and hundreds of dead in the streets in the ghetto.

  So this is how things had turned out, thought Genia Pekelman. This is how things had turned out in the goldeneh medina, the new world.

  The Children

  Sam Ganz was the Managing Director of Champs Elysees Blouses. Sam was on the phone negotiating the purchase of a turn-of-the-century musical sideboard. When you opened its glass doors, this sideboard played ‘Fur Elise’. Sam was on the verge of agreeing to pay the asking price when his father walked into the office. ‘I’ll call you back, and we’ll discuss it this afternoon,’ Sam said to the antique dealer. ‘Just talking to the mechanic about the Volvo. It needs its front brake pads replaced,’ he explained to his father.

  Moishe Ganz was the Chairman of Eiffel Tower Fashions, which owned Champs Elysees Blouses. Pola and Moishe had set up the business in 1950.

  Pola and Moishe had met in Paris, in the Hotel Lutetia, in 1946. They had both just survived the war in Poland – she in hiding, and he in a labour camp. Now they were being looked after at the Hotel Lutetia.

  During the war the Hotel Lutetia had been the Gestapo headquarters in Paris. Now it was a welcoming centre for the few Jews who had survived Nazi Europe.

  Pola and Moishe had rooms on the same floor at the Lutetia. They began talking to each other. Soon they began to meet in the foyer of the hotel in the mornings. Then they spent their days together.

  After two weeks, Moishe proposed to Pola. Pola said: ‘No, never! I don’t want to get married. I want to live a bit, to grow up. I am twenty-one, and I haven’t had any boyfriends. I haven’t done many things a normal girl does. I don’t know who I am, where I am. I only know I don’t want to get married. Not now, never.’ ‘Never say never,’ said Moishe. Three weeks later, Pola and Moishe were married.

  They moved out of the Lutetia and into a small bed-sitting room in the Rue de Rennes. Pola and Mois
he shared their sixth-floor flat in the Rue de Rennes with a family of dark-brown rats. Pola and Moishe kept their bread, coffee, tea, sugar and even butter wrapped in newspaper, and hung these parcels in pillowcases from a hook on the wall.

  One day Pola reached for one of her shoes from the bottom of the cupboard. She surprised a sleeping rat. The rat ran up Pola’s arm. Pola wept. The rat had shat on her skirt. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have got married,’ she said to Moishe.

  Pola and Moishe did have good times in Paris. They went for long walks along the river. They went to the zoo. Even then, straight after the war, Paris was a city of lovers. Pola and Moishe got to know each other slowly. It was a time of rest and recuperation. A honeymoon of sorts.

  They were waiting for their immigration papers to be finalised. Moishe taught Pola to ice-skate. They fed pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens. They walked arm-in-arm alongside other lovers in the Tuileries and on the Boulevard St Germain.

  Years later, when people talked about the beauty of Paris, Pola could only remember the rats.

  Baby Sam was born three months before Pola and Moishe were due to leave for Australia. Pola wept with happiness at the birth of her son. The night after Pola had been freed from the cellar in which she had spent the last year of the war, she had had a dream. Her father, who had died in the cellar, had come to her in her dream. ‘Pola, my daughter,’ he had said, ‘you will one day give birth to a son. And this son will have in him all the fathers and all the sons from our family. I will be there in him. Your grandfather will be there. And your grandfather’s grandfather. We will all be there. As soon as you see your son, you will see us.’

  Sam was a beautiful baby. He had a wise face and a quiet disposition. Pola saw that her father had been right. Sam looked just like him.

  Moishe was also in love with Sam. He kissed him hundreds of times a day. When Sam was two months old, Moishe took him to the Punch and Judy show at the Bois de Boulogne. He pointed out dogs and cats and birds in the street. He repeated the Yiddish, French and English words for these animals to Sam. As soon as he had set eyes on Sam, Moishe had seen that Sam was the image of Moishe’s mother. Moishe also recognised Sam’s eyes: they belonged to his youngest sister, Chana. Chana and her mother had died of tuberculosis in the ghetto.