The Fig Tree (22 page)

The news from Europe is more disturbing with each passing day. Closer to their new home, the Japanese are on the attack. American soldiers are in town. Leslie, the oldest son, joins the air force. Sheindle dreams of her nieces' and nephews' ‘soft white hands', outstretched, ‘crying for help'. The coarse laughter of enemy soldiers rings in her ears. She stands naked over a freshly dug grave, and awakens covered in sweat.

Sheindle's feelings of guilt intensify when the traumatised refugees begin to arrive. She waits on a Melbourne wharf as the first ship makes its way into Port Phillip Bay. She is among the crowd that has gathered to welcome the newcomers as they sail in. The vessel glides towards them in silence. The disembarking passengers are like apparitions rising from the dead. The tattooed blue numbers on their arms evoke images of hell.

Despite her new-found affluence, Sheindle feels estranged. The refugees arouse memories of relatives that had perished while her immediate family had thrived. Her feelings of uncertainty are amplified when daughter Pauline drifts into a troubled relationship with an Italian man. Her older son, Leslie, marries an Australian girl, and the youngest child, Morry, leaves for Palestine. Only the birth of the first grandchild lifts Sheindle's hopes in the new world.

They had an eye for the outsider, my mother's trinity of writers. They probed beneath the surface of both their own communities and society at large. As too did the artist Yosl Bergner. Within a year of his arrival he was painting portraits of urban Aborigines with whom he felt a common bond. ‘I painted these people with a faraway look in their eyes. They were displaced and I felt identified with them,' he wrote.

Yet, despite their critical impulse, these writers were also fascinated by the new land. They saw it as a place where one could pioneer and start anew. Goldhar wrote an essay in which he foresaw the potential of Australia as ‘a nation of immigrants'. He described Australia as ‘a young and healthy nation, hardened in the fight against natural elements, striving to build a life based on understanding and comradeship'.

Goldhar identified with the egalitarian spirit that infused the works of Australian writers. He was drawn towards, and translated into Yiddish, writers such as Henry Lawson, Gavin Casey and Vance Palmer. He brought to his Australian experience the ethos of his literary mentors, the Yiddish writers of Eastern Europe.

Herz Bergner and Pinhas Goldhar would meet every Saturday afternoon to discuss their writing with Judah Waten who was translating their works into English. Herz Bergner, it is said, would argue over every translated sentence. He complained that the word count in English was far less than in the original Yiddish. In turn, with his friends' encouragement, Judah Waten wrote
Alien Son
, a poignant account of his Australian childhood in a family of immigrant Jews.

As for Melekh Ravich, he remained true to his calling. His wanderlust returned. He moved on again in July 1937; but he left behind an enduring legacy. Just twenty months earlier, in October 1935, Ravich had presented his plans for a weekend Yiddish school in Melbourne to a group of fellow enthusiasts. If Yiddish culture were to survive in this remote corner of the globe, such a school was mandatory, he argued.

The Peretz School, named after the so-called ‘father of Yiddish literature', opened on 3 November, 1935. Its first home was the Kadimah building. The students would meet on Sunday mornings. They studied language and history; staged concerts and plays, and studied the works of Yiddish writers. The first principal was Melekh Ravich.

Two decades later I came to know Ravich's successor, Joseph Giligich. By now, the school had moved to newly built premises, on Drummond Street, ten minutes' walk from the Kadimah. Giligich had the bearing of a benevolent patriarch. His hair was white and thinning. He walked with measured steps. As children we knew he came from the city of Vilna, the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania'. He had also taught in Riga, by the shores of the Baltic Sea. He was a follower of the Montessori method, a man of letters whose first love was the Yiddish language.

Giligich led me to a cabinet of books. He lifted a key to the door and unlocked the aroma of decaying parchment. An ancient alphabet tumbled from pages brittle with age. They formed tales of worlds far removed from this building in Drummond Street, which my elders had built to pass on their legacy. By the time I was twelve years old, I could recite the literary lineage.

The so-called ‘grandfather of Yiddish literature' was Mendele Mokher Sforim. He was a sharp-eyed satirist who wrote of madmen in constant pursuit of elusive dreams. He depicted the ‘town of emptiness', where the quixotic Benjamin the third buried himself in an avalanche of books to escape from his poverty-stricken surrounds. Benjamin retreated into his obsessions, while Zelda, his wife, kept the household afloat. One morning, he set off with his faithful neighbour Senderel, in search of the land of redemption that lay beyond the legendary River Sambatyon. Here, it was said, dwelt the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Judah.

So magical was the world he described that I was drawn into it. I devoured page after fragile page. I did not understand the nuances of the language, that amalgam of Middle German, ancient Hebrew, and Slavonic dialects that made up the Yiddish tongue, but I was seduced by its otherworldliness. I followed the eccentric voyages of Benjamin the third and, when I finished, I returned to the patriarch for more.

Giligich eased my thirst with the books of the ‘grandson' of Yiddish literature, Sholem Aleichem. His collected works were bound between frayed cardboard covers of grey. I opened the first cover and blundered into a landscape that held me fast until I exhausted every page.

I ate, slept, went to school, played on the streets of Carlton, yet these were mere intervals between the exploits of Shtempenyu, the wedding fiddler, who could seduce a bride just hours after she had stepped out from under the wedding canopy; or Joseph Nightingale, the wandering cantor, who cast a spell over his entranced audiences who lived in villages scattered throughout the Ukraine.

I followed the adventures of Mottel Peisse, the orphan, the travails of Tevye the dairyman and his seven daughters, and the exploits of Menakhem Mendel, the wheeler-dealer, who gambled on the Odessa stock exchange. He swindled himself into bankruptcy, but always bounced back with yet another doomed scheme to lift himself from squalour to wealth.

Again he fell, of course, back to earth, into the mythical village of Kasrilevke, where the ‘red people' lived. Red in their excitement, as they lurched from one comic disaster to the next, they were trapped within their
shtetl
, just as I was trapped between the fraying covers of Sholem Aleichem's collected works.

I read so fast and voraciously that soon the cupboard was bare. The patriarch put away his keys, stroked his chin, gazed at me with his mild brown eyes, and announced that he would arrange for me to be admitted into the adult library. It was located in a run-down single-fronted cottage in Lygon Street, beside the Kadimah.

I would walk at night from my home to the house of books. They lined the passage, the alcoves, and the walls of every room. They stood in piles upon tables where the readers bent over newspapers and journals imported from Buenos Aires, Jerusalem, Warsaw, London, Moscow, Mexico City, New York and Paris, the many cities where their European kin had migrated and clung to their dreams. They sat in this weathered Victorian cottage, opposite the Melbourne Cemetery, and exchanged stories about a vanished past. They were people of the Yiddish book, and I had become their latest initiate.

These writers were among my first mentors. They gave me a vision of my past that was both magical and terrifying. They enabled me to move in two worlds—both the neighbourhood in which I was raised, and the world of my forebears who had fled here from troubled lands. Their books were written in
mamme loschen
, the mother tongue, a language in which my elders could express their longings and ideals. This was the short-lived miracle known as Yiddish literature, and this tiny cottage on the edge of the world had helped preserve it.

The Kadimah library was founded in Melbourne in 1911. It was first housed in 59 Bourke Street, in the heart of the city. The shelves were lined with books in three principal tongues: Yiddish, Hebrew and English. The collected works of Shakespeare stood alongside the tales of Sholem Aleichem. The songs of modern Hebrew poet Chaim Nakhman Bialik vied with volumes of the Scriptures, while a stream of imported journals and newspapers in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish and Russian kept the newly arrived migrant in touch with the lives they had left behind.

In 1915 the library was transported to a more spacious home at 313 Drummond Street, Carlton. The new centre became a place of welcome, a bridge between old world and new. On Sunday nights Yiddish concerts alternated with learned discourses on Australian life. The Kadimah was a house of many tongues. Free English lessons featured alongside lectures on Yiddish and Hebrew literature.

Occasionally a visiting writer or scholar would be welcomed at a communal banquet. They feasted on gefilte fish, cheese blintzes, salted herring and chicken wings. For dessert they ate poppy-seed rolls and honey cake, washed down with a nip of vodka, or glasses of soda water and lemon-scented tea.

The most revered guests to be feted at 313 Drummond Street were the wandering Yiddish writer, Peretz Hirschbein, and his young wife, the poet Esther Schumiakher. Their private totem was the albatross. They were drawn to its massive wings and effortless glide. They had followed its flight across the Pacific Ocean. As they sailed towards the southern continent, so great was Hirschbein's excitement, his ‘blood danced with joy'. This was how he described it in his journals.

His first impression, however, was disappointing. From a distance, on a summer day in 1921, the eastern seaboard appeared flat and grey. The land was barely visible beneath a low hanging mist. Out of the mist their arose a ‘granite' wall. Like a miracle, the wall opened up, and through the narrow entrance of the Sydney Harbour heads, Hirschbein glimpsed ‘a radiant world'.

His spirit leapt as the ship sailed between the heads. The scent of eucalyptus wafted across the bay. Forested islands rose from its placid waters. Trees dozed beneath a ‘wild' heat. The city hovered on the edge of a dream. There was space enough here to find refuge from the wildest storm, Hirchbein mused.

The couple journeyed by train to Melbourne; and were escorted directly from the station to 313 Drummond Street. They were astonished to find an extensive library of Yiddish books here, in the remotest corner of their known world.

Hirschbein and Schumiakher seemed to personify the romance of the artist's life. They were feted wherever they went. They moved from one welcoming party to the next. And, in turn, they beguiled the community with their public lectures and love for the written word. After a mere five weeks the couple resumed their wandering ways, but their legacy remained.

In 1933, the library shifted house yet again to a newly constructed two-storey building in Lygon Street. The fledgling community had raised the money, and drawn up the plans. With its arched windows, stone stairs and mock marble portico, the building looked like a secular synagogue. The spacious hall extended from a modern stage, complete with a prompter's box, dressing rooms, curtains and theatre lights. A smaller banquet hall and meeting rooms stood on the upper floor. As for the books, they were housed next door, in that narrow-fronted Victorian cottage.

For thirty-five years the library remained here. The venue was home to a new generation of postwar immigrants who brought with them tales of annihilation and death. The Kadimah helped ease their way into a new life with its theatre ensemble, literary evenings and concerts, and guest scholars from abroad. On weeknights, the cottage teemed with avid readers who remained, in the grand tradition, a wandering people of the book.

In 1968 the Kadimah gave in to demographic trends. Most of the community had now moved to the south side of the river. The stage props and files, the book cabinets and shelves, and the entire library, were loaded onto a fleet of trucks, and driven to their new home. Again, the books were on the move.

The cottage that once housed the library has been renovated. The verandah is hidden behind a high brick wall, as if in retreat from the streets that once gave it life. As for the two-storey building, it has fallen into appropriate hands, as I discovered on a Saturday evening not so long ago.

As I drove past the building I noticed a blaze of lights. It reminded me of Saturday nights in my childhood, when I would attend communal banquets and plays. On an impulse I decided to stop. It was hard to find a place to park among the many cars drawing up to the hall.

I followed the crowd. Most were middle-aged men and women dressed in winter coats. They spoke a language other than English. The scent of perfume flowed through the Carlton night. As I climbed the stone stairs it all seemed so much smaller in scale. My most vivid memories of the Kadimah were those of a child, when the world loomed much larger. I had not entered the building, now called Eolian Hall, for over thirty years.

I walked in unnoticed. I fitted in with the crowd. It was exactly like old times. The many guests sat
bei gedekte tishn
, at covered tables. But instead of chicken soup, the guests sipped minestrone. And instead of chopped liver and schnitzel, the guests feasted on pastas, sprinkled with an array of sauces and cheese.

The hall was bigger than it once had appeared; the stage had been removed. I lingered in the foyer with the milling crowd. I climbed unnoticed to the upstairs room. The room was permeated with the aroma of years gone by. It was a comforting smell. The wall featured enlarged photos of older men. They looked familiar. They could have been portraits of Joseph Giligich and Melekh Ravich, Pinhas Goldhar or Herz Bergner. A similar aura of purpose permeated the faces. When I drew closer I saw that they were framed photos of prominent members of the Aeolian islands community.