Bloodhound (27 page)

Then I saw that Temple Beth Israel, the liberal Jewish congregation which held the Sunday school classes I had attended, had a notice of her death. Why was I picking over the ashes of this woman who'd looked after Dad until his awful death? Why was I questioning her right to be interred in the way that she and her family saw fit?

I found the records for Mama and Dad. As in life, when they could hardly stand to be in the same room together, in death they were far removed, too. Her 1977 death placed her in Row 3, plot B8, while his 2008 death had him in Row 20, plot D12. But he was more removed by distance from his second wife. Her ashes are interred a way down the road.

I looked up the records for Max. He'd died on 13 January 1989. He was buried somewhere between Mama and Dad, Row 18, grave S5. Was the placement fitting? He hardly needed to come between them in death, as so much else came between them in life.

I remembered the first phone call from Bern after she'd met Max at the auction and he'd asked after me, asked if I was happy. It was in my first years of full-time broadcasting, which started in 1988. He may well have known by then that he was dying. He might have been thinking about his life and putting some things to rest. But then, why would he have been at an auction? Maybe he was always going to auctions; maybe they were a hobby for him.

Like Dad, Max didn't leave me anything. I was tempted to get sentimental about him, but he had plenty of chances to contact me after that day he'd been reminded of me by seeing Bern. And if she hadn't been looking for a house, they would never have met and he would never have asked about me.

I checked on Max's brother Joe, the one who couldn't be told about my existence because of the shame. He'd died, too. His younger son had told me that Max and his father often fought about their business. Joe was the tailor and Max was the businessman; Max wasn't a fine tailor like Joe. Of course Max was the businessman, I thought. He had learned everything about how to do business, how to
organise
, in his years at Auschwitz.

One night the following year I was watching a television documentary about the caves under Easter Island when the phone rang. It was Joe's younger son's wife. She told me that Alan had died, aged sixty-three. He'd had pneumonia, after serious lung disease, and had continued smoking. He'd still ridden his horse each day around Kuranda, and someone at his funeral recalled him wearing a Zorro costume. His kids were now young teenagers. His mother was still alive: eighty-eight years old and in a retirement home.

He'd been in Melbourne with his daughter some months before his death and hadn't called or visited me. I wasn't surprised, but I felt left out. He was possibly my half-brother, and I only met him that one time. He'd died some weeks ago. His poor mother, outliving her only child.

Meanwhile, I'd got in touch with Mr Lederman's adoptive son to tell him I had written about his father, and ask what he knew about his parents' marriage and their history together. He knew very little. When he was growing up he didn't think it polite to probe too much. He said that Mr Lederman had indeed been a truck driver in the Red Army, but had defected during the war because he didn't like the way the Soviets treated their underlings. Along with three others he deserted, taking the army truck and ending up behind German enemy lines. After the German defeat the Soviets found them, and his three companions were executed on the spot. Mr Lederman was set free, as his captors couldn't believe a Jew would drive towards Nazi Germany during the war unless he'd made a dreadful mistake. Hearing this, I thought Mr Lederman might have been a bit dim for the likes of Mama. I still had not forgiven him for his cowardice towards us.

What was I left with as each of the players in my drama slowly faded off stage? That old Yiddish joke about the man who's proud of his antecedents being like a potato: the best part of him is underground.

The 1894 translation of
The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
(the name under which the adventurer, intellectual and lover Giacomo Casanova wrote) starts with ‘My Family Pedigree', which the author can cite from the elopement of his relative Don Jacob Casanova, the illegitimate son of Don Francisco Casanova, a native of Saragosa, the capital of Aragon: ‘in the year of 1428 he carried off Dona Anna Palofax from her convent, on the day after she had taken the veil.' He charts seven generations of his father's family and, from his mother's side, the story of her romance with and marriage to his father, until his own birth on 2 April 1725.

In light of Casanova's reputation as a daring lover, the first story of the flight from the convent of the bastard with the newly minted nun is but a precursor to many of the adventures of the author himself. You soon forget about the stories that went before, as Casanova tells his own recollections and adventures so well. Apart from the family tree being a useful literary device, what does it matter to me how he arrived on the planet?

After his mother died, my husband showed me some photographs of his mother's family sent to him by his first cousin. There was his grandfather and his great-grandmother. He looked to see if there was a resemblance; he saw a similar nose. And then he filed the pictures away.

I asked what he saw when he looked at these people. He said that he remembered some of them. There wasn't much connection there, it seemed to me. His family ties were much looser than mine.

If I had pictures going back three or four generations, I thought, I would be entranced. But how long would that last? How entranced would I be if there was no loss to deal with, no tragedies?

I'd been looking at images of pre-World War II Polish Jews on a memorial website. They were affecting photos, because they were taken at all kinds of family events: birthdays, weddings, dinners. One showed a girl of about eleven leaning into a large chair on which sat her cousins, girl twins, all of them dressed in their best clothes. I shudder to think what happened to them. They are connected to me in ways that are sociological and cultural, although not familial. Would my shuddering be more profound if we shared blood ties?

In an interview the great Australian writer Elizabeth Harrower told me that, while she'd never had children, she thought of us as all belonging to the same family. There were very few human beings once, and now we are numerous but connected. Why should we want our ‘own' families ahead of others?

When I first read Dovid Hofshteyn's poem I thought it was melancholy.
We spring from rocks / from rocks ground by millstones of time…
Not knowing where I sprang from, I had only barren rocks with which to make a claim for my history.

Now I think of it as a poem for all life, not just for the human species. We did all spring from rocks: geological time threw up the right conditions for our species to hold sway on the planet. It wasn't always so, and it won't always be.

Where do I come from?
Why must we ask this question?

Does coming from somewhere tell us anything about where we are and who we are? Does coming from somewhere give us more than the right to claim land, or a history, or a culture?

I know without doubt that I come from the remnant Jewish population of Poland gathered together after World War II and flung to this far region of the planet. I am from the Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox-practising population of the
shtetls
.

I know I am descended from a rural family near the town of Sokołów Podlaski, because my maternity is not in doubt. My access to the family stories from this branch is limited by the early death of my mother, and by her lack of inclination when alive to tell many of them. This is understandable, as she was a child survivor of the Holocaust and the only surviving member of her family. She was traumatised by her history. And I was too young to formulate a set of questions that I could ask her. So there is a significant historical gap in my knowledge.

But say I could know as much as I wanted to know: what would it mean? What does it mean to people who can trace their roots back? How much does it connect you to a person you may have directly descended from? Would it matter for four generations? Five? And then what?

I spent a weekend in the home of a friend who has pictures of her English relatives, many generations back, fixed to the wall in the hall. There are women in long crinolines, preparing for a ball or sitting next to their respectable husbands. I had a pang of longing when I saw them all set out like this.

I fantasised about having just such a set of pictures, reaching back through both the maternal and paternal lines. The bearded serious grandfathers, the Orthodox women with wigs on their heads. (Because of which, I might not be able to see if their hair was curly or reddish or black as coal.)

What traits do we get from these people? Beyond the shape of our faces or the colour of our hair, or the inheritance of money and property, what do they give us? Do they help in our understanding of the lives we lead and the choices that are available to us and the decisions we make?

My grandmother Rivka, from whom I got my Hebrew name—who, before she died in her thirties, decided in 1942 to send her only blond-haired, blue-eyed fourteen-year-old daughter away to an uncertain future, but one that was less certain to contain death than the one which she shared with her darker, brown-eyed son—made a wrenching decision that guaranteed my birth on a continent a world away. Does her story tell me anything about what I might be capable of?

And why then does it matter to me who my father was? If I knew, would I be any clearer about the contribution of his parents or their parents to the person I am, or the life that I have lived or the future stories of my grandchildren?

Why does the story of the Khazar Jews make me want to search online for a portrait of their likeness? What might a picture of a Khazar Jewish princess with curly reddish hair and blue eyes and a face shaped like mine tell me? Given the length of time involved, the chances that I'd look like my fanciful Khazar princess are probably small.

When I look at my own grandchildrens' faces, I see how the contributions of their fathers' families change the shapes of their eyes from mine—or my chin, or my hair. My eldest granddaughter has the almond-shaped eyes of her Filipino-Spanish mezisto grandfather, my blue eyes and curls, and elements I imagine her father may have inherited from his Indigenous Australian great-grandmother. She is just as close to me as if she were my perfect clone, and the differences that make her who she is delight me.

One day, my husband used computer software to see what the possibilities were when Max's and Mama's faces were combined. We had to find original photos of our subjects facing in the same direction, so it was a bit restricted, but I was convinced that my face was an approximation of theirs. It was a little spooky. I played with the software for a while, changing the percentages—less Max, more Mama; more Max, less Mama—and then I put it aside, just like my husband had done with his family photos.

They said it would take three months to arrive, but I was anxious when that time had almost elapsed and my Polish passport had not come. For most of the third month I checked the letterbox each day for special deliveries. I searched my calendar to see exactly when I had handed over my papers at the consulate in Sydney. It was Tuesday, 30 July 2013, and on Wednesday, 30 October 2013, three months to the day, a man from Australia Post brought the registered letter from the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland to my door.

I could even read some of the writing in it, as I had engaged a Polish teacher to give me weekly lessons. Learning Polish had ceased to be full of anxiety and had turned into a pleasurable interest for me. I thought I would never master the complex grammar, but I was learning words and phrases and was even able to decode signs in the historical footage I found on YouTube. I enthusiastically attended Polish film screenings and could understand some of the dialogue without reading the English subtitles. I was especially taken by films set in the pre-war period and postwar Soviet times, and shot in black-and-white. I was under the illusion that they brought me closer to my quarry.

My EU passport was finally before me, all present and correct and above board. I was now a legitimate citizen of the Republic of Poland. But, I reminded myself, I was already a legitimate citizen of the Commonwealth of Australia before all this started.

Over the course of this winding journey I had at least learned that I am determined. I am like a dog searching for a bone, a bloodhound, even if I am still not sure of where all my blood comes from.

With my two passports I am now a citizen of the earth. Although the past is important, the future is what excites me, and my passport to it requires me to take one breath, one step and one day at a time. One step, one day at a time. It sounds like a program for alcoholics. Was I unhealthily addicted to the story of where I came from?

I saw Wagner's Ring Cycle and realised that I was not alone. There are great traditions, across cultures and time, of asking the same questions: Who is the father? Who is the mother? This importance of tracing the godly lines, the questions of inheritance, the confusions between princes and paupers, the ways in which human beings try to avoid their fates by taking on other identities, the wandering gods in disguise, the myths and legends: they all point to the importance of our identity. Many of Shakespeare's plays have a disguised or mistaken identity at their heart.

I understand now that I was missing not just a collection of family photographs and a family tree showing blood ties, but the stories upon stories that they might have told and I would have loved to hear. Of how their families found their ways to this part of Poland and in which year, after which pogrom or family tragedy. Maybe one of them went off and became something unexpected—a court advisor or a famous soldier or a courtesan or a thief or a slave.

We need our stories: they are the way we learn about the world, and the way we pass on what we learn to those who come after us. We are always looking for a plausible story, one that might fit the meagre facts, as they do in courts of law—never really able to know the whole truth but finding the most likely explanation, the most convincing thread.