Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  Twelve years after they’d arrived, life in Israel was still hard. Marcel didn’t earn much, and now, with their little son Igal as well as Ronit to support, it was a struggle to make ends meet. For the past few years Krysia had been employed by Aunty Lunia, giving lessons at Madame Stella’s Sewing School. The memory of working for her aunt twists my cousin’s placid face into a grimace. ‘Uncle Berus wanted me to become their partner but she kept stalling. I didn’t earn much money and wanted to leave, but my mother always sided with Lunia. Never mind that I was unhappy and struggling, that didn’t count. “You can’t let Lunia down,” she used to say. Even though she and Lunia fought like cat and dog, Lunia was her guru. So I kept working there, on the understanding that one day the business would be mine.’

  ‘Imagine my shock the day Aunty Lunia came over to see me and said in that honeyed tone of hers, “You know, Krysia, I’ve sold the school!” I was struck dumb. After twenty-five years I was left in the lurch without even a pension. Berus was compeletely different. He was an angel, I’ve never met anyone like him,’ she sighs. ‘When he was dying the last thing he said to me was, “Don’t abandon Aunty.” If not for that, I wouldn’t have put up with her all these years.’

  Krysia’s dissatisfaction with life in Israel came to a head in 1962 when she travelled overseas for her brother’s wedding to Phyllis Pomer in Connecticut. Fred had been strong enough to get away, while Krysia felt trapped in this impossible land, shackled to her demanding aunt and distrustful mother who alternated between generosity and vitriolic criticism.

  So when her friend in Canada organised a work contract for Marcel, Krysia returned home fired up with enthusiasm to migrate to Canada. ‘Let’s go for one year and see,’ she pleaded. ‘We won’t risk anything. They’re even going to pay for our flights. We can always come back.’ But Marcel was adamant that he wouldn’t leave Israel.

  Sooner or later in the life of every marriage, an issue surfaces which tests the strength of the relationship. ‘It was serious, because Krysia wanted to go at all costs but I said not at any price,’ Marcel recalls. ‘No power on earth could make me leave Israel. Maybe this sounds funny, but I was afraid of being a Jew again. Here among Jews, I was an Israeli. I wasn’t going to become a Canadian Jew. Maybe I would have been better off in Canada. Certainly I would have led a quieter, safer life without wars, hostile Arabs and intifadas, and my granddaughters wouldn’t be going into the army.’

  In the warm Tel-Aviv night we discuss what it means to be Jewish when you don’t go to synagogue or observe religious laws. In his quiet, compelling way Marcel says something which resonates in my mind for years to come. ‘We are descended from a long chain of people who started with Moses a few thousand years ago. They were persecuted and hunted, but they didn’t abandon their faith or their Torah. The Assyrians, Sumerians, Hittites, Babylonians and all their gods have come and gone, Pharaohs, emperors, sultans and chancellors have tried to annihilate us, but we’re still here, hm?’

  Outside, some of those Jews are shouting to each other in the sultry night, and a bald man with a Yiddish accent pokes his head over the balcony. ‘Is my building a conference hall?’ he shouts. ‘Go have your meeting somewhere else.’ They laugh and move away, and their voices fade in the dark night as we sit around the table and muse about our Jewish legacy.

  Krysia has been deep in thought, her head propped up on her hand. ‘I didn’t put down roots in Israel until 1967,’ she says. ‘During the Six-Day War, when our very existence was in danger, our soldiers conquered the armies of the Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians in six days, broke through to Jerusalem and kissed the Western Wall. I thought I’d burst with pride. That’s when I knew that I belonged here, that this was my land.’

  CHAPTER 36

  On her way home from her brother’s wedding in the United States in 1962, my cousin Krysia stopped over in London and stayed in the high-ceilinged Edwardian flat that Michael and I were renting in Maida Vale. Judging by the size and self-important air of the solid houses which lined Elgin Avenue, this must have been a prestigious address at the turn of the century, but by the time we arrived it had come down in the world, and most of the houses were divided into draughty, inhospitable furnished rooms let to impecunious Commonwealth visitors like ourselves. My reunion with Krysia was much warmer than our accommodation, and even the frosty weather and foggy nights didn’t dampen our pleasure at seeing each other again for the first time since we’d parted in Krakow fourteen years before.

  Michael and I had been living in London for two years. A trip to England after graduating was considered an indispensable part of your education, and Michael, who’d recently finished studying medicine, was keen to work in London hospitals. Most Australians in the predominantly Anglo-Saxon society of the sixties referred to England as ‘back home’, but in his case, this was actually true.

  Michael was born in London in 1935 to Ben and Aida Armstrong, both of whose parents had migrated from Russia to the UK during the pogroms at the turn of the century. How a Jewish immigrant from Kiev came to have a Scottish surname was a mystery that not even my father-in-law could satisfactorily explain. Ben was a tall man with a loping stride, thick glasses over myopic eyes, and a hearty laugh. When, on arrival in Britain, his father had told the immigration officer his long Russian name, it must have sounded like Armstrong, which is what the man wrote down, and that’s how it remained ever since. I must admit a sneaking feeling of gratitude towards that immigration official whose laziness saved me from having another unpronounceable surname!

  In his lilting Welsh accent, my father-in-law told me that his father had started off as an itinerant peddler, and later became a ships’ chandler in Cardiff. ‘My father was a huge man with a long red beard, so strong that he could lift up brawling sailors with one hand and throw them out of his store which smelled of candle wax, hemp, paint and tar,’ he reminisced.

  Ben’s parents were an ill-matched couple who waged unremitting war against each other. His mother was a difficult, embittered woman whose parents had pushed her into marriage with a man she detested all her life. They had seven children, the youngest of whom sat too close to the fire one cold winter’s night and her long thick hair caught fire. Ben’s mother never got over her terrible death and the quarrels grew even more acrimonious. Although the parents finally separated, they still didn’t stop fighting and embroiled the six children in their on-going battles. ‘We weren’t brought up, we were dragged up, us kids were shunted from pillar to post,’ Ben often said.

  Desperately unhappy at home because of the bitter rows, Ben stowed away on board ship at the age of thirteen and worked his passage as a cabin boy. As the ship pulled away from the port in Cardiff, he watched his mother running along the quay, her long skirts flying as she vainly tried to catch up with him before it was too late. In one hand she held his boots, in the other, a packet of matzohs. It was Pesach.

  In Canada and America Ben led the kind of colourful, rambunctious existence that fills adventure books. ‘I bummed around for years, got into all sorts of scrapes,’ he used to laugh, waving the large hand with the short middle finger in a disparaging motion. He left that bit of finger behind in a lumber camp in the Yukon. After working as a lumberjack, he smuggled liquor over the border during Prohibition, and later made a living as a boxer in a seedy part of New York, although it always puzzled Michael how, with his poor vision, he ever managed to land a punch.

  When Ben returned to England in the early thirties, he was twenty-nine, a tall impetuous man with an expansive nature and a fund of exciting stories. He had intended to return to the United States but fell in love with a woman who impressed him with her refinement and class. Aida Kleiman was his opposite in every way. Frugal where he was extravagant, restrained where he was emotional and reserved where he was extroverted. Intelligent and well-spoken, she was very proud of the fact that her father, a Russian immigrant tailor from the East End of London had sent her to Clark’s College to become a secretary while
her three sisters, like most of the daughters of immigrants at the time, had gone straight from school to the workroom.

  Because of his unhappy childhood, and the misery he’d seen at home, Ben longed to have a happy home life but having chosen a woman so different from himself guaranteed considerable marital friction. But there was one aspect of their life on which they both agreed and that was their devotion to their children. Ben and Aida had migrated to Australia in 1949 mainly to give Michael and Carole a better life. When Michael and I started going out, Carole was a shy, thoughtful twelve-year-old who preferred to listen than to talk. She had an infectious laugh and a quiet strength far beyond her years.

  Michael was in fourth year medicine and I was a wide-eyed Arts freshette when we met on the steps of Mitchell Library and began a conversation which has continued ever since. To my father’s disappointment I’d chosen to study arts instead of dentistry. In an era when most parents saw their daughters as future wives and mothers, my father believed that women should be financially independent, and he urged me to become a dentist. ‘You never know what life will bring,’ he used to say. ‘You can’t count on a man supporting you all your life. You might be divorced or widowed. As a dentist, you can always support yourself. What will arts give you?’

  Although I had no idea how I would earn a living with an arts degree, my father’s practical arguments didn’t sway me. English and history were the only subjects I was passionate about, and when it turned out that I was one of the top English and history students in the state in the Leaving Certificate, I felt that my choice was vindicated.

  As soon as we met, Michael knew that I was the girl for him. He had an unexpected ally. My mother, who usually made withering comments about my other boyfriends, could find no fault in him. ‘Michael is a mensch,’ she told me, using the Yiddish word which denotes a decent, caring, reliable human being. In years to come, she often gloated that she’d been the first to recognise his fine qualities.

  Although Michael was Jewish, I had been allowed to go out with boys who were not, unlike many of my friends. Religion was never an issue and all my friends were equally welcome. ‘Marrying someone of the same religion is no guarantee of happiness,’ my mother used to say. ‘These days so many Jewish couples don’t get through one sack of flour together.’

  Ours was not a religious household. My parents never lit candles on Friday nights or went to synagogue. When in my first year at Sydney Girls’ High I announced that I was going to fast on Yom Kippur with my friend Liliane, my father nodded approval. ‘Fasting is good for the system,’ he said. It was with Liliane that I went to synagogue for the first time. We sat upstairs with the women and looked down at the boys who were always glancing up to catch a glimpse of their girlfriends. I didn’t understand a word of the Hebrew prayers, but when the cantor’s full-throated voice sang ancient Jewish melodies, those haunting cadences tugged at my heart. Deep in my unconscious, something stirred in recognition.

  Although the religious affiliation of my boyfriends was never an issue, my father and I clashed about dating. In many ways my father was far more up-to-date and open-minded than any of the other fathers. My friends were always impressed that he discussed sex, religion and politics with me, and that he always knew who was the latest pop star, who we used to ‘swoon’ over, and which songs were top of the hit parade.

  But where dating was concerned he turned from an understanding pal into a Victorian patriarch. He had two fixed beliefs, both of which I found archaic and unreasonable. He was convinced that going out with boys would distract me from my school work, so while I was at school I wasn’t allowed to go on dates. As all my friends had boyfriends and talked about them incessantly, I rankled under this injustice. In his armchair beneath the bay window which often vibrated with the screech of buses hurtling down towards the beach, my father would take off his glasses, put down the book he was reading, and say, ‘You want to go out with boys? So leave school and get a job, and you can go out every night.’

  After I’d matriculated and was finally free to go out as much as I liked, the second rule came into operation. No going steady. According to my father, who’d been my age back in 1917, a girl who went out exclusively with one boy for more than three months was compromising herself. ‘How does it look if you break up after going out so long with one boy?’ he’d say, his face red with irritation at my protests. ‘After a few months people know how they feel. Either get married, or stop going out,’ he’d pronounce. He couldn’t understand that in 1957, the year the Sputnik had been launched in space, it was acceptable for young people to go steady, that three months was considered insufficient time to form a lifelong commitment, and that going steady wasn’t perceived as a sign of loose morals. My mother didn’t share his mid-Victorian views, but once my father had made up his mind, it was impossible to budge him.

  My mother had a biting turn of phrase and often demolished my boyfriends with comments which were invariably apt. ‘That fellow looks as if he’s swallowed a stick,’ she once said about one of my less relaxed suitors. So when she started praising Michael, I was taken aback. ‘If you like him so much, why don’t you go out with him?’ I teased her, but Michael soon swept me off my feet. He rang several times a day, brought flowers every time he came, found my thoughts riveting, and said things which made me laugh until my sides ached. I’d never had so much fun. He was witty, playful and sensitive but also protective, strong and very determined. I didn’t realise until much later that in many ways he resembled my father.

  We became inseparable. In the mornings he used to pick me up in his blue Mini Minor and drive me to lectures. By day we sat side by side in the Fisher Library without ever turning a page and later had romantic picnics in the park. At night we went out for coffee, dinner or a movie, and then spent several more hours talking on the phone until past midnight. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ my mother used to grumble. ‘You’ll wear out that telephone.’

  Two years later, just after sitting for our final exams, we married in Sydney’s Great Synagogue. I was so thrilled to be marrying Michael that my wedding day passed in a haze of euphoria. Feeling like a fairy-tale princess, I walked down the aisle on my father’s proud arm, and stood under the chuppah in front of Rabbi Israel Porush whose stern gaze reminded me of a biblical prophet. After I’d taken a sip of wine from the sacramental goblet, Michael stamped on the glass in memory of the destruction of the Second Temple and as a symbol that the silken thread of life is interwoven with joy and sorrow.

  A year later we set sail for England. Never having been separated from my parents before, I was reluctant to leave, but Michael argued that he needed to work in London hospitals and we needed to stand on our own feet and learn to depend on each other. Although we’d intended staying for about eighteen months, we enjoyed the theatre, the concerts and the English countryside so much that we stayed for almost four years. While Michael worked in hospitals, I did the last thing I thought I’d ever do. I became a teacher.

  Having lived with our respective parents until we married, we revelled in our freedom in London. Living in England enabled me to meet some of the family I’d heard about for so long. We came to love my father’s cousin, Janek Spyra, his wife Maryla and their lively, warm-hearted daughters Anne and Shirley. Janek’s charming brother Albert and his delightful wife Gertrude were wonderful to us and often invited us to Covent Garden and Sadlers Wells, luxuries we couldn’t afford on our meagre salaries.

  Occasionally Uncle Marcel came from Paris to visit us. We adored this bearlike man with a heart of gold and eyes that shone with warmth and humour. Marcel, who loved good food, always returned to Paris with a leg of lamb and a side of smoked salmon under each arm. During one of these visits he gave Michael a Practika camera. ‘I found it on top of a rubbish bin in Monte Carlo,’ he explained. ‘I looked around and asked, “Does anyone own this camera?” No-one replied, so I took it.’ Then he added with a booming laugh, ‘I have to admit I didn’t ask very loudly
!’

  During our four years in London, while I was teaching English at a blackboard jungle school in West Ealing, Michael had a meteoric rise in medicine. After working as junior resident at Willesden General Hospital, he was appointed Senior Medical Registrar. While working there, he wrote A Systematic Method of Interpreting ECGs, which has been translated into five languages and hasn’t been out of print since 1965.

  Before returning home, we toured Europe for six months in a campervan. While we were travelling, I became obsesssed with recording every detail of our trip and wrote down everything I saw, heard, bought, ate and thought every single day. Without realising it, I’d become a travel writer. That trip also marked another, more important beginning. Our daughter Justine was conceived.

  Nine months later at Sydney’s Royal Hospital for Women, Michael sat beside me holding my hand during a long and exhausting labour which I thought would never end. My hands shook when I finally held the perfectly formed baby that was my own flesh and blood and yet distinct from me, and tears streamed down Michael’s face. As Justine nestled into my arms like a warm possum, I felt overwhelmed at the thought that we’d created a whole new world, a new human being.

  My writing career, which had a much longer gestation period than the baby, was born in the same year as Justine. My first magazine article about the trials and triumphs of teaching at a difficult London high school was published in the Australian Women’s Weekly while I was still in hospital. From the moment I saw the story splashed across two pages of a magazine that was then read by almost every woman in Australia, I became hooked. Writing had entered my bloodstream.

  Two years later, when Justine was a delightful toddler with a mass of fair curls, an extraordinary vocabulary and a mind of her own, our second child Jonathan was born. After the nurse had said, ‘It’s a boy!’ there was an ominous silence during which I held my breath. Then his triumphant cry resounded in the delivery room, the most wonderful sound I’d ever heard. ‘He’s the image of Henry,’ my mother-in-law commented as soon as she saw her new grandson. Jonathan inherited my father’s finely shaped head, intellectual mind and individualistic personality. Many years passed before I realised that I’d unwittingly chosen a name for him that was similar to that of my ancestor, the famous Krakow scholar Natan Spira.