The Fig Tree (5 page)

Once home, Hadassah retreated to her household chores and silences, broken by an occasional outburst of song. She sang without restraint. She sang by the kitchen table as she chopped and cut, sliced and diced onions and egg, liver and fish, chicken and lamb chops, and the various ingredients that went into the family meals. She sang as she sat by our bed and nursed us through the childhood illnesses: measles and chicken pox, whooping coughs and mumps, and the many colds and influenzas that swept through our neighbourhood every winter.

She sang by the sewing machine at which she worked for hours on end, stitching together skirts and socks, jackets and trousers, piecework for factories in Brunswick, the neighbouring suburb to the north. The sewing machine was her closest companion, her means of livelihood. She would sit bent forward, intense in concentration as she threaded the cotton with one deft stab through the needle's eye. Once the rhythm took hold, she would sing in tandem with the machine's drone.

She sang in the washhouse at the back of the house, where she stoked the laundry in stone tubs steaming with hot water. She refused washing machines when they began to appear on the market. A waste of money, she said, with contempt. Instead she beat the laundry into submission. She kneaded the washing like a baker rolling dough. She hauled the soaked clothes to the backyard hoist and pegged them against a breeze. Sheets and blankets, trousers and cardigans, underwear and overcoats, dresses and petticoats unfurled in the wind; and still she sang.

Her repertoire was vast. She sang about rabbis and wonder workers, silver birches and solitary pines. She sang lullabies and love songs, and ballads that depicted the lives of tailors, shoemakers, carpenters and weavers, songs extolling the virtues of work when larders were empty, and wolves were baying at the door.

Yiddish music permeated our lives. Even in the silence, a song always seemed about to break loose. Melodies seemed to linger in shafts of dust trapped in rays of sun that poked between the window frames.

At first there was just the
nigun
, the wordless tune, sung by mystics in praise of their Lord, songs that Hadassah first heard sung by her father, Aron Yankev, the devout Hasid. ‘
Reb
Aron, geb unz a nigun
', ‘Reb Aron give us a melody', his fellow devotees would say when he entered the tiny prayer house on Sabbath nights and festival days. It stood in one of the many lanes of the Chanaykes, the slum quarters of Bialystok, the city to which Reb Aron, the weaver, had migrated, from the nearby village of Grodek, at the turn of the century, in search of work. Hadassah hummed Reb Aron's
nigunim
with a gentle rocking, a swaying motion, until the melody gave way to words:

Riboynoy Shel Oylom, Riboynoy Shel Oylom

Master of the Universe,

I will sing you a song of praise

Is there a place where You cannot be found?

Wherever I walk, there is only You

Wherever I stand, there is only You

To the east, You, and the west, You

In the north, You, and the south, only You

In the heavens above, You

On the earth below, You

Wherever I turn, I see only You.

This was among the many songs that wove through my childhood. It was written by one of the most revered of Tzaddikim, holy men of the Hasidic movement, Reb Levi Yitskhok Berdichiver. Famed for his fierce independence, Levi Yitskhok composed songs and prayers in which he argued with God. Why do my people continue to suffer? he demanded. Why do you not respond to our call? Where can we find you? he pleaded. And this plea, too, became a song.

For Levi Yitskhok, God was an intimate friend with whom he could enter into dialogue; God was the recipient of his anger and fears. Now, years after her death, I understand why Hadassah returned so often to this song. She too hungered after an intimate friend, a confidante. She too wanted to break free of her isolation and simmering regret.

Long before I acquired such understanding, however, there was merely the
nigun
. And the lullaby. Hadassah would sit by the bedside and sing of the miraculous goat that stood beneath the cradle. In order to survive, the goat would leave his village to sell raisins and almonds. As Hadassah sang I imagined the white goat making his way from one market place to the next. I did not see, then, the degree to which this deceptively simple ballad mirrored the lives of my mother and many of her peers. You too are destined to become like the white goat, warn the lyrics of this, the most famous of Yiddish songs. ‘There will come a time my child, when you too will travel far and wide.'

Born in the Polish village of Grodek, in 1905, Hadassah would one day make her way to the ends of the earth in search of a haven from a burgeoning storm. As a teenager she understood how fragile life could be. She knew the tyranny of constant change. She had lived through two revolutions and one prolonged war, and she had moved house many times.

Yiddish song remained her one constant. In her youth she often performed solo at school concerts and community celebrations, youth camps and rallies, and in the workshop where she fashioned clothes. A quiet woman by nature, when she sang she came alive. In singing she allowed herself to fly.

Hadassah was blessed with a resonant soprano. Even as she neared old age, it continued to soar in our Canning Street home. But there was a shrillness, a hard edge to her singing; perhaps fuelled by the thought that she was never able to bring her talent to fruition.

‘I have a story to tell,' she would say in despair. ‘No one knows. No one cares. No one sees who I really am.' Perhaps this is why she made her way, at the age of sixty, to Miriam Rochlin's flat, determined, finally, to reveal her true worth.

The front door of the flat opened directly into a cubby-hole kitchen. In one corner stood a Kooka stove. Miriam served Hadassah a cup of black tea spiced with lemon. After a chat by the kitchen table, Miriam guided her into the living room. She sat down at an upright piano and assumed her characteristic pose. A cigarette dangled from the side of her mouth. On the floor lay her well-worn leather satchel crammed with scores. Her eyes squinted at the music sheet behind thick-framed glasses. Above the piano there stood a photo of an all-female band.

Miriam Rochlin was a familiar figure in Carlton. She accompanied almost every Yiddish concert, choir rehearsal, and theatre performance, for over half a century. Miriam did not merely play. She thumped. Whenever an actor complained she was playing too loud, she snapped back, in her gravel-laced voice, ‘Listen. Acting is your business, music is mine. You mind your business and I will mind mine.'

Miriam lived alone. She spoke Yiddish with the accent of a native Australian. The tight vowels were elongated into a drawl. She knew the details of the village gossip. We were the children she did not bear. She would stop when she saw us in the street, and inquire after everyone in the family. She knew everything about our lives, but we knew little about hers; except for that enigmatic photograph of the band.

The women were young and dressed in loose flowing white gowns. I recall their faces as poised between a smile and a frown. A young Miriam Rochlin sits by the piano. One woman poses behind a set of drums. Another stands, clutching a bass, and yet another holds a trumpet. Or was it a clarinet? Or flute? I cannot quite remember. The photo was taken perhaps some time in the 1930s, certainly before the war.

Miriam was an independent spirit who knew her own mind. Music was her first love, and her calling. She had followed her own muse. Perhaps this is why Hadassah was drawn towards her; and why she would return home from the rehearsals somewhat lighter, with an uncharacteristic ease. And perhaps this is why she persisted with the rehearsals for many months, until she emerged, triumphant, from the studios of Wilbur William, with two copies of a 45 rpm vinyl platter.

When I listen to the record now I am surprised at how young Hadassah sounds. The soprano still holds, though at times the voice lapses and is hesitant with age. She struggles to follow the beat. She seems uncertain in the surrounds of a recording studio. Yet it is clear that she possessed an extraordinary talent. Her voice is powered by a fierce will. She seems to be saying, ‘This is who I really am. After all these years, I am still here. Still alive.'

Hadassah chose well. Within the four songs resides a vanished world. The lyrics mirror Hadassah's ‘ideals'. They reflect the struggles and journeys of her generation. She begins with a lullaby. ‘Sleep My Child, My Crown' was written as a new century was approaching. It was composed in Tsarist Russia at a time of mass movement and change. This movement was sparked by a wave of pogroms that swept through Russian villages in the 1880s, in the wake of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.

Written by the most renowned of Yiddish authors, Sholem Aleichem, the lullaby was sung by women who wanted to maintain their maternal softness, yet remain strong. It was sung by women who were raising their children through times of poverty, and the constant threat of the baying mob.

The lyrics reflect the dominant trend of the time. In the tens of thousands Jews were fleeing the townlets of Eastern Europe. Entire families were stealing across the border, en route to Atlantic ports. More often, the family was preceded by a father, a husband, a son.

The mother sings of the child's absent father. He has been long gone. He lives in America. The new world is surely a Garden of Eden where one eats sweet braided Sabbath bread, even in the middle of the week. Your father will send letters, money, a photograph. And:

One day your father will send for us

But until that moment comes, my child

Sleeping is the surest cure

Sleep my child, ai-le-lu

Singing was Hadassah's act of renewal. This is how she held herself together while she raised her three sons in an alien land. This is how she maintained her spirit at a time when the savings culled from many years of drudgery were eaten up by a business gone wrong. And how she kept the ghosts of her murdered loved ones at bay, and honoured the many friends she never saw again after she left Bialystok on the eve of war. Perhaps this is why Hadassah follows the lullaby with a song called ‘In Life's Hard Times'.

Based on a Yiddish translation of a poem by the Russian poet Lermontov, the song extols the healing quality of prayer. There is a godly power, writes Lermontov. A power that nurtures and protects; that provides meaning and faith. A power that can guide us through dark times.

The third song, ‘The Naked Young Man from the Swamps', is a hymn to honest labour and toil. As a child I imagined the naked youth as a wild man caked in mud. I saw him as dancing in the swamps. I saw him as driven by a kind of madness; and I saw this madness as reflected in my mother's voice.

Look at that cottage which stands not so far

Who was it that built it, who was it?

Who was it who built it of brick and of clay?

The naked young man from the swamps.

Look at that horse dancing outside

Who was it that raised it, who was it?

Who was it that made it so powerful and strong?

The naked young man from the swamps

‘The Naked Young Man from the Swamps' was written by the poet Itzik Feffer. Born in a Russian village in the very first year of the twentieth century, Feffer came of age at the time of the Bolshevik revolution. Like so many young men and women he was drawn to the socialist ideal. He was one of a group of Yiddish writers who moved to the newly formed Soviet Union to serve a revolution they believed would bring an end to inequity and strife.

Feffer clung to this vision even during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. He clung to this ideal even as his fellow writers began to disappear in the labour camps of the Siberian gulag. And even as some of his closest friends woke up to the harsh fact that the Red Messiah was as ruthless and self-serving as the Tsars they had overthrown.

Perhaps he still clung to his waning faith when he was arrested in Stalin's final purge of Yiddish writers and intellectuals. How can we know? But on 12 August 1952, along with thirty other writers who had remained loyal to their youthful hopes, Itzik Feffer was executed under direct orders from Joseph Stalin.

This is where many Yiddish songs finally lead us. They cling like vines struggling for light within a forest. The forest stood on the outskirts of town. With the coming of spring there would arrive bands of gypsies. They unharnessed their wagons, set up camp, lit fires, and entered into the dreams of the townsfolk. Perhaps Hadassah glimpsed in them another possibility. Perhaps she longed to move on with them, and imagined them enjoying a life of greater freedom.

She herself had to stay put. After decades of movement she lived the final forty-three years of her eighty-six years of life in the one place, a terraced cottage in Canning Street. She lived there until ten days before she died, on 15 July 1990.

When her children left home she retreated to the darker corners of the house. She moved to the back room away from the northern light. Her shoulders became drawn, her back hunched, her face gaunt. She pulled down the blinds and spent many days in bed. Or she would sit on the chair beside the bed, bent over a Yiddish novel. More often she would lapse into a prolonged silence. Her gaze was focused elsewhere, far beyond the house and her austere surroundings. She emerged from the back room only to cook, or to greet her visiting sons.

And sometimes she would hum a fragment of melody, a verse of forgotten song. She never entirely gave up her passion. I would come across her, lost in a reverie, humming; and the song she sang most often in those last years, was ‘Play Gypsy':

Play Gypsy, play me a song

On the fiddle all day long

On the fiddle green leaves fall

And what once was, is now beyond recall

Red is blood and red is wine

A star falls and then another

And our hearts reach out to each other.

‘Play Gypsy' was the final song Hadassah chose to record in the studios of Wilbur Williams. For many years she retained her shock of black hair. She wore the hair tied back in a tight bun. From time to time she set it free. She sat by the kitchen table, removed the amber combs that kept her hair in place, and allowed it to cascade over her shoulders. She followed a well-practised ritual. She would massage her hair with Restoria Cream. These jars of cream were her most prized possessions; she claimed the cream kept her hair black. She would then comb the lengthy strands with a rhythmic precision.