Letter from my Father (11 page)

Our little boys alternated between playing together happily and fighting. Partly this was due to Simon, a great
builder of blocks, and later of Lego pieces and Meccano sets, becoming really mad when his little brother, in his clumsy attempts to participate, unwittingly destroyed some great construction. I say unwittingly because Jonathan simply did not have any malice in his character. Once Simon threw a chair at him, breaking a tooth in half so that Jonathan had to have it pulled out under anaesthetic. He had a bad reaction afterwards, thrashing about in a state of arousal. We had to restrain him and put him in a cushioned cot so he would not hurt himself.

This happened on the day of my graduation as a Bachelor of Arts from Sydney University. We left Jonathan with a babysitter and rushed to get to the ceremony on time. All through the grand occasion in the majestic Great Hall of the University, the congratulations and photos, I had a vision of my little Jonathan in that terrible semi-conscious state in his cot at home.

In autumn we liked to go to Cooper Park, an ideal area for adventurous children to explore, with its caves and swings and leafy paths, brooks full of tadpoles and frogs, and logs for climbing. Richard and I loved seeing the two boys run ahead, Simon nearly always dressed in browns and olive green to match his hazel eyes and brown hair and Jonathan in red and navy to match his blue-green eyes and fairer hair. They were so good-looking. Spring and early summer weekends were spent picnicking in Centennial Park, often with other friends, while the children, mostly little boys, fed ducks, chased birds and resisted our efforts to stop them falling into the lake.

On weekdays, after picking up the children from kindergarten or infants' school, a group of young mothers would meet to gossip at one of our special places like the Harbourside Lyne Park with its excellent playground equipment. We talked mainly of our children, their triumphs and our concerns, while keeping a watchful eye on what our offspring
were doing. While we chatted and intervened to settle disputes such as
he pushed me
, brushed down dirt, attended to scratches, kissed sore knees better and just gave the occasional cuddle, the children climbed trestles, slid down slippery-dips increasingly faster and swung higher and higher on swings. They also talked with one another – or at least
at
one another.

Richard and I seemed to spend hours, weekend after weekend, holding on to the back of a bike and running along as the boys learned to peddle fast enough to gain balance. Both became proficient bike riders and enjoyed finding out about our neighbourhood, especially streets with no barking dogs, of which they were wary, just like their mother.

Growing up in a city like Sydney and living close to some glorious Harbourside places – Camp Cove, Watsons Bay and Nielsen Park, as well as Bondi Beach – much of our outdoor summer time was spent at the beach. From the time they were toddlers, the boys were encouraged to enjoy water splashing over them, jumping over waves and eventually surfing. Learning to swim was imperative. When I took six-year-old Jonathan for lessons from an experienced elderly teacher at Bondi Baths, a real ‘old-timer', I was told after a few lessons:
That boy has the courage of a lion – but he is poorly co-ordinated. Bring him back next year and he'll get it
. He did. Both boys also had lessons from the legendary Alf Vockler, an old Olympian who taught children in a firm authoritative manner at Watsons Bay Baths. Determined Simon would swim his laps either under Vockler's strict gaze or unsupervised. Then my heart would beat fast, knowing that if he encountered trouble I, a poor swimmer, could not save him.

At school, Simon was selected for the Opportunity C (gifted children) class at primary school in Woollahra. His teacher was brilliant in knowing how to foster each child's talent, and Simon blossomed. Reserved ten-year-old Simon, with his fine diction, was selected to make a speech in
celebration of Red Cross Day in front of 1000 people at the Town Hall. Though apprehensive beforehand, he performed with amazing poise and not a little courage. This did wonders for his confidence and gained the respect of his peers, not easy for a boy who was relatively short for his age at the time.

Jonathan lost some of his good looks during his primary years when the secondary teeth started emerging and could not find sufficient space in his narrow jaw. They crowded in on one another, the front two teeth protruding noticeably, like a rabbit's. At the age of seven it was found that he needed to wear strong spectacles. I cried for weeks seeing those beautiful eyes veiled by lenses.

In his middle childhood he was a very thin, wiry, extremely active boy. He was certainly not a team player. In kindergarten his teachers described him as wild and non-conformist. In a class photo at Rose Bay Primary, when he was about eight years old, he stands out. Every child except Jonathan is looking straight at the camera. He was constantly in trouble at this school, for calling out in class and not giving other children a chance to answer.

Jonathan was probably bored, since this behaviour ceased when he too entered Woollahra Public Opportunity C Class. He blossomed. The boys' primary years were characterised by the demands of innumerable projects necessitating trips to the library, photocopying, scissors-and-paste work and lots and lots of discussion and parental help. We transported the children to and from sporting events, birthday parties and camps, which seemed to take forever. Though much time was still spent adjudicating arguments between the two of them, as they invariably blamed one another, we also had the pleasure of seeing them sit for hours co-operating in building complex structures from ever-more-sophisticated building sets, playing table tennis and, as they grew older, talking endlessly about cricket.

Simon proved a natural at sailing. He seemed to possess the qualities, mysterious to me, which make a good skipper. They included understanding wind direction, water currents and sails – but there was more. The other boys respected his judgement and his decision-making ability. He was not a boy of many words, but they listened to what he said. I spent my Sundays, heart in mouth, sitting with other parents watching the boys race their Manly Juniors and observing how our young sailors managed dangerous situations.

One memorable Sunday a sudden storm hit the Harbour and literally swept the tiny vessels into the surrounding bays or in the direction of bigger boats, which immediately helped in a rescue effort. As each little boat and its soaked crew were brought in, their names were announced through the loud-speaker. But there was no sign of Simon's boat. I was dying inside, praying and gritting my teeth. Eventually the boat was located after Simon rang the club from a small bay. Simon had, in fact, come through with flying colours, having calmly steered his craft into a sheltered spot without sustaining any damage at all.

I tried hard not to show that all this was too much for an anxious mother from a land-locked eastern European country. For me, safety was paramount and anything to do with deep water made me fearful. But I also felt exhilarated that my son, growing up in this peaceful tolerant country, was confident enough to put himself into situations which, to me, spelled danger and risk. To him they were just a challenge to be enjoyed.

At Woollahra Public, Jonathan took off like a rocket. As he proclaimed one day:
At Woollahra school, each lesson is of great interest and compared to my last school, this place is a palace
.

His teacher knew how to nurture my son's talents. In the entries Jonathan wrote in his diary, there is the sense of a boy bursting out of his skin in excitement at the expanding horizons of his intellectual and social world, and enjoying his successes.

When he was seven, Jonathan had joined Mrs Shipp's art school at Watsons Bay. There he painted and drew and made a type of lithograph, showing an intuitive understanding of colour, composition and perspective. During a visit to the school by acclaimed painter Desiderius Orban, his work was singled out for praise. I still have in my study a water-colour wash picture of a yellow house with two red-framed windows and a blue-framed door, set among trees and bushes and bathed in the rays of a prominent sun. That early work of Jonathan's is a simple little painting, suggesting peace and warmth and love of nature.

Jonathan and I developed a special relationship, based on the fact that he was my ‘baby' and on the similarity of our temperaments and academic mindsets. I also felt a genetic connection. Having grown up not knowing anybody who looked like me, I saw in him, this fair-haired, green-eyed boy whose limbs had the same shape as mine, whose hair parted in the same way and who looked at me directly in the way shown in my cherished photograph of my father, a mix of myself and my father Szulem. Jonathan was my first experience of genetic mirroring.

With two friends Jonathan entered the Bible Quiz run by the Jewish community, the venue being the vast and impressive Great Synagogue. The three boys decided that they were going to show ‘those kids' at Jewish Day schools such as Moriah, who studied Jewish history and the Torah for years on a daily basis, what boys from a non-denominational school could do. They went about it in a determined, highly focused way, driven by ambition and, I suspected, a sense of superiority. The three met over several weekends ‘swatting up' the Bible, testing each other, discussing, predicting questions and planning strategy. And they did it! To everyone's astonishment and quite a few people's displeasure, Jonathan's team, the only one from a non-Jewish school, won the Senior
team Bible Quiz for 15-year-olds as well as the prize for best individual debaters.

Both Simon's and Jonathan's reading of their
Bar Mitzvah
portion of the Torah at the magnificent Great Synagogue and subsequent celebrations aroused further strong emotions in me. They were evidence of the continuity of our family and our people. We celebrated Simon's
Bar Mitzvah
with a big reception at a hotel near Bondi Beach, with both grandparents, Opapa and Nena Gita, beaming with pride. It was a true
Simcha
(joyous occasion), at which we were showered with wishes of
Mazal Tov!
(Good Luck).

Two years after Simon, Jonathan sang his portion in his beautiful alto, to the delight of the whole congregation. It was a balmy summer evening and our friends gathered in the garden of our home for the reception. I made a rather emotional speech. I said that it had been my dream that our sons should grow up not just academically bright and professionally successful, but as men of integrity and goodness. These qualities, I said, were already evident in both of them. We drank a toast to Jonathan growing up to
Chachma
and
Tovah
– in Hebrew, wisdom and goodness. We felt that he was following his brother's example.

In my mother Nena Gita's eyes there was no one in the world quite like her grandsons, the princes, the noble ones; no one so clever, so good, so aristocratic, so worthy of admiration as they. She was extraordinarily generous, and devoted to them both. And they reciprocated in their devotion to her.

VIII

The Boys Grow Up

T
he boys' high school years seemed to go faster than their early ones. While Simon attended the selective Sydney High, the old school of many notable Australians, Jonathan won a scholarship to Sydney College, a school that takes pride in its classical studies as well as its excellent science department.

Simon made some lifelong friendships at Sydney High. One of his friends, Tim, played the classical guitar and offered to teach the musically talented Jonathan to play the instrument. My son developed a passion for it. He learned quickly and many an evening was spent as he played and we listened in delight.

Jonathan loved his time at Sydney College, excelling in his studies. Beyond schoolwork, it was gratifying to see this tall, lanky, socially rather shy boy making friends with others who had similar interests.

We could feel Simon's and Jonathan's excitement at the vast horizons opening before them. One day in the early weeks of his attendance at Sydney High, Simon came home and asked: ‘Have you heard of Descartes?' I asked him why.
At recess Tim had said Like Descartes, I think therefore I am, but the bell rang and we had to go into class.

There were so many things to excite them, to motivate them to learn more, to push the boundaries. Our home was a place where politics and underlying ideologies were discussed, argued and even fought over, usually at dinner around our large kitchen table. Woollahra Opportunity class had early on encouraged the boys' interest in the wider world
and an awareness of social policies and politics. Both Simon and Jonathan developed an abiding interest in this at a young age, not only talking but also getting involved in the political process.

The Labour Party's 1972
It's Time
campaign was a particularly exciting time for the boys, who were then thirteen and eleven years old. We joined throngs of people at the Randwick Town Hall to hear Gough Whitlam speak. Both boys proudly wore their T-shirts carrying the slogan. They were fired with enthusiasm at the coming of a new age. Later as young adults they joined the local youth branch of the party, where they formed the
Brothers Block
, usually being in agreement on different points of policy, after exhaustive discussions. Coming from a home where the relevance of politics to one's life was tragically obvious, I found it gratifying that both my sons became interested in the political situation, both local and international.

After graduation, as they moved into secondary education, I found a satisfying part-time job teaching Modern History to senior students at the nearby Catholic Girls High School. Over a period of two years I studied for a Master's degree and eventually went on to a PhD. The day I picked up my PhD thesis from the printer, my first thought was that I wanted to show it to my father – and I did. I drove to the cemetery straight from the printer's, sat by his graveside and showed it to him. He would have been proud and thrilled.