The Watermill

by Arnold Zable

  Hadassah, like Narom, had lost her entire family—except for two sisters—to genocide. Unlike Narom, she did not experience the carnage directly. She left in time, but the damage was irrevocable. Hadassah’s youthful ideals of brotherhood and sisterhood had been violated. Her descents into despair could occur at any time. She could never speak of what had happened to them, but wept over her impotence to save them.

  For Hadassah, too, there was a time before, a childhood lived in the border town of Grodek, and a youth spent in the city of Bialystok, where she performed at community celebrations as a singer of Yiddish song: a public presence in a time of belonging and purpose.

  Unlike Narom, in the new world, Hadassah’s public voice was silenced. She could not allow herself the joy of celebration. Nor did she have the time or energy. She worked in the new city, helping her husband at his Victoria Market stall and at her sewing machine, late into the night, stitching clothes for the factories of Brunswick and Flinders Lane, Melbourne’s garment district.

  She was confined to singing at home as she cleaned and cooked, washed and sewed, and looked after the three sons who were born after the Annihilation. She channelled whatever will she had left into raising her children. In this she was heroic, fierce in her resolve. Defiant.

  And she sang. For hours on end, her mezzo-soprano edged by anguish. Her repertoire was vast. Lullabies and laments. Love songs. Nonsense songs. Children’s songs. Ballads of gypsies and miraculous goats. Hymns of protest and revolt.

  Songs of praise for the borderlands of her native Poland. Songs of toil and labour:

  And you plough and you hoe, tend your herd, and you sew. And you hammer and weave, tell me, what pittance do you receive? And you extract ore from the shaft, and harvest wheat thick with chaff. But tell me, where is your table set? Where is your festive dress? Where is your sharpened sword? Where is the joy that you deserve?

  Hadassah was never again able to practise her vocation. She retreated from the world. She was unable to overcome her sense of life as a betrayal and find solace for her wounded spirit. Unable to overcome her unjustified guilt for not saving her loved ones. She could not forgive herself for surviving, and would not allow her talents to flourish. Strange to say, in meeting Keo Narom, I saw what could have been…

  Sonia Lizaron is waiting. She is neatly dressed in a pale-blue skirt and matching jacket. Her face is powdered and her cheeks are rouged. She is ninety-five years old, in aged care. After the death two years ago of her partner Pinche Wiener, she was transferred to the dementia ward, though she is far from demented. She is the Sonia I have known for more than three decades: unassuming, dignified and, for the most part, tranquil.

  On the wall hangs the sleeve of Sonia’s album of Yiddish songs, ‘In Freyd un Umet’, ‘In Joy and Sorrow’. Her face adorns the cover. She is radiant. She wears bright red lipstick, eyeshadow and mascara, and an off-the-shoulder black dress with gold trimming.

  Beside the cover hang two portraits of Sonia, one painted in New York, the other in Paris, and, stuck to the wall with Blu Tack are Sonia’s drawings: a tree, a bird, and the traced outline of her hand and wrist encircled by an orange bangle. On a coffee table stands a vase of roses, and on the dresser, two pre-war photos of Sonia’s mother, Lisa, one with her two young children: her son, Genek, and daughter, Sonia.

  The dementia ward is in the basement. Sonia sits in an armchair, on the bedside table, within reach, a box of tissues and a transistor radio. A Shostakovich string quartet is playing. Sonia’s eyes are closed and she sways to the music. A window opens out into a courtyard, enclosed on four sides by several storeys. There are plants, and there is light; but the courtyard is hemmed in, claustrophobic.

  Sonia is not affected. She knows how to withstand confined spaces. She possesses infinite patience. She knows how to endure a state of prolonged transience. She had long ago developed the ability to dismiss thoughts that are disturbing. There are questions she deflects and places she no longer ventures. She has mastered the art of the moment, and in this moment there is only music.

  When I enter, she opens her eyes and searches my face for recognition. Then she lights up: ‘Arelle der narelle,’ she says. ‘Little Aron the little fool’—a cheeky term of endearment. She stretches the vowels for emphasis. Then chuckles. We converse in Yiddish. In recent years, she has moved back in time through her languages from English to French, Russian and Polish and, finally, Yiddish, the mother tongue.

  ‘How are you?’ I ask. ‘Hanging in there,’ she replies. It is her ritual response. She sings: ‘Vos geven, is geven, un nishto’. What was, once was, and is no more. But what ‘once was’ remains extraordinary. Sonia lived an epic life, but rarely spoke about it, save the few recurring stories she told me over the years, and her occasional comments on an album of photos depicting a theatre troupe, post-war, in the displaced persons camp, Bergen-Belsen.

  Sonia hung in there, in the dementia ward, for another five months. She hung in there even after she slipped into her final coma. She died two weeks later. As we sat by her body late into the night, one of her closest friends made a profound observation. Sonia endured for so long because she had been in this situation before. Her body had learnt to cope with deprivation. The memory of it was a part of her being.

  It is said there are stories that are meant to be told and that not to tell them would be to betray them. This is one such story.

  May 2018. The house is gone. In its place, behind a cyclone fence, a vacant lot strewn with mounds of clay and dirt, thistles and wild grasses. A row of cypress line the back fence, and a block of flats and houses mark the side boundaries. The lot is up for auction. ‘A rare townhouse opportunity’, reads the real-estate board.

  Here, at 18 Joyce Street Elwood, stood the house built by the Wiener brothers, Bono and Pinche, of solid brick, rock-hard foundations. It was in this house, in the mid 1980s, that I first met Sonia. It takes time for the mind to adjust and re-imagine the layout as it once was: the untidy front garden, the car parked askew in the driveway, the small entrance porch and doorbell; and the expectant pause before Sonia and Pinche answered.

  Whenever I visited with my partner they were pleased to see us, more so after 1993, when our son was born. Their faces would be beaming. ‘The no-good bastard is here,’ says Pinche, pointing at me. My infant son is pleased to hear him say it.

  To the right of the hallway stands the master bedroom, and to the left, through the double doors, an open-plan living room. Leather swivel chairs and sofas surround a glass-topped coffee table stacked with newspapers, books and journals. This was often a place of heated conversation and political argument. The Wiener brothers lived life with passion.

  On the wall, a large TV screen—the world news; and on a sideboard, a record player, and beside it a stack of vinyl records. The floor-to-ceiling shelves are crowded with ornaments and sculptures collected by Bono on his extensive travels, and the walls are lined with paintings of shtetl scenes, Chagall prints and Yosl Bergner originals. The living room opens into an elevated dining space.

  The kitchen smells of herring, black bread and garlic. On the wall above the phone, hangs a calendar, dates marked with appointments and engagements. A rear door leads to an office; the desk is scattered with bills and books in a Babel of languages. The back window overlooks a backyard swimming pool in which the Wiener brothers and Sonia swim every morning.

  It was from this house that Sonia and Pinche made their final move to the aged-care home, trading the independence they so treasured for security as they approached their nineties. Bowing, proudly, to the inevitable.

  There is something else that comes to mind at the vacant lot: Sonia and Pinche as I saw them one windy day, setting out on their afternoon walk to the foreshore. I retrace their steps from the lot, right into St Kilda Street, and one block south to Beach Road, pausing at the traffic lights by the corner nursery.

  They cross the road and make their way along the gravel path through the foreshore parklands. Pin
che strides forward, straining with each determined step. Sonia, unconcerned, maintains her own pace. The argument on this has long been settled. Neither of them bends, but there is a compromise. Pinche pulls ahead for a while, then returns. Again, they walk together. This is the pattern: an alternating between fierce independence and reliance.

  Pinche and Sonia walk past the familiar markers: the croquet club, the park with its cropped lawns and playing fields. Mid-afternoon it is quiet, bar the whoosh of traffic on the highway. Perhaps too quiet. At the end of Head Street stands a solitary palm. They step out to the sea air, and in that instant, Sonia’s longing for her native Lodz, or for Paris and New York, her adopted cities, is swept away by the glorious present.

  This is the reason she chose to live her final years here, at the ends of the earth. This daily miracle: the sweep of the bay, the sun on the silver water, freighters heading to and from the docks, and the nearby marina filled with boats, masts naked in their winter hibernation. And all this a ten-minute walk from the house in Joyce Street.

  The couple turn onto the seaside walkway and join the stream of joggers, strollers, other elderly couples and power walkers. Cyclists are racing by. Why the hurry? Why not enjoy the rhythmic wash of waves, and the congregations of dog-walkers, their pets sniffing each other while the owners compare notes on their red setters, Samoyeds and greyhounds?

  Sonia and Pinche begin the return under reddening skies, past the octagonal kiosk, the sailing club, the anglers club, the life-saving club, each with their insignia. The walk is taxing. Their shadows lengthen before them. Darkness is falling as they turn back into Head Street. Again, Pinche leads the way. The house lights are switching on. Through the windows can be seen flickering TV screens, private enclaves of intimacy. Beach Road vibrates with peak-hour traffic. One block further on the couple turn left, and into the house on Joyce Street: a haven.

  Long before Pinche there was someone else. On one of my last visits to Sonia, I showed her a photo of Sami Feder. ‘Yes. I knew him,’ she says. ‘Sami. He was my husband.’ She shrugs her shoulders, closes her eyes, and runs her fists over them. ‘Ah, you look so beautiful today,’ she says, when she reopens her eyes and gazes at her visitors. In that moment, we are all that matters.

  In the years that I knew her, I never saw Sonia cry. She maintained a vigil against painful memories. She was resolute. The closest she allowed herself to come to tears was in that gesture: she would close her fists and brush the back of the knuckles over her eyelids. Then she would reopen them and return, fully alert, to the present.

  We sit in her room. The conversation drifts in and out between comfortable silences. ‘Ikh heib zikh oif vider un shpan avek veiter,’ I say. ‘I lift myself up and again stride onward.’ Sonia takes it up and recites the entire poem, as she has many times. This will be the last time, just weeks before she slipped into her final coma. She performs the lines with her eyes closed. Her recitation skills remain intact. They are second nature.

  Di velt nemt mikh arum mit stekhike hent,

  Un trogt mikh tsum feyer, un trogt mikh tsum shayter;

  Ikh bren un ikh bren un ikh ver nit farbrent—

  Ikh heib zikh oif vider un shpan avek veiter.

  The world embraces me with barbed hands,

  And carries me to the fire, and to the pyre;

  I burn and I burn, but I am not consumed—

  I lift myself up, and again, stride onwards.

  Sonia Lizaron was born Sonia Boszkowska in Lodz, on 1 May 1919. Lodz was an industrial city, the skyline dominated by tall brick chimneys. Textile workers laboured in cavernous rooms with grime-stained windows. Mechanised looms beat their round-the-clock rhythm. Trolleys filled with clothing clattered over wooden bridges and porters walked the streets, bent under the heavy packs tied to their shoulders. Travelling salesmen sat late into the night, sealing deals, talking business.

  Sonia’s father, Aron Boszkowski, was an accountant in a textile factory. He, and Sonia’s mother Lisa, were members of the Jewish Labour Bund. In inter-war Poland, the Bund was a mass workers’ movement with representation in both local and national governments. Sonia imbibed the Bund ideals of Yiddishkayt, a secular humanism driven by a yearning for social justice and a love of the Yiddish language as the earthy expression of the people.

  In her youth, she trained as an actor and singer with Moyshe Broderson, the founder of the Kleynkunst theatre, Ararat, named after the mountain where Noah’s Ark was said to be grounded, and doubling as the acronym for the Artistic Revolutionary Revue Theatre.

  Kleynkunst, literally ‘small art’, is the art of Yiddish cabaret, and Broderson was one of its leading exponents. A man about town, with a mane of black hair and Pushkin-style sideburns, Broderson was often seen dressed in a black shirt, affecting the demeanour of a Russian worker. He wore amber and coral necklaces, and rings on each finger. He held court in literary cafes and walked the streets accompanied by a retinue of hangers-on and colleagues. A master of wordplay, he compered cabaret shows in rhyming couplets sprinkled with puns, parodies and political satire.

  Broderson founded a drama studio, and revelled in his role as teacher and mentor. He was impressed by Sonia’s talent and encouraged her to pursue a vocation as a singer and actor. His students could never have imagined that the theatre, and the culture that nurtured it, would soon be threatened with annihilation.

  Sonia made her acting debut in Lodz as the storm clouds of war were gathering. Her mother had died of cancer before the outbreak of war. When the Germans occupied Lodz, Sonia was deported with her father and brother to Bedzin, a city in Upper Silesia, territory annexed by the Germans. Bedzin was a textile centre. Its confiscated factories were essential to the war effort, producing uniforms for the German army. The expertise of Bedzin’s Jewish textile workers granted them a reprieve when a section of the city was converted into a ghetto. It was in Bedzin that Sonia met Sami Feder.

  Sami was born on 5 December 1906, in the Polish city of Zawiercie, in Silesia. His father, Eliezer, a textile worker, died in a factory accident when Sami was three. His mother, Golda-Rivke, a seamstress, was left with five young children. Sami was adopted by his maternal grandfather, Ephraim-Fishl Imerglik, a watchmaker. In 1918, Ephraim-Fishl took Sami to live with him in Frankfurt am Maine in Germany, where Sami attended a Yiddish folk school, a German high school and a Yeshiva for religious studies.

  Sami fell in love with the stage as a teenager. He joined the Sholem Aleichem Club and worked with its drama circle to produce Yiddish classics. He studied acting and directing at night school, and attended lectures on Yiddish language and literature. When the renowned Habimah Theatre toured Frankfurt, he watched every performance. He stood behind the curtain and studied each movement and gesture. His dedication was noted by the theatre’s artistic director, Zvi Friedland.

  Friedland invited him to study in his Berlin Yiddish Theatre Studio. Sami was drawn into the maelstrom of Weimar Berlin. His mentors included Austrian theatre director Max Reinhardt, German theatre producer Erwin Piscator and Soviet director Alexander Granowski.

  Feder graduated as an actor and performed in several Berlin theatre companies. He worked as a journalist, translator and dramaturge, wrote articles for progressive literary journals and co-published the Yiddish weekly Die Neue Zeit. He was active in Berlin’s Actors and Artists Union and founded a Yiddish labourers’ troupe, bringing to it the innovations of the European Art Theatre movement. He made a living setting Yiddish type in a printing workshop.

  When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Feder was blacklisted as a stateless Jew of the political left. His room was ransacked by the SS, and he went into hiding. He fled to Poland, to Warsaw, where he warned Yiddish writers and journalists of Hitler’s murderous intent.

  Disillusioned by their complacent response, Feder turned to the theatre. He enlisted dramaturg Shmuel Volman, who was well versed in Warsaw Yiddish dialect, to co-write Hitleriada, a satire on the Führer, which was also titled In This World, Noth
ing Changes. Feder worked in the Berlin tradition that nurtured him, viewing theatre as a craft at the service of a higher end. He defined his pre-war Polish-based theatre work as ‘careful art’, interweaving anti-Hitler texts into cabaret acts to disguise their subversive intent.

  Feder premiered the satire in Warsaw with the Orpheus Drama group, and worked with local drama groups to stage it in provincial towns. After a disturbance at a performance of Hitleriada in the town of Otwock, he was advised by the Polish police to leave Warsaw or risk imprisonment.

  Sami returned to his mother’s town, in the Zaglembie region, in southern Poland. After lying low for a while, he was invited to direct the Bedzin Muze Theatre and the Lire drama circle in the nearby city of Sosnowiec. Undeterred, he restaged Hitleriada. He continued to work with Muze after the Nazis occupied and annexed Benzin, and it was during this time that Sami met Sonia, who was performing in the Muze Theatre.

  Sami Feder’s impact on Sonia was profound. His view of theatre as a means of easing the suffering of his people in dark times was in accord with her Bund upbringing and her work in the subversive art of Yiddish cabaret. Sami directed Sonia in several productions. But his time with Muze was cut short when, in May 1941, he was deported to Germany and interned in a slave labour camp.

  Hence began a journey through twelve concentration camps, or, as Feder describes it in one of his memoirs, ‘through twelve portals of hell’. Sami did not stop his cultural work. Even in the darkest of times he organised performances. In Bunzlau slave labour camp he produced evenings of theatre, adapting excerpts from Yiddish classics that reflected the predicament of his fellow prisoners.

  Theatre was an act of resistance, performed openly if possible, or, when need be, in secret, in barracks transformed into performance spaces. The texts were recalled from memory. Feder disguised his intent by playing on Jewish stereotypes to appease his captors. His audiences of inmates understood the ruse. In later years, he would define his theatre as frontline art and, as the title of one of his memoirs has it, the art of the Closed Fist. Sami recounts: