Letter from my Father (9 page)

Occasionally we took a break from striving to do well. Our month-long summer holidays were spent with another family at a rented cottage in the Blue Mountains. Our parents would cook and play innumerable rounds of cards. We teenagers, girls and boys, would congregate at the large swimming pool in Blackheath to talk about our schools and what we wanted to do as grown-ups. We also went horse-riding along the safe local tracks from one Blue Mountains town to another. This was the only sport I enjoyed.

I began to make friends not only with my fellow reffo kids but also with girls whose parents had migrated before or at the outbreak of War, when they had been two or three years old. These girls spoke accent-free English and had read or been read the same nursery rhymes and songs and stories as other Australians. They were told by their parents that it was their duty to be nice to
foreign kids
like me.

One thing that remained stable in my life was my deep respect for my father. We liked to go hiking together and learned over time to see beauty in the subdued colours of the Australian bush. At first we looked for the vivid greens of birch and pine trees and for flower-strewn meadows. We found instead dry she-oaks, fragrant eucalypts and twisted casuarinas, or tiny bush orchids and lacy grevilleas, golden and pink. We needed to learn to penetrate the strong white
light of the southern sun to appreciate their shape, colour and delicacy. It took five long years before we developed
Australian
eyes not only for the fauna but also the exotic birds and animals, the multi-coloured lorikeets and rosellas and the kookaburras. At the zoo we marvelled at the platypus, wombat and the kangaroo. My father's awe and wonder at these amazing new creatures inspired me. He was opening our eyes to this new world on whose shores we had landed. He wanted to learn and understand its history and architecture and the strange habits of its people, such as the ubiquitous
Hello, love
said to strangers. He would stand enthralled, watching through a peep-hole in a rough fence what was going on in a vast building site, curious about the way
they
constructed tall buildings.

VI

Becoming a Grown-Up

A
t age sixteen things improved for me. My skin slowly cleared and I found friends, all children of migrants who

shared my interest in serious reading, bush-walking and talking politics. About this time I joined the Zionist youth group, Betar, where we listened to lectures, danced, sang and talked and talked about anything to do with Israel. My fellow idealists became the core of my social life. We organised camps for younger children, cooked together and thought of ourselves as real contributors to the future of the State of Israel and, by extension, the Jewish people.

As part of this process we were encouraged to engage in self-disclosure sessions to gain understanding of our goals and how to achieve them. At one of these I surprised and disturbed my companions and even myself when, amid their declarations of what they wanted to achieve in the wider world, I came out with:
I want to marry and have children
. They were not impressed.
How bourgeois and boring
, they responded.

In Betar, I could be myself: Jewish, Zionist and a reffo. In this group I was an insider rather than odd. Within the wider Zionist movement, however, Betar was not mainstream as were Habonim and other socialist groups. So again when I told people that I had joined Betar, I experienced that familiar look:
You are not one of us.

One fellow member who became a close friend was Daniel, a student of the piano and composition at the Conservatorium. He had erudite views on many topics and an original way of looking at the world. He not only started taking me to
concerts and teaching me how to listen to music, but for a while was enamoured of me, writing beautiful love letters in magnificent prose. He told me that he loved my
joie de vivre
and
the liveliness expressed in your eyes
. I luxuriated in his friendship but was not interested in being his girlfriend. My parents liked him and would always welcome him warmly, seeing him as a
good prospect
. Daniel did wonders for my self-esteem. I started thinking of myself as an attractive young woman, though my shortness and need for glasses (still worn only when absolutely necessary) continued to bother me. I learned to flirt and boys called me a
tease
, something which I in my utter innocence did not understand.

On a sunny January day in 1954 we were on holidays in the Blue Mountains. My group of friends, with our parents, gathered at the Blackheath newsagency to get the
Sydney Morning Herald
. Feverishly we searched for our names on the list of Leaving Certificate results. I found mine and was delighted with my excellent results, quite beyond expectations. My parents were full of pride and my friends respectful.

My heart was set on studying Medicine. I wanted to serve humanity and study interesting things. But my father intervened. Medicine was not, he declared, an appropriate profession for a woman. There were too many years of study for a girl and then the nuisance of being called out at night, especially once I had children. I should study Pharmacy to gain a profession that was practical, portable to another country and suitable for a girl. His foremost concern was that I should have a secure, rather than a personally fulfilling job.
Fulfilment
was not even in the vocabulary of a Holocaust survivor migrant.

My friend Elizabeth, the same age as I, commented how little six years of study were in a lifetime of work, and opted for Medicine herself. But here again I was a good and obedient daughter following the advice of my father, even though
dull
was what came to mind at the very thought of Pharmacy.

Along with my Betar friends, I had also set my heart on spending a year in Israel before starting my studies. But my parents would not hear of it. We had survived the Holocaust and now I intended to leave them for a year, exposing myself to possible dangers?
Out of the question.
I wrote in my diary:
I really want to go to Israel, but I cannot see how this is possible, taking my parents' loneliness and their need to keep me safe into consideration
.

Fortunately, I could not get a position that year as an apprentice in a pharmacy, a prerequisite at the time for a degree in the subject, so I started instead on a Bachelor of Arts degree. I loved my first year at the University of Sydney. I made friends with fellow students, many of similar background, though most earlier arrivals than me – which meant without an accent. During our cups of coffee at Manning House, in its comfortable Margaret Telfer room reserved for female students, we talked of boys and ideas and shared our dreams. Lunchtimes were spent on benches in the Quad-rangle near the old Fisher Library. There Arts I girls met Medicine II boys. My confidence grew.

I made friends with an eccentric and flamboyant girl of Hungarian background called Aggie. She was studying Medicine and went on to specialise in Psychiatry. Unlike me, she wore low-cut dresses in vivid colours, oranges mixed with reds, and knew female tricks for enticing boys. This was helped by her not wearing a bra. She told me this sometimes made things awkward during petting sessions.

Aggie invited me to her home to teach me about make-up. Her room was a gorgeously untidy treasure-trove of eyebrow pencils, lipsticks, creams and powders, and eye-shadows in brilliant colours which she used generously. She demonstrated how to apply lipstick artfully and mascara to full advantage. In the midst of her engrossing instructions, her mother walked in, completely naked, to ask whether we wanted a drink. My jaw fell open, though I tried hard to act cool.

I never developed into more than a novice in the game of femininity. I loved Aggie's colourful presence and her imaginative dreams such as buying an orchard in the South of France. I suspect she appreciated my rooted reliability, as well as my loyalty.

I majored in History and Psychology, History because I loved it and Psychology because it was vocationally useful. I learned from my cousin in Israel that my father Szulem had also majored in History, at the Institute of Jewish Studies in Warsaw. Along with my friend Julie, I attended lectures and tutorials in French, enjoying reading French Symbolist poets such as Rimbaud and Mallarmé, and the novels of Emile Zola. Unfortunately, my tutor pointed out that my poor ear for languages meant that my French accent was that of a Mediaeval Provencal peasant. At the end of that first university year, I did well in most subjects. I felt hopeful about my future.

My discomfort and timidity in what I thought of as centrestage situations were, however, still evident. One incident stands out. I studied Ancient History under an eccentric professor, an Egyptologist. After a lecture, a group of us crowded around him asking questions. He invited us all back to his room for further discussion and coffee. An invitation to an intellectual salon! It was something of which I had only previously dreamed. But I immediately shrank inside, overcome by my unworthiness to be included in such a group. What would I say? What if what I did say was not good nor clever enough? I declined and melted away to the safety of the margin.

It was the same with many of the other activities offered by the University. I enviously observed but judged them as being beyond me. So I missed becoming active in political groups such as the Labour Party in which my friend Julia starred, the civil rights campaigns, the debating clubs and the activities of those who preached free love. I was neither willing nor able to press forward with the others.

After my first year at the University, following the plan devised by my father, I became an apprentice at a small quiet pharmacy owned and run by an elderly Hungarian lady with a clientele of people of her own background. Its only advantage from my point of view was that it was close to lovely Rushcutters Bay Park, beside the Harbour. While friends continued their studies as full-time students, participating in the life of the University and able to meet boys, I spent my days dealing with elderly customers, attending to the owners' spoiled dachshund and making suppositories prescribed by ancient Hungarian doctors. I was bored. After my wonderful first year at the University, I felt sidelined.

Something in me stirred, however, and I now took my first tentative step towards fulfilling my own destiny. I determined that I would study Pharmacy during the day to satisfy my parents and take Arts as an evening student, for myself. I did that for a year, but continuing to be
sensible
I took as part of my course Chemistry and Botany, subjects that I did not really care about but which counted towards the degree in Pharmacy.

I relished the study of History. One lunch time, as I sat on the grass in Rushcutters Bay Park reading for a paper on the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaton, called the first monotheist, I became so fired up that I decided if I ever had a son I would call him Akhenaton.

Though I was now nearly eighteen years old, my parents continued to be protective of
the child.
I felt stifled. I had gone with my Betar group to a camp in Melbourne, where we were received by local Betarniks, including an older man, David, who was twenty-three and attracted to me. I sensed that he was experienced with women but was not right for me. But I was flattered and allowed him to kiss my arm from wrist to shoulder, having told him firmly that kissing on the lips was forbidden. On my return home, word reached my parents about my
illicit friendship
. My father was enraged.
Didn't I know
that David was a womaniser?
He insisted that I had
behaved like a whore and brought shame on the family.
Clearly I could not be trusted. I found out afterwards that David had come to visit while I was out. He had been met by my angry father who had pushed him down the stairs ordering him never again to approach me. I had been feeling hurt and disappointed that David had not kept his promise to make contact on his next trip to Sydney. Before I found out about his visit, I was convinced that I was not as attractive as he had made me feel at the camp.

I knew that it was time to leave my protective but restrictive parental home. Marriage became my escape route. I went out with a few young men my own age, none of whom excited me enough to pursue a serious relationship. In any case, none at that stage was interested in marriage. Because I was not attending the University full-time, I was not mixing with other Jewish students, and had little opportunity to socialise with the future professionals who were beginning to pair off. I was too immature to weigh up the type of man I would like to marry and define how I wanted to live my adult life, beyond knowing that
he
had to satisfy certain minimum requirements, drummed into me by my parents and their friends. He had to be Jewish, of course, have a profession, and be a man of good character and, above all, a protector. I was ready to fall in love with any
qualified
man who would show interest in me.

Within a year I found such a man, gave up Pharmacy and married. My husband Richard, born in Vienna, had come to Australia as a child. He had studied Dentistry but was at the time we met running his widowed father's clothing shop while his father was enjoying himself in Europe. Richard was more of a businessman than a professional, to my parents' disappointment. But on the whole my father approved of the match. His health and strength were failing and he was keen to hand over
the child
to a mature, reliable man. Richard seemed to embody both these qualities.

What I liked about Richard was his sensitivity, his appreciation of art and culture and, most of all, his devotion to me. I also liked his face. He led me to an appreciation of contemporary Australian art. We visited galleries, read reviews and slowly started buying our own paintings. Richard would queue up all night for the occasional
all paintings under ten pounds
exhibitions held in the 1960s by the Macquarie Galleries. So we acquired works by rising Australian artists, including one of the interior of Australia by Sidney Nolan and a larger canvas by Ian Fairweather in his idiosyncratic calligraphic style.