Jewels and Ashes

by Arnold Zable

  Then the lights were on, the chandeliers ablaze, the community swarming out onto the streets, the children even daring to play. We hurtled up and down flights of stairs while our parents talked on the footpaths. The faces of the town clock beamed at us as we crowded onto trams together, since many of us were returning to the same neighbourhood where Bloomfield, the human guinea pig, could be seen even at this late hour, maintaining his restless patrol, his eyes perpetually fixed on a distant and inaccessible goal.

  And there was a golden era, which I vaguely recall as weaving in and out of a darkness. Father would sit on the living-room sofa, stand me on his feet, and lift. His feet contained a magical power. ‘Oompah! Oompah!’, he would say with every lift. ‘Oompah! Oompah!’, and I was flying, arms outstretched, while his face whirled below me in a ball of laughter. Mother too displayed magical powers, especially when I contracted the various childhood ailments which swept through kindergarten and primary school. I recall them as one extended fever from which I would sometimes open my eyes to see mother always seated by the bed, her face emanating a softness, a gentle strength, a constancy. Sunday mornings were the best of times. We were allowed, all three brothers, to jump into the warm double bed which mother and father had just vacated. We bounced on the mattress, crawled under the fat eiderdown beneath which they slept on winter nights, and revelled in the after-scent of their bodies.

  Yet there was always something else. I do not recall a first time, but there were to be many times. Mother would be standing in front of me, rocking to and fro, her eyes shifting out of focus, as if everyone around her, myself included, no longer existed. She was somewhere else, perhaps ‘over there’, in that distant world she had left behind. I did not see it as such at the time. All I could register was the estrangement, her non-recognition; and I wanted to shake her, to bring her back, to awaken her from the dream — or perhaps enter into it, so long as we were together.

  But even this seemed preferable — her silent retreat, the passive withdrawal — to the rage that could erupt at any time, accompanied by a refrain repeated incessantly as a plea, a demand, an accusation. ‘I’ve got a story to tell’, she would exclaim. ‘No one sees! No one understands! No one knows who I am!’ It was never clear nor logical, this outcry, but rather a succession of garbled clues, an erratic monologue strung together between familiar phrases and catchwords: something about permits, passports, disloyalties and locked doors; broken promises, broken hearts, betrayals and unjust laws. Her words were hurled at father, Hitler, the community, the world at large; and they careered back, over and again, to the refrain, ‘I’ve got a story to tell. No one sees! No one understands! No one knows who I am!’ Bialystok, Wellington, Melbourne, Oswiecim, this world and yener velt were all intertwined. Over there was over here, and here was over there; and I would take to the streets, or retreat to my bedroom, to seek relief from the storm. And father too would slip away, as if somehow implicated, unwilling to answer the questions I had begun to ask with increasing persistence and mounting anger as I sought to fathom the source of the constant tension which simmered in the house.

  There was another possibility: the dining-room cupboard, full of journals and letters, ageing books and mysteries. Spiders had found undisturbed corners in which to spin their webs. Cockroaches scurried by. The letters were neatly tied in bundles, the envelopes coated in dust. I would prise open the doors, retrieve the bundles, and take them to my bedroom. I carefully unfolded the fragile writing-sheets, which were yellowed and riddled with holes. Others were a little thicker, pale blue, more durable. A vague scent of forgotten days hovered about them. The dates seemed ancient, concentrated between 1933 and mid 1936: they were addressed from mother to Meier Zabludowski, Bialystok, Kupietzka 38; and from father to Hoddes Zabludowski, care of her sister Feigl in Melbourne, and care of a Mr and Mrs Morris in Wellington, New Zealand.

  It was difficult to decipher the scrawling Yiddish script — written in haste, it seemed, with an urgency I was too young to comprehend. Only gradually did I come to detect the agitation and longing, especially in mother’s letters; and also a strength, always expanding in order to contain her growing sense of isolation, bewilderment, and unfulfilled love.

  Her early letters, however, were permeated with optimism and high expectations. On the night of February 3, 1933, the passengers on the Wild Mama held a farewell party. A chocolate cake was baked for the occasion, and the French cook was shown how to ice the message, in Yiddish: ‘We wish you happiness in your new life.’ The passengers sang, made lofty speeches, and danced. Two black stewards, who had served them throughout the journey, joined in the festivities. ‘They were fine dancers’, writes mother. ‘One of them stood on the table and sang the Marseillaise.’ And at dawn they had all gathered on deck while the Wild Mama steamed through the gap between the two peninsulas which enclose Port Phillip Bay.

  As the port came into view they could see many people awaiting their arrival. A boat from Europe was quite an event, and the infant Polish-Jewish community of Melbourne would treat it as a public holiday, a rare day off work. Among the passengers, Mrs Abrahams and her three young children were the most excited. Somewhere in the crowd, waving from the docks, stood her husband. Five years of separation were coming to an end.

  Mother was greeted by her sister Feigl, her brother-in-law Moishke, their baby daughter Freidele, and many former Bialystoker, eager to obtain news from home, a message from a loved one. As for Mrs Abrahams, her husband was nowhere to be seen. Long after the customs formalities had been completed she remained on the wharf with her three children, their trunks and suitcases in a pile beside them. Nine weeks later, Mrs Abrahams was dead of a stroke. Or was it suicide? The children were in a home for the abandoned, and her husband was still living with the woman who had been his mistress for several years. Meanwhile, the gates of the Old World were slowly closing and, in the New, mother had begun the long battle to bring over her husband.

  She writes once a fortnight, late at night, or early mornings, before work, in order to post her letters in time for the next mail-run to Europe. For the most part she concentrates on everyday details, her practical vision of reality. Within two weeks of arrival she has a job as a machinist in a textile factory in Flinders Lane, the garment district in the heart of the city. She gets up at seven, walks to the tram stop at 7.30, and enters the factory punctually at eight. There is a ten-minute break for morning tea, half-an-hour for lunch at one, and an afternoon session until five thirty. At night she works at home, in her sister’s dressmaking business. She receives a weekly wage of two pounds and five shillings, pays fifteen shillings for food and lodging and, apart from various little expenses, the balance goes into paying back the loan for her ticket to Australia. She looks forward to the day when she can put aside money for her husband’s fare and for her impoverished family in Bialystok.

  ‘Work conditions are in general satisfactory’, she writes in the tone of the former committee member of the Bialystok Seamstresses’ Union. She is grateful for the regular wage, and enthuses about holiday pay and the overtime bonus. She recalls the interminable hours of unrewarded work in the sweatshops at home. The memory tempers her attacks of nostalgia. She is determined to start a new life regardless, under the strange, somehow transparent light of these southern skies.

  Nevertheless, Melbourne’s isolated Polish Jews learn to bend and mould time and space to soothe their moments of longing. They recreate the Old World in the New. Mother asks Meierke to send pictures of her Bundist heroes, Vladimir Medem and Beinish Michelevitz, and of her beloved Yiddish writer, I. L. Peretz. When they arrive she hangs them on the walls of her room alongside pictures of the Polish countryside. On Sundays she visits Bundist families in the neighbourhood. As soon as she enters their homes she feels enveloped by the warmth of familiarity. There are regular latke evenings, where fiery discussions of politics burn until the early hours of the morning; and when she walks home, she feels lighter, uplifted, as if she were moving through
the streets of Bialystok.

  And she calculates distances, time-spans. It takes five weeks for a letter to cross the oceans to her Meierke. ‘Here it is midnight. I am sitting at a table, in a room in Melbourne, and over there, my dear one, it is early afternoon. Here it is late summer, and for you it is still winter. Be careful you do not catch cold.’ Weeks later, when she tastes the freshness of autumn evenings on the way home from work, she muses: ‘If only, on such perfect nights, you were the one who greeted me as I left the factory, rather than the strangers who crowd the streets at this hour.’ On Mondays, when letters from Europe arrive, she sits at work impatiently, ‘as though on pins’. Her head ‘spins from thinking about it’, and at five thirty she grabs her coat and beret and hastens to the tram. Within twenty minutes she is close to home, running, her heart beating strongly, plagued by the thought, ‘What if no letter arrives today? How will I get through the next week?’

  There are times when she can barely contain the longing. Especially on anniversaries and celebrations. Take, for instance, May Day, 1933. Mother writes in March, so that the letter will arrive at the appropriate time. She is upset that this year she will not be able to participate, for the first time since 1922. In ten years she had not missed a single May Day march, ‘like a pious Jew does not miss his three daily prayers’, she remarks. She recalls the arrest, just one year before, of Rivke Hartman. ‘I can picture the scene clearly, the police running with batons and upraised bayonets. Meierke, I trust you will describe everything that takes place during this year’s march. Send my best wishes to my friends in the Bund, and take good care of yourself during the demonstration. I will be with you, in spirit.’

  As winter approaches, the community huddles together. It subscribes to Polish-Yiddish dailies, worries about the rise of Hitler in Germany, establishes news-sheets, a choir, a Yiddish theatre. Mother sings at concerts and at a grand banquet to celebrate the arrival of an eminent Yiddish writer on a lecture-tour of Australia. Funds are raised for Yiddish schools in Poland; and plans are made to establish one in Melbourne, which I will attend decades later, on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. As a result I will learn the ‘aleph beis’, the Yiddish alphabet, an esoteric knowledge which will enable me to decipher mother’s letters and to discover the ebb and flow of her moods, the slow erosion of her faith, and her increasing desperation as she fought to remain in the New World.

  Lives hang in the balance in ill-lit offices where, in between cups of tea and biscuits, with a cigarette dangling from the lips — or so I like to imagine it — a bureaucrat sits down, adjusts his glasses, focusses on the papers in front of him, and deduces that she, my mother, had migrated as a Probutski, on a permit made out to a single woman, sponsored by a sister, and the application he is scanning is for a husband with the name Zabludowski. This is a transgression of the law. Besides, there is an economic crisis in the land, jobs are hard to come by, and there are many citizens calling for an end to migration. A letter is sent to Hoddes Probutski, official, polite, to the point: you have one month in which to leave the country.

  Mother fights tenaciously to stay in Australia. Accompanied by her brother-in-law Moishke, she approaches rabbis, communal leaders, lawyers, and lodges appeals. She is interviewed by an immigration officer. He is angry at the ‘trick’ she had played on the government. She had signed her papers falsely. Mother argues she had been single at the time. ‘But you arrived as a married person’, the officer admonishes. He turns his attention to Meier. ‘Can your husband speak English? Does he have skills which are scarce in Australia? Perhaps he has money. With five hundred pounds he could enter without a permit.’ Only towards the end of the interrogation, when mother hands him a photo of Meier, does he soften. ‘Not bad looking, your old man’, he remarks. ‘But I’m afraid the decision is not up to me. Your papers will be sent to Canberra. The boys up there will look into it. Trouble is, there are too many people in this country. Even our prime minister, good Catholic that he is, has eleven children.’

  ‘I have become very nervous’, writes mother. ‘I am running out of patience.’ She waits six weeks for a reply. On October 19 it arrives. Her permit has been revoked. She must leave the country. Mother’s despair can be felt in every sentence as she writes to Meier of her sense of humiliation on receiving the reply. ‘It was like a clap of thunder’, she tells him. She has barely paid off her debt for the ticket out: now she must find money for the return journey. The Christmas season is coming. She works overtime in the factory and well past midnight in Feigl’s business. ‘At least work helps me forget’, she writes, ‘and as I work 1 think of you. Your name is always on my lips, your face embedded in my fantasies.’

  A delegation is sent to the Minister responsible for immigration. He promises to think it over. Mother’s hopes leap. ‘It is good to dream’, she writes, ‘but woe unto the dreamer.’ At the same time, she never allows herself to stray too far from the practical. She rebukes Meier for sending letters express: ‘An unnecessary expense. Every groshen is valuable. Write on thinner paper. But your letters are a great encouragement’, she adds, ‘and I await them anxiously, every Monday, my “sacred” day of the week.’

  The Minister rejects the appeal, but allows her four months in which to earn the fare home. A new possibility emerges. Rabbi Brody of Melbourne writes to rabbi Katz in New Zealand. Rabbi Katz approaches immigration officials on mother’s behalf. She requires sponsors, they reply, and only then can she apply for a permit. A young Bialystoker in Melbourne has relatives in Wellington, a Mr and Mrs Morris. He asks them to act as guarantors. They agree, and an application is lodged. If this attempt fails, mother reasons, she will return to Paris rather than Poland. She can see what is coming. Any alternative, anywhere on this globe, would be preferable to her former homeland.

  Yet with each rejection Bialystok seems more alluring. ‘Come home’, writes Chane Esther. ‘There will be a great simche when you arrive.’ ‘Life is not so bad here’, writes Meier, ‘Your many friends would love to see you again.’

  Their entreaties are tempting; a day of waiting is an eternity. Each night takes its own time before giving way to the dawn. Mother wakes at 3 a.m. in a fever. She stares at photos of Meier. The ticking of the clock is a creeping insanity. Each minute is fraught with panic; each successive tick resounds louder. Letters float across oceans, bearing images of loved ones. Mother gazes at photos of her sister Sheindl, her cousin Freidele, her nephew Chaimke. ‘He looks so alive, as if he were actually here’, she writes. ‘And Freidele is growing up to be pretty. But my sister Sheindl’s sad smile gives me no joy. She seems very upset. Chilek no longer writes to her from Palestine. I feel insulted by it.’ This is always the possibility which skitters beneath the surface, the spectre of abandonment, the fate of Mrs Abrahams.

  Mother lodges one last appeal with the logic of desperation. Or is there a touch of irony, uncharacteristic of her? ‘The centenary of Victoria’s settlement is to take place next October’, writes Moishke on her behalf. ‘The newspapers say that over fifty thousand guests are coming from England alone. So why not allow me to stay on? At least until then? What difference will one person make?’

  March 4, 1934: the final rebuff from the Minister. Melbourne has just emerged from a heat wave, over forty degrees for nine days in succession. Factory work is almost intolerable. ‘The papers say it was the hottest spell in many years’, writes mother. ‘It had to be now, of course, just for me. It seems as though I am a true shlemiel. Well, let it be the last trial.’

  Mother’s moods fluctuate with increasing rapidity. She receives a visa for New Zealand, but only for six months. Her Yiddish script takes on greater urgency. The characters are more elongated, stretched taut almost beyond recognition. ‘I have become a mere straw tossed around on wild seas, from earth to the skies, from the skies back to earth.’ And she hastens to add: ‘This is not just pretty prose, but the way it is. Which way do I go? Wellington? Paris? Bialystok? Buenos Aires?’ She changes her mind from one
letter to the next. ‘Why spend my hard-earned money on a fare to New Zealand, where my future is uncertain, where I am without family or community?’ Bialystok appears frequently in her dreams as an enticing mirage. She sees herself sitting in the city gardens on summer evenings, strolling in Sienkiewicza Avenue on Sunday afternoons. ‘It will be exciting to see everyone again’, she writes. Mother appears to have made up her mind. ‘There is much to talk about, Meierke’, she concludes, ‘but it can now wait for when we are reunited in our beloved Bialystok.’

  April 11, 1934: mother’s last letter from Melbourne. ‘It is early afternoon. At four o’clock I will be going to the station. At 5.30 the train leaves for Sydney. From there I will catch the ferry for New Zealand. My situation you can well imagine. I try to reassure myself, but I have fantasies of arriving in a strange and desolate land. I’d be much happier returning to Bialystok. But I know, within me, I must seize this last chance, so that in years to come I will be certain I exhausted every possibility. Otherwise it will always weigh on my conscience.’

  On the train to Sydney mother chats with the woman sitting next to her. She is of German descent. When she learns of mother’s predicament she offers to look after her in Sydney until the ferry departs. ‘Only seven million people in such a vast continent?’, the woman muses. ‘Surely there is room for just one more!’

  The Wanganui steams into Wellington Harbour through heavy rain. When the ferry docks customs police check documents. Mother and a group of Chinese are detained. ‘We were treated like criminals’ she writes. After lengthy questioning, Mr and Mrs Morris are allowed on board. They identify Hoddes as the woman they have been expecting, and assure the police they are her guarantors.

  On April 30 mother writes her first letter from New Zealand. She is at her lowest ebb. During the first week she had walked the factory district looking for a job. Within a week she had found work. ‘Mr and Mrs Morris are fine people’, she observes. ‘I sleep on a sofa in their dining room. They treat me as a welcome guest.’ Yet this cannot lift her spirits. ‘To tell the truth’, she confides, ‘I would rather be back in Bialystok eating bread and salt, than here, with all the riches in the world. I cannot see either of us fitting into this way of life. You have to look with a lamp to find just one Bialystoker. As soon as I have earned the money for the fare, I’ll take my pack on my shoulders and journey home. This single thought sustains me.’