by Arnold Zable
Meier’s love of words, and their power to console, returns. As, too, does his capacity to respond to the moment. In the winter of 1976 he revives a ritual that had threaded through our childhood. He draws back the curtain that has covered the kitchen wood stove for many years, rekindles the embers, and falls into a reverie, a meditation on gold and fire: on the power to destroy or heal, to create or deceive. The only true gold, he concludes, is the fire that burns within, the gold of one’s own soul.
The following year Meier honours the one constant in his life: the alphabet, the building blocks of expression, of understanding. The Hebraic script is: ‘So crystal clear, past and present can be clearly seen; so light, so close, as pungent as freshly baked bread. Through aleph, beit, gimmel I came to know the world, to see the sky, to discern its rays of wisdom.’
‘This is my great wealth,’ he concludes. ‘And when the time comes to leave this world, this will be my greatest regret—to be torn away, forever, from my sacred Yiddish alphabet.’
Meier’s mind sharpens with age. He casts his eye over a long lifetime that has straddled a century of terror and upheaval, and emerges as witness. He is suspicious of ‘blind masses’. He is wary of the mob. He is conscious of the illusions, the paradoxes. And he carves his observations in a lean poem:
Love is blind.
Hatred a thousand eyes entwined.
Joy, a tiny ring entrapped
Within a long chain of sighs.
Fortune dangles on a string:
A mere touch, and back it springs.
I remain, sadly musing.
Wonderful is this world,
Just plain common sense is missing.
Meier is returning to his mentors. He is emulating the feats of the poets he had first read as a teenager. He is studying the volumes he had brought with him on the sea voyage to a new world. He reads them with renewed appreciation. And he acknowledges one particular volume, written by his favourite poet.
He has kept this book with him for over sixty years. Scattered about the pages are flowers which Meier had picked during his walks on the outskirts of Bialystok. The flowers are ancient moments fixed in time. They are brittle, yet somehow they have held fast. Meier browses through his most prized possession, and composes a song of praise for ‘An Old Book of Poems’:
Not withered trees, nor decayed leaves,
Are the yellowed pages
In this book between fraying boards,
Shelved between all my newer books
With their glossy sheen.
Not yet dead are the threads,
The word chains,
The lines of verse
The black dots…
They reveal their wisdom to my eyes
When I delve into these lines…
As he moves into his ninth decade, Meier becomes increasingly obsessed with time. He returns to his thoughts of imminent death; and he is defiant. The pace quickens, the images become more succinct. Every moment is significant. He is rushing towards eternity. His mind is ablaze with rhythms, word plays, and contending thoughts which seek to synthesise a lifetime of reflection.
Meier’s life becomes an extended poem. ‘Poetry is being totally immersed in every moment of every hour of every day,’ he tells me. ‘There is poetry in gardening, in housework, in making a potato cake,’ he proclaims. Indeed, there is poetry in moving around the city on trams, free to observe the world flowing by, and to talk to strangers who spill out life stories to an avid listener.
The tram conveys him to a communal hall, in Elsternwick, south of the river, to listen to Yiddish lectures delivered by guest speakers from overseas. Melbourne has become his domain, his intimate shtetl. On the way home, the conductor asks him to stay on the tram to the end of the line and to extend their conversation into the night. He has become entranced by this wiry leprechaun for whom life had curved back, full circle, to the primal joy of a child.
The near-empty tram races to the depot and back to the corner of Lygon and Fenwick streets. Meier is still on his feet, his breath laboured, sustained by sheer will as he moves through the neighbourhood that has gloved him for so many years. He turns left into the back lane, and walks a familiar gauntlet of rusting fences to the ramshackle rear door of the house that has become his haven. He makes his way through the kitchen, along the passage to the front room where he will end yet another day, seated at his desk, writing a summary of the lecture he has just heard.
Meier is revelling in being alive. He is grateful for each morning in which he awakes ‘intact after yet another night’. He knows now, at last, that he has lived his life to the full. He is aware of his worth. He is conscious of his being. The lenses have been wiped clean. He returns to the streets and sees ‘patches of grass sprouting through cracks in the hardened-grey path’. He emerges into the early light of day, and sees its fresh ‘face washed clean with dew’.
Meier’s final vision is that of an elder with the eyes of a child. ‘Every step you take,’ he asserts in one of his last poems, ‘make it worth two. As long as the stars still twinkle and shine, as long as your clock still beats, use your time. Each extra minute is a gift. I am thankful for this life of mine.’
It was this sustained momentum towards wisdom that enabled Meier to write, just hours before his death, the first draft of his last poem, beginning with the line ‘The world will get by with the least of worries, with my not being here’. And it was his heightened sense of self that enabled him to conclude, with his mind clear, his faculties intact, ‘I feel like an anonymous leaf about to fall into eternity.’
And who is Wang Liu? Remember? His is the parallel tale, a journey still unfolding, a ballad still in the singing. Or is the song of Wang Liu condemned to be suppressed in the new world, just as the song of Meier Zabludowski so nearly was?
I first met Wang Liu in 1992. He was my student in a literacy class for newly arrived migrants. His father had died in the same week as mine. Wang Liu wore black for several weeks when he returned to class after a month’s absence. I noted his interest when I talked to the students about the death of my father. I told them he had been a poet who had begun to practise his craft anew, in his mother tongue, Yiddish, after a forty-year detour as a factory worker and stall-holder at the Victoria Market.
Weeks later, Wang Liu handed me a thick wad of poems, typed on the lined sheets of an exercise book. The poems were in English, translated from his original Mandarin. He had obviously worked on them for hours with the aid of dictionaries. Many of the words had been translated literally, and this gave the verses an eccentric quality that I found appealing. The syntax was distinctly different, perhaps echoing the rhythms of the mother tongue. Yet, despite the difficulties, I could discern the power and spirit of the original.
I pencilled in suggestions. Wang Liu reworked the poems and handed them back with a new batch. The translations remained primitive. How could it be otherwise for someone who had recently begun to study the language?
Still, I was stunned by the overall impact of the work. Wang Liu’s poems were an extended chant of longing, driven by a youthful exuberance. He wrote of the village of his birth, his childhood memories, lost loves, his erratic dreams: it was the song cycle of a young immigrant who had left his homeland to embark upon a new life, in a new language, in a new world.
After the course ended I did not see Wang Liu for almost a year. I met him again, by chance, on a tram in an inner-city suburb. He told me he had found a job as a machinist in a clothing factory, in a suburb on the other side of town. It took him over two hours a day to make his way to and from the factory. He had to be at work by seven-thirty, six days a week. He was content, he told me. Both he and his wife were working. Between them they were making a good living. He gave me his address and invited me to visit him some time.
I called on Wang Liu several weeks later. He lived on the ninth floor of a high-rise housing estate. The foyer was littered with graffiti and dust. The corridors smelt of frying oil and neglect. T
urkish music wafted through one open door, metallic rock through another. From the windows, the inner-city skyline loomed close. Office towers glowed in a night sky illumined by lights that extended to the horizon, while directly below could be seen the faint outlines of back lanes and yards.
Wang Liu’s flat was decorated with Chinese scrolls and paintings. Porcelain horses and cranes reared from the tables and sideboards. The decor reminded me of apartments I had seen in Shanghai and Beijing in the mid-1980s. The furniture, however, newly acquired, hinted at an affluence that would have been undreamed of in the high-rise blocks of the old country.
Wang Liu’s English had improved considerably. He was keen to talk about writing. He showed me his few treasured volumes of Chinese verse, collections of poems from the Tang and Song dynasties—a renowned era of creativity that extended from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries in imperial China. Wang Liu regarded these poets as his mentors. He had tried, he told me, to emulate their styles, especially those of his two favourites, the eighth-century poets Du Fu and Bai Juyi.
He had tried, but was no longer trying. Or at least he had postponed his efforts. After all, he added, ‘When do I have time to write? And besides, what place is there for a Chinese poet in Australia?’
I left Wang Liu’s apartment clutching a book of poems by Bai Juyi, in English translation, the gift of a former student to his teacher. I descended to the ground floor, and walked out into the cool night air. On a nearby corner beneath the flats, torch in hand, stood a lone figure, bent over a patch of soil, in a tiny allotment, within a patchwork of vegetable plots that made up the high-rise gardens.
He remained oblivious to his surroundings as he tended his plants. I watched him from the footpath beside the cyclone fence that enclosed the plots. I sensed his obsession, and the attachment that he felt to this piece of earth, so far removed from his Asian homeland. And I felt a surge of elation, a momentary sense of total belonging. Yes, this was my city, a metropolis of invisible lives. Each life was a world unto itself.
Each life was a miracle of being. Yet each life was also a part of me, and a part of a single song.
How many of them are there, I wondered, hunched over their kitchen tables late at night, whilst their spouses and children sleep, writing their poems of longing, employing words to bridge the gap between past and present? How many are there, working in their diverse mother tongues, writing their way towards relief and understanding? These are the unsung balladeers of the city. These are the invisible ones, whose barely audible songs are the stuff of which cultures are born.
And just as abruptly the feeling was gone. I walked on alone, dwarfed by the buildings that reared above me. Beyond reach, detached, huddled within myself, still in search of that elusive melody.
Perhaps, in his final years, Meier Zabludowski found that melody. He sang his way into eternity. In the days I spent after his death, sifting through his vast legacy of fragments, this became clear. There were many surprises—a continual uncovering of new compositions, of yet another bundle of scribbled notes, cryptic messages, seed droppings. Father’s final years were a time of completion, a time in which he tried to find his way to a personal dreaming, a sense of wholeness. His drive to express himself knew no bounds.
As I scan his papers I come across a line which he scrawled again and again, on scraps of paper, in the margins of notebooks, and in the spaces surrounding his poems: ‘Boundless space in the lonely eye of a bird.’ This was his preferred epitaph, it seems, the way he came to see himself. This was the way he viewed the world: from above, elated in his solitude.
Meier looked like a bird in those final years. He flew through the streets with rapid strides, as if keeping pace with an inner rhythm of his own. He was a small man shrinking with age, yet compact and fluent in his movements; and firmly rooted upon the earth. He tended his forget-me-nots, while his mind swooped through open skies.
On these mornings, sitting by the desk, I can see how much he has left me. His ‘seed droppings’ have helped me reconnect to my own past; and beyond, to something far more vast. On these mornings I have the uncanny feeling that there are many others like me: sons and daughters who, in sorting out their loved one’s remains, have stumbled upon lyrics encoded in another language. These are words reaching out to be heard, to be deciphered as part of an ancient melody.
Language: this is the essential clue, the code that increases our ability to retrace the footsteps of our forebears. This was, in retrospect, the great gift I received as a child, a language that would, in time, enable me to retrace my ancestry. A language which flowed from the melodic voices of the many guests who sat around the kitchen table over endless cups of tea, recounting tales of a world that had all but vanished.
There is much to learn from Meier Zabludowski who returned to the naive wisdom of a child, and to the songs of his receding past. He re-created them anew, and sang them into the future. And, in so doing, he was able to fly through boundless space and view the world, in all its terrifying radiance, through the solitary eyes of a bird.
The Record
For my father, the poem; for mother, the song; and for both, a love of the Yiddish language, and of Bialystok, the Polish city where they met. My most precious possession is a 45 rpm vinyl platter, recorded at Wilbur Williams Studios, in High Street, Northcote. The names of the two performers are typed on a red label in the centre of the disc. The vocalist is Hadassah Zable, accompanied on piano by Miriam Rochlin. Produced in 1965, it is the only recording my mother ever made.
To this day, I find it remarkable that, at the age of sixty, Hadassah stepped out of her home, made her way through the streets of Carlton to a block of flats in Drummond Street, and ascended the stairs to Rochlin’s one-bedroom apartment for the first of many rehearsals.
Hadassah had become increasingly reclusive as she aged. She left the house only to shop, or to make her way to the Victoria Market stall where she helped my father sell the socks and stockings that kept the family finances afloat.
She would leave by the back door, string bags in hand, and walk via the cobblestone back lane that ran from the yard to Fenwick Street. The weed-strewn lane, with its flaking timber and rusting tin fences, was her conduit into an increasingly forbidding world. She did most of her shopping on Saturdays, late morning, when the market was about to close. This is when the fruit, vegetables and meat were off-loaded at much cheaper prices for fear they would rot over the weekend.
Hadassah hauled her string bags from the low-slung sheds of the market, six hundred metres to the tram stop, and she stepped off, half an hour later, at the corner of Lygon and Fenwick streets. With two bags sagging from each hand, she looked like a village water-carrier as she walked the final four blocks back to the lane.
Once home, Hadassah retreated to her household chores and silences, broken by an occasional outburst of song. She sang without restraint. She sang by the kitchen table as she chopped and cut, sliced and diced onions and egg, liver and fish, chicken and lamb chops, and the various ingredients that went into the family meals. She sang as she sat by our bed and nursed us through the childhood illnesses: measles and chicken pox, whooping coughs and mumps, and the many colds and influenzas that swept through our neighbourhood every winter.
She sang by the sewing machine at which she worked for hours on end, stitching together skirts and socks, jackets and trousers, piecework for factories in Brunswick, the neighbouring suburb to the north. The sewing machine was her closest companion, her means of livelihood. She would sit bent forward, intense in concentration as she threaded the cotton with one deft stab through the needle’s eye. Once the rhythm took hold, she would sing in tandem with the machine’s drone.
She sang in the washhouse at the back of the house, where she stoked the laundry in stone tubs steaming with hot water. She refused washing machines when they began to appear on the market. A waste of money, she said, with contempt. Instead she beat the laundry into submission. She kneaded the washing like a b
aker rolling dough. She hauled the soaked clothes to the backyard hoist and pegged them against a breeze. Sheets and blankets, trousers and cardigans, underwear and overcoats, dresses and petticoats unfurled in the wind; and still she sang.
Her repertoire was vast. She sang about rabbis and wonder workers, silver birches and solitary pines. She sang lullabies and love songs, and ballads that depicted the lives of tailors, shoemakers, carpenters and weavers, songs extolling the virtues of work when larders were empty, and wolves were baying at the door.
Yiddish music permeated our lives. Even in the silence, a song always seemed about to break loose. Melodies seemed to linger in shafts of dust trapped in rays of sun that poked between the window frames.
At first there was just the nigun, the wordless tune, sung by mystics in praise of their Lord, songs that Hadassah first heard sung by her father, Aron Yankev, the devout Hasid. ‘Reb Aron, geb unz a nigun’, ‘Reb Aron give us a melody’, his fellow devotees would say when he entered the tiny prayer house on Sabbath nights and festival days. It stood in one of the many lanes of the Chanaykes, the slum quarters of Bialystok, the city to which Reb Aron, the weaver, had migrated, from the nearby village of Grodek, at the turn of the century, in search of work. Hadassah hummed Reb Aron’s nigunim with a gentle rocking, a swaying motion, until the melody gave way to words:
Riboynoy Shel Oylom, Riboynoy Shel Oylom
Master of the Universe,
I will sing you a song of praise
Is there a place where You cannot be found?
Wherever I walk, there is only You
Wherever I stand, there is only You
To the east, You, and the west, You
In the north, You, and the south, only You
In the heavens above, You
On the earth below, You
Wherever I turn, I see only You.
This was among the many songs that wove through my childhood. It was written by one of the most revered of Tzaddikim, holy men of the Hasidic movement, Reb Levi Yitskhok Berdichiver. Famed for his fierce independence, Levi Yitskhok composed songs and prayers in which he argued with God. Why do my people continue to suffer? he demanded. Why do you not respond to our call? Where can we find you? he pleaded. And this plea, too, became a song.