Jewels and Ashes (28 page)

As the lights dimmed, six candles would be lit by six children, the sons and daughters of survivors. We all knew very well what the candles represented. But the figure was too vast, incalculable. I would lie awake some nights trying to penetrate the mystery. Six million dead? Or was it six million spirits? If one travelled out into space, what would be the end of it? Could there be an end? Was six million the end-point of all journeys?

In the candle light, standing on a rostrum, alone on stage against a stark black backdrop, a cantor would recite the Prayer for the Dead, a plea to the Master of the Universe to look after the souls of the departed. His amplified tenor would soar in the cavernous hall, mounting in intensity as it flowed into a recital of names, each one pronounced in a voice that seemed to weep, drawing with it a chorus which ascended from the audience, at first softly, slowly gathering force, discarding all restraint, until it seemed as though the whole of humanity was weeping. Oswiecim was always the first name: Oswiecim, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec, Buchenwald, Dachau — ghettoes, extermination camps, sites of execution. As I listened, the names were instilled within me as places on a mythical landscape, in a remote Kingdom of Darkness, in which ancestral ghosts stalked unredeemed, eternally condemned to a netherworld of shadows.

Then the lights were on, the chandeliers ablaze, the community swarming out onto the streets, the children even daring to play. We hurtled up and down flights of stairs while our parents talked on the footpaths. The faces of the town clock beamed at us as we crowded onto trams together, since many of us were returning to the same neighbourhood where Bloomfield, the human guinea pig, could be seen even at this late hour, maintaining his restless patrol, his eyes perpetually fixed on a distant and inaccessible goal.

And there was a golden era, which I vaguely recall as weaving in and out of a darkness. Father would sit on the living-room sofa, stand me on his feet, and lift. His feet contained a magical power. ‘Oompah! Oompah!', he would say with every lift. ‘Oompah! Oompah!', and I was flying, arms outstretched, while his face whirled below me in a ball of laughter. Mother too displayed magical powers, especially when I contracted the various childhood ailments which swept through kindergarten and primary school. I recall them as one extended fever from which I would sometimes open my eyes to see mother always seated by the bed, her face emanating a softness, a gentle strength, a constancy. Sunday mornings were the best of times. We were allowed, all three brothers, to jump into the warm double bed which mother and father had just vacated. We bounced on the mattress, crawled under the fat eiderdown beneath which they slept on winter nights, and revelled in the after-scent of their bodies.

Yet there was always something else. I do not recall a first time, but there were to be many times. Mother would be standing in front of me, rocking to and fro, her eyes shifting out of focus, as if everyone around her, myself included, no longer existed. She was somewhere else, perhaps ‘over there', in that distant world she had left behind. I did not see it as such at the time. All I could register was the estrangement, her non-recognition; and I wanted to shake her, to bring her back, to awaken her from the dream — or perhaps enter into it, so long as we were together.

But even this seemed preferable — her silent retreat, the passive withdrawal — to the rage that could erupt at any time, accompanied by a refrain repeated incessantly as a plea, a demand, an accusation. ‘I've got a story to tell', she would exclaim. ‘No one sees! No one understands! No one knows who I am!' It was never clear nor logical, this outcry, but rather a succession of garbled clues, an erratic monologue strung together between familiar phrases and catchwords: something about permits, passports, disloyalties and locked doors; broken promises, broken hearts, betrayals and unjust laws. Her words were hurled at father, Hitler, the community, the world at large; and they careered back, over and again, to the refrain, ‘I've got a story to tell. No one sees! No one understands! No one knows who I am!' Bialystok, Wellington, Melbourne, Oswiecim, this world and yener velt were all intertwined. Over there was over here, and here was over there; and I would take to the streets, or retreat to my bedroom, to seek relief from the storm. And father too would slip away, as if somehow implicated, unwilling to answer the questions I had begun to ask with increasing persistence and mounting anger as I sought to fathom the source of the constant tension which simmered in the house.

There was another possibility: the dining-room cupboard, full of journals and letters, ageing books and mysteries. Spiders had found undisturbed corners in which to spin their webs. Cockroaches scurried by. The letters were neatly tied in bundles, the envelopes coated in dust. I would prise open the doors, retrieve the bundles, and take them to my bedroom. I carefully unfolded the fragile writing-sheets, which were yellowed and riddled with holes. Others were a little thicker, pale blue, more durable. A vague scent of forgotten days hovered about them. The dates seemed ancient, concentrated between 1933 and mid 1936: they were addressed from mother to Meier Zabludowski, Bialystok, Kupietzka 38; and from father to Hoddes Zabludowski, care of her sister Feigl in Melbourne, and care of a Mr and Mrs Morris in Wellington, New Zealand.

It was difficult to decipher the scrawling Yiddish script — written in haste, it seemed, with an urgency I was too young to comprehend. Only gradually did I come to detect the agitation and longing, especially in mother's letters; and also a strength, always expanding in order to contain her growing sense of isolation, bewilderment, and unfulfilled love.

Her early letters, however, were permeated with optimism and high expectations. On the night of February 3, 1933, the passengers on the Wild Mama held a farewell party. A chocolate cake was baked for the occasion, and the French cook was shown how to ice the message, in Yiddish: ‘We wish you happiness in your new life.' The passengers sang, made lofty speeches, and danced. Two black stewards, who had served them throughout the journey, joined in the festivities. ‘They were fine dancers', writes mother. ‘One of them stood on the table and sang the Marseillaise.' And at dawn they had all gathered on deck while the Wild Mama steamed through the gap between the two peninsulas which enclose Port Phillip Bay.

As the port came into view they could see many people awaiting their arrival. A boat from Europe was quite an event, and the infant Polish-Jewish community of Melbourne would treat it as a public holiday, a rare day off work. Among the passengers, Mrs Abrahams and her three young children were the most excited. Somewhere in the crowd, waving from the docks, stood her husband. Five years of separation were coming to an end.

Mother was greeted by her sister Feigl, her brother-in-law Moishke, their baby daughter Freidele, and many former Bialystoker, eager to obtain news from home, a message from a loved one. As for Mrs Abrahams, her husband was nowhere to be seen. Long after the customs formalities had been completed she remained on the wharf with her three children, their trunks and suitcases in a pile beside them. Nine weeks later, Mrs Abrahams was dead of a stroke. Or was it suicide? The children were in a home for the abandoned, and her husband was still living with the woman who had been his mistress for several years. Meanwhile, the gates of the Old World were slowly closing and, in the New, mother had begun the long battle to bring over her husband.

She writes once a fortnight, late at night, or early mornings, before work, in order to post her letters in time for the next mail-run to Europe. For the most part she concentrates on everyday details, her practical vision of reality. Within two weeks of arrival she has a job as a machinist in a textile factory in Flinders Lane, the garment district in the heart of the city. She gets up at seven, walks to the tram stop at 7.30, and enters the factory punctually at eight. There is a ten-minute break for morning tea, half-an-hour for lunch at one, and an afternoon session until five thirty. At night she works at home, in her sister's dressmaking business. She receives a weekly wage of two pounds and five shillings, pays fifteen shillings for food and lodging and, apart from various little expenses, the balance goes into paying back the loan for her ticket to Australia. She looks forward to the day when she can put aside money for her husband's fare and for her impoverished family in Bialystok.

‘Work conditions are in general satisfactory', she writes in the tone of the former committee member of the Bialystok Seamstresses' Union. She is grateful for the regular wage, and enthuses about holiday pay and the overtime bonus. She recalls the interminable hours of unrewarded work in the sweatshops at home. The memory tempers her attacks of nostalgia. She is determined to start a new life regardless, under the strange, somehow transparent light of these southern skies.

Nevertheless, Melbourne's isolated Polish Jews learn to bend and mould time and space to soothe their moments of longing. They recreate the Old World in the New. Mother asks Meierke to send pictures of her Bundist heroes, Vladimir Medem and Beinish Michelevitz, and of her beloved Yiddish writer, I. L. Peretz. When they arrive she hangs them on the walls of her room alongside pictures of the Polish countryside. On Sundays she visits Bundist families in the neighbourhood. As soon as she enters their homes she feels enveloped by the warmth of familiarity. There are regular latke evenings, where fiery discussions of politics burn until the early hours of the morning; and when she walks home, she feels lighter, uplifted, as if she were moving through the streets of Bialystok.

And she calculates distances, time-spans. It takes five weeks for a letter to cross the oceans to her Meierke. ‘Here it is midnight. I am sitting at a table, in a room in Melbourne, and over there, my dear one, it is early afternoon. Here it is late summer, and for you it is still winter. Be careful you do not catch cold.' Weeks later, when she tastes the freshness of autumn evenings on the way home from work, she muses: ‘If only, on such perfect nights, you were the one who greeted me as I left the factory, rather than the strangers who crowd the streets at this hour.' On Mondays, when letters from Europe arrive, she sits at work impatiently, ‘as though on pins'. Her head ‘spins from thinking about it', and at five thirty she grabs her coat and beret and hastens to the tram. Within twenty minutes she is close to home, running, her heart beating strongly, plagued by the thought, ‘What if no letter arrives today? How will I get through the next week?'

There are times when she can barely contain the longing. Especially on anniversaries and celebrations. Take, for instance, May Day, 1933. Mother writes in March, so that the letter will arrive at the appropriate time. She is upset that this year she will not be able to participate, for the first time since 1922. In ten years she had not missed a single May Day march, ‘like a pious Jew does not miss his three daily prayers', she remarks. She recalls the arrest, just one year before, of Rivke Hartman. ‘I can picture the scene clearly, the police running with batons and upraised bayonets. Meierke, I trust you will describe everything that takes place during this year's march. Send my best wishes to my friends in the Bund, and take good care of yourself during the demonstration. I will be with you, in spirit.'

As winter approaches, the community huddles together. It subscribes to Polish-Yiddish dailies, worries about the rise of Hitler in Germany, establishes news-sheets, a choir, a Yiddish theatre. Mother sings at concerts and at a grand banquet to celebrate the arrival of an eminent Yiddish writer on a lecture-tour of Australia. Funds are raised for Yiddish schools in Poland; and plans are made to establish one in Melbourne, which I will attend decades later, on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. As a result I will learn the ‘aleph beis', the Yiddish alphabet, an esoteric knowledge which will enable me to decipher mother's letters and to discover the ebb and flow of her moods, the slow erosion of her faith, and her increasing desperation as she fought to remain in the New World.

Lives hang in the balance in ill-lit offices where, in between cups of tea and biscuits, with a cigarette dangling from the lips — or so I like to imagine it — a bureaucrat sits down, adjusts his glasses, focusses on the papers in front of him, and deduces that she, my mother, had migrated as a Probutski, on a permit made out to a single woman, sponsored by a sister, and the application he is scanning is for a husband with the name Zabludowski. This is a transgression of the law. Besides, there is an economic crisis in the land, jobs are hard to come by, and there are many citizens calling for an end to migration. A letter is sent to Hoddes Probutski, official, polite, to the point: you have one month in which to leave the country.

Mother fights tenaciously to stay in Australia. Accompanied by her brother-in-law Moishke, she approaches rabbis, communal leaders, lawyers, and lodges appeals. She is interviewed by an immigration officer. He is angry at the ‘trick' she had played on the government. She had signed her papers falsely. Mother argues she had been single at the time. ‘But you arrived as a married person', the officer admonishes. He turns his attention to Meier. ‘Can your husband speak English? Does he have skills which are scarce in Australia? Perhaps he has money. With five hundred pounds he could enter without a permit.' Only towards the end of the interrogation, when mother hands him a photo of Meier, does he soften. ‘Not bad looking, your old man', he remarks. ‘But I'm afraid the decision is not up to me. Your papers will be sent to Canberra. The boys up there will look into it. Trouble is, there are too many people in this country. Even our prime minister, good Catholic that he is, has eleven children.'

‘I have become very nervous', writes mother. ‘I am running out of patience.' She waits six weeks for a reply. On October 19 it arrives. Her permit has been revoked. She must leave the country. Mother's despair can be felt in every sentence as she writes to Meier of her sense of humiliation on receiving the reply. ‘It was like a clap of thunder', she tells him. She has barely paid off her debt for the ticket out: now she must find money for the return journey. The Christmas season is coming. She works overtime in the factory and well past midnight in Feigl's business. ‘At least work helps me forget', she writes, ‘and as I work 1 think of you. Your name is always on my lips, your face embedded in my fantasies.'