My heroine boarded a bus, sat next to a handsome young stranger, and sobbed that she was in the clutches of a sinister man known as the Scorpion. Unless someone accompanied her to his hideout to protect her, she’d be murdered. The smitten hero fell for the damsel in distress and for her story, but when they arrived at what was supposed to be the scoundrel’s lair, it turned out that she’d brought him to the theatre instead. She got the part but lost the man!
After making sure that the manuscript was written in my best writing, I mailed it to the Australian Women’s Weekly. Each day I rushed out to the letterbox as soon as I heard the postman’s whistle awaiting their reply. Several weeks later, Mary and I were playing jacks on the verandah when the whistle shrilled.
When the postman handed me a large manila envelope, I saw that it was addressed to me and, with an author’s instinct, knew that my story had been rejected. Without saying a word I ran inside and pushed it into a drawer out of sight, but Mary’s quick eye had spotted my name on the envelope. I insisted that she was mistaken. Mary and I were soul mates and rivals. We had the same taste in books, film stars and games, longed to beat each other at school and shared the frustration of restrictive European parents, but I wasn’t going to tell her that I’d had a story rejected. At the age of twelve, I was too embarrassed to admit literary failure.
It was to be another thirteen years before I submitted anything for publication again. Once again I submitted my story to the Women’s Weekly, but this time it was accepted. My writing career had begun.
The bright summer sun of 1951 gilded the sandstone buildings of Sydney University and slanted through the stained-glass windows of the Great Hall when my father, attired in a graduate’s black gown and mortarboard, shook hands with the Dean and received his degree as Bachelor of Dental Science. But although his studies were over, for the rest of his life he had a recurring nightmare about sitting for exams that he hadn’t prepared for. Even at the age of seventy that dream would fill him with such panic that he used to wake up covered in sweat. It’s not surprising. After all, so many times in his life, survival had depended on passing some test whose rules he didn’t know.
In his dentistry year book, his entry is headed ‘Is it so?’ which must have been a phrase he often used. It goes on to say:
One of the older men in our year, Henry commenced his studies in 1949. At first, Henry had difficulties with our language, but has mastered it so quickly that statements such as ‘I will borrow you my knife’ are becoming rare. In fact, he has been heard to use the expression ‘It fits like a bomb.’
Henry has a very keen sense of humour and is able to appreciate a joke at his own expense. This, coupled with his ability and philosophical outlook, ensures him a happy future in the dental profession.
By 1951, I too was assured of a happy future: in my last year at Waverley Primary School, the headmistress had astounded me by appointing me school captain. At the end of the year I was the only one in my class who was sent to Sydney Girls’ High School, which was then fully selective.
My parents applied for Australian citizenship as soon as they were eligible. When I was going through my father’s papers after his death, I found the copy of a letter he’d written to the then Minister for Immigration, in reply to his formal letter of congratulation.
Dear Mr Holt,
Although I know that I am not expected to reply, I feel that I should take the opportunity of expressing my very sincere thanks and gratitude on my own and my family’s behalf, in being accepted so thoroughly into the Australian way of life, and can assure you and my fellow-Australians of my wholehearted co-operation in my new responsibilities.
Hirsch Baldinger, now Henry Boguslawski, had become a proud Australian citizen.
CHAPTER 33
While in Sydney my father was poring over his lecture notes, in Rio his eldest brother Avner was packing his bags. Avner’s nightclub, like his previous ventures, had failed. ‘My oldest brother ran a nightclub on Copacabana,’ my father used to say with a mixture of wonder and pride at Avner’s entrepreneurial flair. It sounded exotic, but the image was more glamorous than the reality. At first the restaurant had been a success but problems with the clientele soon emerged. The refugees wanted to sit and gossip all afternoon over one cup of coffee, which was unprofitable, and to make matters worse, the wealthy Cariocas didn’t want to patronise a restaurant filled with impoverished expats. Eventually the refugees became offended and spread rumours that Avner was arrogant and didn’t want them to patronise his club. To add to the dissension, some nights the son of President Vargas swaggered in drunk, kept drinking, and started firing his pistol as if he was in a wild west bar, which frightened off some of the regular clients. And on top of all that, Avner wasn’t making any money because the chef was robbing him blind. Avner closed the restaurant.
There was nothing to keep him in Rio any longer. He’d never belonged in this hedonistic city where mulatto exuberance, African rhythms and Carioca poverty pulsed beneath the predatory European lifestyle. What’s more, so many Germans had found refuge in this pro-Nazi corner of South America after the war that Jews felt uneasy. So when in 1949 their daughter Wanda gave birth to her first son, Peter, the prospect of seeing their first grandchild was the impetus that Avner and Hela needed to leave Brazil.
For the fourth time in his life Avner, at fifty-five, found himself in a new country, broke, and once again facing the dilemma of how to earn a living. Dependent on their daughter and son-in-law in Connecticut for a roof over their heads, he and Hela struggled to earn a pittance. Avner’s first job in America was selling baking powder door to door. Slumped in a chair at the end of a demoralising day, he told Wanda, ‘Every customer would have to buy ten containers of baking powder every week for me to make a living out of this, but unfortunately one box lasts for two years!’ The only job he could find was operating an elevator. For a time the two of them packaged candies in Wanda’s cellar. For a man of grand visions and big ideas, life in the United States was dispiriting.
By then Wanda had been living in the United States for three years. When she arrived in New York from Rio in 1947, she was twenty-five, stunning and single. Like so many bright, beautiful and temperamental women with a stormy relationship with their fathers, she tended to choose unsuitable men, and her relationships in Rio had been unsatisfactory.
Although she’d come to the States for a holiday, when she was offered a job as secretary with the Chilean Delegation at the United Nations in New York, she jumped at the opportunity of staying. Freedom beckoned. As it turned out, her independence was short-lived because before the year was over she was married. She met Max Matt through some Baldinger relatives she’d located through the telephone directory. At the turn of the century, Daniel Baldinger’s youngest sister Eva had migrated from Poland to New York and although Eva had died before Wanda’s arrival, her daughter Esther introduced Wanda to the intense young man whose soft voice and strong character won her heart.
When Avner and Hela arrived in Connecticut, Max was managing a chain of grocery stores. He felt it was his duty to help Avner get started, but couldn’t see what an unqualified man in his fifties without assets or capital could possibly do. From the moment they met, Max was fascinated by his sophisticated, cultured father-in-law and his gift of the gab. ‘Avner could charm the shirt off your back,’ he recalls. ‘If he drew a castle in the air he could convince you that it was solid marble. If only he’d arrived in the United States during the twenties or thirties, he would have made a fortune, but by 1950 the opportunities were dwindling.’
Wanda shakes her head impatiently. ‘Father didn’t make it anywhere because he was profligate. They both were.’
‘I don’t believe so,’ Max counters in his husky voice. ‘Perhaps in Europe, but not in America, anyways.’
There’s something elfin about this octogenarian whose whiskery grey beard, blue denim jeans, and quirky cap pulled over his bald head make him look like an eccentric intellectual. He i
s strong and centred, looks at the world with curious eyes and an open mind, and gives others space to be themselves.
Later that afternoon, as we hike along a steep path that leads to a mountaintop, Max talks about his own childhood in a Ukrainian village, and it strikes me that privation forges stronger character than plenty. Max was five years old when he and his siblings were orphaned in 1915 and they were taken in by their aunt and uncle who could barely feed their own five children. One of his first memories was being chased by Ukrainian boys who threw stones at him because he was Jewish.
By the time he was nine, he knew that being Jewish meant death. During a pogrom, one of his aunts and her daughter were raped and killed by hoodlums whose catchcry was ‘Kill the Jews and save the Ukraine’. Not long afterwards his aunt and uncle tied their meagre possessions in bundles and the whole family fled to Romania on foot. Max still remembers the terror of crossing the Dniester River by night. The river was iced over, their feet kept slipping, and they couldn’t see where they were going, but they knew they mustn’t utter a sound in case the border guards heard them. Suddenly Max’s little sister Hilda started crying. Shots rang out. Any moment now the guards would shoot them. Swiftly their uncle picked Hilda up, muffled her crying with his hand and carried her for hours across the slippery ice.
When they reached Bucharest, their uncle couldn’t find work, so Max and Hilda were sent to an orphanage. ‘To this day I have nightmares that I’m back in that soulless place. Nobody cared about us and hunger gnawed at me night and day.’ He used to sneak out at dawn with some of the other boys to ambush farmers on their way to market and steal apples and melons off their carts. One memory from those days still makes Max tremble. ‘I was walking with Hilda through a park, tailing a man who was eating an apple, just waiting for him to throw away the core. The moment he did, I swooped down on it and started devouring it. My little sister was tugging at me, crying with hunger. She wanted some too.’ In a voice that’s barely audible, as though he doesn’t want to hear what he’s saying, he whispers, ‘But I didn’t share it.’ Tears are running down his furrowed cheeks. He still can’t forgive himself.
When the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society arranged for Max and his sisters to set sail for Canada along with two hundred other Jewish orphans, he was overjoyed. They were told that they’d be adopted by farming families who needed help on the land. Max knew nothing about Canada or farming, but he longed to get away from that orphanage and get enough to eat.
Soon after their ship docked, the adoption process began. The farmers and their wives looked over the children as if they were apples on a stall and selected the ones they fancied. By the afternoon most of the orphans had been taken to their new homes, but no-one chose Max or his sister. The day was almost over when a couple of latecomers looked Hilda over and took her with them. Max was left standing forlornly in the hall.
When Max was told that he’d have to go to the Montreal Hebrew Orphans’ Home, he went berserk. An orphanage meant hunger, cold and misery, which he’d have to face all alone as his little sister had gone. Max became a wildcat. He screamed and yelled, bit and scratched, kicked and fought, and they couldn’t calm him down.
In the midst of this rampage, Max looked up and the shout died on his lips. Running towards him was his little sister. As soon as Hilda had realised that she was going to be separated from Max, she also screamed and yelled so much that the couple became alarmed and brought her back. The children clung to each other, overjoyed to be together again. No matter how bad the orphanage was, at least they’d be together.
But when Hilda and Max entered the Montreal Hebrew Orphans’ Home, they couldn’t believe their eyes. It was a big and beautiful building with bright rooms, clean bathrooms and food in abundance. For the first time in years they were well fed, clothed, given books and treated with kindness, but Max didn’t believe it could last. There had to be a catch.
Not long after they arrived, he got up at night and crept down to the kitchen where they kept a basket of apples. Although he wasn’t hungry, he grabbed three, ran upstairs and hid them under his pillow. Next morning the headmaster called Max into his office. A kitchen hand had seen him take the apples. Max’s knees trembled as he faced the headmaster, dreading the punishment to come. But Mr Goldie looked into his face with such compassion that Max had to look away. ‘If you take three apples, two other children will miss out on theirs,’ the headmaster explained. ‘But if you’re really hungry, you can keep them.’ Red-faced, Max handed back two apples. He never stole again.
Long before I met him, I’d heard from my parents that Max was a remarkable man who became the supervisor of his orphanage at the age of nineteen and, shortly afterwards, was appointed director of the Montreal Hebrew Orphans’ Home. Ten years later, however, he realised that it was time for a change. He was twenty-nine and he had no social life or interests outside the orphanage. When he found out that he had a relative living in Connecticut, he moved to Hartford and worked in his cousin’s grocery business until he was drafted in 1941.
As we climb a steep leaf-strewn mountain path that smells of spring in New England, Max, who is eighty-two and has had bypass surgery, forges ahead of me. ‘The effect of war on a soldier cannot be explained,’ he muses in his soft, husky voice. ‘Self-preservation takes over, and you do things you don’t believe you’d ever do. You don’t give a damn about anyone or anything. All you know is, if you don’t protect yourself, you’re going to get killed.’
He served in North Africa, Italy and Germany. ‘You know, we Americans believe that we are angels, but ugly stories come out of every war. When we got to Civita Vecchia we wanted to place our anti-aircraft guns on top of the plateau but we knew that the Germans had planted mines and booby traps. So the army selected some town dignitaries and made them lead the way. If they made it, we knew we could use the same route. Of course often they didn’t make it. I don’t think I felt bad about it. At that time the Italians were the enemy. I was in anti-aircraft—we’d see a plane and shoot it down. We had a battery of four big guns and maybe twenty or thirty calibre machine guns. Whenever we saw injured American soldiers, we lusted for revenge. That’s what war does to people.’
The hardships he’d suffered making his own way in the world made Max admire Avner’s resourcefulness and tenacity. He also liked Hela’s genuine, down-to-earth attitude. But Wanda and her parents had never got along, and before the year was over, conflicts escalated between them. ‘They spoiled the baby rotten,’ she reminisces. ‘They couldn’t say no to him. When Peter picked up a penknife one afternoon, my father ran into the kitchen shouting for me to come quickly so that he wouldn’t have to be the one to take it away from him!’ She was astonished that Avner didn’t know how to play with his own grandson. ‘I still remember the wistful look on my father’s face when he told me, “I never learned how to play because my father sent me to cheder when I was three years old.”’
Apart from arguments about the baby, Wanda resented the way her parents ordered her around and sided with Max against her. ‘Whenever Max and I argued, my mother would say to him, “Only you would tolerate a person like Wanda!” I just couldn’t see myself spending the rest of my life with my parents after I’d travelled 5000 miles to get away from them!’ she says. Things came to a head when she and Max were about to move into a new home. ‘I was willing to help them financially but not to live with them,’ she says. Musing about her relationship with her parents, she says: ‘Life isn’t fair. The pleasures that parents give children are brushed away like crumbs, but the pains are absorbed into the psyche like inkblots.’ Once again, my cousin’s insight resonates in my mind for a long time to come.
Avner and Hela moved to New York to live with their son Adam and his new wife Margot, and continued to live with them for the next eight years. Having in-laws living with you for years in a cramped apartment sounds like a recipe for disaster, but Margot’s affection for her parents-in-law never waned, not even after she and Adam parted.
Soon after arriving in New York, Avner started working as a diamond broker, a business he’d learned in Antwerp. According to Adam, he was unlucky from the start. He made a sale of industrial quality diamonds but as the customer didn’t pay, he couldn’t pay the supplier and lost the business. His next venture was costume jewellery, but that didn’t work out either. Neither did his attempts to sell real estate.
Adam has come to Connecticut to meet me. Again, it’s disconcerting to realise that this elderly white-haired man with the stroke-slurred speech and stiff gait is the cousin who has always been referred to in the family by the childish form of his name, Adash. Unlike his sister, Adam doesn’t analyse his parents or himself. When I ask why so many of his father’s enterprises didn’t work out, he shrugs. ‘You have to realise that for many people of that generation, life didn’t go in a straight line. Your father was a dentist so he remained a dentist, he didn’t have to keep trying to figure out new ways of earning money. But my father didn’t have any trade or profession, so he had to keep finding new businesses. Finally he hit on the idea of making pâté. He loved fine food and felt that there had to be a market in the United States for the chicken liver pâté he used to buy in Antwerp before the war.’
Mosaic Page 41