by Arnold Zable
For Levi Yitskhok, God was an intimate friend with whom he could enter into dialogue; God was the recipient of his anger and fears. Now, years after her death, I understand why Hadassah returned so often to this song. She too hungered after an intimate friend, a confidante. She too wanted to break free of her isolation and simmering regret.
Long before I acquired such understanding, however, there was merely the nigun. And the lullaby. Hadassah would sit by the bedside and sing of the miraculous goat that stood beneath the cradle. In order to survive, the goat would leave his village to sell raisins and almonds. As Hadassah sang I imagined the white goat making his way from one market place to the next. I did not see, then, the degree to which this deceptively simple ballad mirrored the lives of my mother and many of her peers. You too are destined to become like the white goat, warn the lyrics of this, the most famous of Yiddish songs. ‘There will come a time my child, when you too will travel far and wide.’
Born in the Polish village of Grodek, in 1905, Hadassah would one day make her way to the ends of the earth in search of a haven from a burgeoning storm. As a teenager she understood how fragile life could be. She knew the tyranny of constant change. She had lived through two revolutions and one prolonged war, and she had moved house many times.
Yiddish song remained her one constant. In her youth she often performed solo at school concerts and community celebrations, youth camps and rallies, and in the workshop where she fashioned clothes. A quiet woman by nature, when she sang she came alive. In singing she allowed herself to fly.
Hadassah was blessed with a resonant soprano. Even as she neared old age, it continued to soar in our Canning Street home. But there was a shrillness, a hard edge to her singing; perhaps fuelled by the thought that she was never able to bring her talent to fruition.
‘I have a story to tell,’ she would say in despair. ‘No one knows. No one cares. No one sees who I really am.’ Perhaps this is why she made her way, at the age of sixty, to Miriam Rochlin’s flat, determined, finally, to reveal her true worth.
The front door of the flat opened directly into a cubby-hole kitchen. In one corner stood a Kooka stove. Miriam served Hadassah a cup of black tea spiced with lemon. After a chat by the kitchen table, Miriam guided her into the living room. She sat down at an upright piano and assumed her characteristic pose. A cigarette dangled from the side of her mouth. On the floor lay her well-worn leather satchel crammed with scores. Her eyes squinted at the music sheet behind thick-framed glasses. Above the piano there stood a photo of an all-female band.
Miriam Rochlin was a familiar figure in Carlton. She accompanied almost every Yiddish concert, choir rehearsal, and theatre performance, for over half a century. Miriam did not merely play. She thumped. Whenever an actor complained she was playing too loud, she snapped back, in her gravel-laced voice, ‘Listen. Acting is your business, music is mine. You mind your business and I will mind mine.’
Miriam lived alone. She spoke Yiddish with the accent of a native Australian. The tight vowels were elongated into a drawl. She knew the details of the village gossip. We were the children she did not bear. She would stop when she saw us in the street, and inquire after everyone in the family. She knew everything about our lives, but we knew little about hers; except for that enigmatic photograph of the band.
The women were young and dressed in loose flowing white gowns. I recall their faces as poised between a smile and a frown. A young Miriam Rochlin sits by the piano. One woman poses behind a set of drums. Another stands, clutching a bass, and yet another holds a trumpet. Or was it a clarinet? Or flute? I cannot quite remember. The photo was taken perhaps some time in the 1930s, certainly before the war.
Miriam was an independent spirit who knew her own mind. Music was her first love, and her calling. She had followed her own muse. Perhaps this is why Hadassah was drawn towards her; and why she would return home from the rehearsals somewhat lighter, with an uncharacteristic ease. And perhaps this is why she persisted with the rehearsals for many months, until she emerged, triumphant, from the studios of Wilbur William, with two copies of a 45 rpm vinyl platter.
When I listen to the record now I am surprised at how young Hadassah sounds. The soprano still holds, though at times the voice lapses and is hesitant with age. She struggles to follow the beat. She seems uncertain in the surrounds of a recording studio. Yet it is clear that she possessed an extraordinary talent. Her voice is powered by a fierce will. She seems to be saying, ‘This is who I really am. After all these years, I am still here. Still alive.’
Hadassah chose well. Within the four songs resides a vanished world. The lyrics mirror Hadassah’s ‘ideals’. They reflect the struggles and journeys of her generation. She begins with a lullaby. ‘Sleep My Child, My Crown’ was written as a new century was approaching. It was composed in Tsarist Russia at a time of mass movement and change. This movement was sparked by a wave of pogroms that swept through Russian villages in the 1880s, in the wake of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.
Written by the most renowned of Yiddish authors, Sholem Aleichem, the lullaby was sung by women who wanted to maintain their maternal softness, yet remain strong. It was sung by women who were raising their children through times of poverty, and the constant threat of the baying mob.
The lyrics reflect the dominant trend of the time. In the tens of thousands Jews were fleeing the townlets of Eastern Europe. Entire families were stealing across the border, en route to Atlantic ports. More often, the family was preceded by a father, a husband, a son.
The mother sings of the child’s absent father. He has been long gone. He lives in America. The new world is surely a Garden of Eden where one eats sweet braided Sabbath bread, even in the middle of the week. Your father will send letters, money, a photograph. And:
One day your father will send for us
But until that moment comes, my child
Sleeping is the surest cure
Sleep my child, ai-le-lu
Singing was Hadassah’s act of renewal. This is how she held herself together while she raised her three sons in an alien land. This is how she maintained her spirit at a time when the savings culled from many years of drudgery were eaten up by a business gone wrong. And how she kept the ghosts of her murdered loved ones at bay, and honoured the many friends she never saw again after she left Bialystok on the eve of war. Perhaps this is why Hadassah follows the lullaby with a song called ‘In Life’s Hard Times’.
Based on a Yiddish translation of a poem by the Russian poet Lermontov, the song extols the healing quality of prayer. There is a godly power, writes Lermontov. A power that nurtures and protects; that provides meaning and faith. A power that can guide us through dark times.
The third song, ‘The Naked Young Man from the Swamps’, is a hymn to honest labour and toil. As a child I imagined the naked youth as a wild man caked in mud. I saw him as dancing in the swamps. I saw him as driven by a kind of madness; and I saw this madness as reflected in my mother’s voice.
Look at that cottage which stands not so far
Who was it that built it, who was it?
Who was it who built it of brick and of clay?
The naked young man from the swamps.
Look at that horse dancing outside
Who was it that raised it, who was it?
Who was it that made it so powerful and strong?
The naked young man from the swamps
‘The Naked Young Man from the Swamps’ was written by the poet Itzik Feffer. Born in a Russian village in the very first year of the twentieth century, Feffer came of age at the time of the Bolshevik revolution. Like so many young men and women he was drawn to the socialist ideal. He was one of a group of Yiddish writers who moved to the newly formed Soviet Union to serve a revolution they believed would bring an end to inequity and strife.
Feffer clung to this vision even during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. He clung to this ideal even as his fellow writers began to disappear in the labour
camps of the Siberian gulag. And even as some of his closest friends woke up to the harsh fact that the Red Messiah was as ruthless and self-serving as the Tsars they had overthrown.
Perhaps he still clung to his waning faith when he was arrested in Stalin’s final purge of Yiddish writers and intellectuals. How can we know? But on 12 August 1952, along with thirty other writers who had remained loyal to their youthful hopes, Itzik Feffer was executed under direct orders from Joseph Stalin.
This is where many Yiddish songs finally lead us. They cling like vines struggling for light within a forest. The forest stood on the outskirts of town. With the coming of spring there would arrive bands of gypsies. They unharnessed their wagons, set up camp, lit fires, and entered into the dreams of the townsfolk. Perhaps Hadassah glimpsed in them another possibility. Perhaps she longed to move on with them, and imagined them enjoying a life of greater freedom.
She herself had to stay put. After decades of movement she lived the final forty-three years of her eighty-six years of life in the one place, a terraced cottage in Canning Street. She lived there until ten days before she died, on 15 July 1990.
When her children left home she retreated to the darker corners of the house. She moved to the back room away from the northern light. Her shoulders became drawn, her back hunched, her face gaunt. She pulled down the blinds and spent many days in bed. Or she would sit on the chair beside the bed, bent over a Yiddish novel. More often she would lapse into a prolonged silence. Her gaze was focused elsewhere, far beyond the house and her austere surroundings. She emerged from the back room only to cook, or to greet her visiting sons.
And sometimes she would hum a fragment of melody, a verse of forgotten song. She never entirely gave up her passion. I would come across her, lost in a reverie, humming; and the song she sang most often in those last years, was ‘Play Gypsy’:
Play Gypsy, play me a song
On the fiddle all day long
On the fiddle green leaves fall
And what once was, is now beyond recall
Red is blood and red is wine
A star falls and then another
And our hearts reach out to each other.
‘Play Gypsy’ was the final song Hadassah chose to record in the studios of Wilbur Williams. For many years she retained her shock of black hair. She wore the hair tied back in a tight bun. From time to time she set it free. She sat by the kitchen table, removed the amber combs that kept her hair in place, and allowed it to cascade over her shoulders. She followed a well-practised ritual. She would massage her hair with Restoria Cream. These jars of cream were her most prized possessions; she claimed the cream kept her hair black. She would then comb the lengthy strands with a rhythmic precision.
Hadassah looked like a gypsy at such moments. Her hair was her great pride. It matched her black eyes and her dark complexion. It radiated vigour. Even when she was sixty it still retained much of its colour. Her voice and hair shared one thing in common: they both retained a youthful quality well into old
‘Play Gypsy’ was written by the Yiddish poet Itzik Manger. Born in 1901, Manger was raised in the Romanian city of Czernowitz, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. It was in this city, in 1908, at a congress of writers, that Yiddish, once held in disdain as a jargon, a common vernacular, was declared an official language.
Manger saw himself as the heir of the Yiddish minstrels and bards of the nineteenth century. His mentors were Berl Broder, the folk singer and composer, who moved through the hamlets of Russia and Galicia singing ballads of the common man; and Velvl Zbarzher, the ‘folk nightingale’, a prolific songwriter who performed throughout the Ukraine, so legend has it. Manger revered Eliakhum Zunser, the wedding jester, whose spontaneous verse and social commentaries poured forth at village celebrations in an effortless flow; and Yisroel Grodner, an entertainer who performed humorous monologues in the wine cellars of Odessa, dressed in stylish jackets and capes.
The troubadours moved throughout Eastern Europe. Their domain extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea. They sang in bars and wayside inns, in makeshift halls and village homes. They composed ballads and popular verse, and collected folksongs and traditional lore. They were both entertainers and social commentators who challenged the authorities of their time.
Manger reinvented himself in their image. He journeyed in their well-worn tracks. His vision expanded. He was inspired by other mentors, Rilke and Goethe. Manger was at home both in music halls and literary forums. He composed sonnets about ancient sages, and re-created biblical figures in the guise of his own townsfolk. He experimented with many forms, but his first love remained Yiddish song.
Manger was impulsive and unpredictable. He rarely said no to a drink. Hadassah once saw him perform his poetry drunk in Bialystok. He was an unrepentant romantic, intoxicated by his love of verse. But Manger’s romantic self-image was shattered by the Shoah. He spent the war years in London, and emerged a bitter man. He raged at the fate of his people. He saw the Shoah as a betrayal of his faith in universal brotherhood. His people had been abandoned. His treasured legacy was in flames. His work now seemed meaningless.
‘Play Gypsy’ captures the essence of a dispersed people; and Manger, the wandering poet, personified their longing for a better life. This is why his work touched a deep chord in his audience. And this is why his songs reached out to an ageing woman seated at her kitchen table in a Melbourne suburb, far distant from the world of her past.
As she hummed Manger’s songs, she threaded her comb through her unbraided hair. This is my most abiding image of Hadassah, singing in the fading light, as she tamed her gypsy-black hair.
Even in her final days, in Royal Melbourne Hospital, she continued to tend to her hair, with the help of a new friend. A week before she died I made my way down the corridors to the ward in which she lay, and stopped, abruptly, in the doorway, arrested by the sight of her seated in a wheelchair. Behind her stood a trainee nurse, combing her hair.
Hadassah and the nurse were silhouetted by the rays of the mid-morning sun radiating through the windows. A cleaner was swabbing the floors, the morning teas were being delivered and Hadassah, eighty-five years old, was in a reverie as the teenage nurse continued her combing. Strangers just days earlier, in this moment they seemed as one.
And Hadassah was humming, inaudibly almost. Beside her, on the dressing table, lay the amber combs and a jar of Restoria Cream. While in the chair sat a tough old gypsy, still haunted by ghosts. And still singing.
The Fig Tree
A cancer ward in St Vincent’s Hospital. The lights have been turned down. It is at night that I prefer to visit Lily Varvarigos, my mother-in-law, now lying terminally ill. It is at night, as the city meanders towards sleep, that a special kind of energy can be felt. It simmers beneath the surface calm, among sixteen patients in a public ward. Some doze, some cough, others moan. Within their dreams, and their ebbing thoughts, there is a wafting of memories, a raging against the dying light and, perhaps, in others, the beginnings of an acceptance, a reconciliation.
‘I do not want to die just yet,’ Lily tells me. She resumes her defiant silence. Her eyes remain shut. ‘Look after the baby,’ she says. ‘He shouldn’t be allowed out into the cold.’ She remains a carer to the last. Her mind sways between fear for herself and concern for the welfare of Alexander, her one-year-old grandson. Lily is Alexander’s last living grandparent.
October 1994. It is four years since my mother’s death, two years since my father’s. And many years since Lily’s husband Athanassios passed away. Alexander’s last link to a generation is moving on.
‘Why is this happening to me?’ Lily asks after another prolonged silence. Over and again these words float into hearing. ‘Why is this happening to me?’ These are not cliches but battle cries—attempts to come to terms with impending death, with life’s greatest mystery.
‘I want to go out into the garden,’ she tells her youngest daughter, Dora, and me, the next night.
&
nbsp; It is a demand.
‘Which garden?’ we ask.
‘My garden,’ she says, with a hint of annoyance. ‘The garden in Parkdale,’ she adds, in order to make sure that we know she still knows her own mind—the garden with the apple and citrus trees, grape vines and ferns, infant gums, pots of basil and scented mint; the garden with the duck waddling about, the cats dozing in the sun, the bantams laying eggs; the garden with the all-embracing fig tree.
But it is midnight, and Lily is dying. She lies in a hospital bed, far removed from the garden she has presided over this past quarter-century of her sixty-nine years of life.
‘Perhaps wait until morning,’ we suggest.
‘I know it is night-time,’ she replies, with annoyance. ‘Still, I want to go out into the garden.’
And the thought occurs to us, why not? Why shouldn’t she return to the place where she feels most at ease? Why shouldn’t she return to the familiarity of home? Why shouldn’t she be set free of the drips and tubes, the catheters and masks that are keeping her afloat? Why shouldn’t she be granted just this one simple request?
A Sunday morning in St Vincent’s. In the city, a festival is taking place. In the cancer ward, dramas unfold, a constant ebbing and flowing of life. On a bed, diagonally opposite Lily’s, lies little Roza, wrapped in a blanket, asleep. She is one week old. Her mother hovers nearby. On a reclining chair, beside the bed, lies Roza’s forty-seven-year-old grandmother, after whom she has been named. The grandmother is gasping for breath, and the doctors say this may well be her last day. By her side sits Yiayia, the great-grandmother, clad in black, distraught. She holds her dying daughter’s hand.
‘Why doesn’t the cancer attack rocks? Why does it attack people?’ Yiayia asks. Hers is the wisdom of the village woman. Not far from Thessaloniki she raised her children who were to make their way to new worlds. Yet those who remained in the village, those who have watched the rise and fall of countless suns, they seem to sense that through rocks and people the same life-force, the same atoms, the same energy flows. So why not the rocks? And the attention of Yiayia’s grand-daughter, the young mother, is torn first one way, then the other: from the baby, the miracle of new life, and the joy of her being, to the woman who bore her, now slipping away from life.