Out of Tune (5 page)

When we finally arrived in Perth, not only did we not have anywhere to stay, but we had almost no money. Being broke, we first
moved into an old factory warehouse full of gleaming white refrigerators. The scene was really quite surreal. We all slept
on one big double mattress surrounded by fridges, and we cooked on a radiator turned on its side. We lived there for about
three weeks until we finally managed to find somewhere to rent.

During this time, although we had no house, no furniture, nothing at all apart from food to eat, my father did something which,
on the face of it, might seem very peculiar. He decided to go out and buy the family a piano. He did this on credit. It was
a wonderful old second-hand Ronish piano, on which we all learned to play. My brother Leslie in Perth still owns it, indeed
his young daughter Dorothy is learning to play on it. She’s very talented musically, and is continuing the family tradition.

My father had notified the Perth Jewish community that we were moving to the town; the old system of Jewish communal support
was still very strong and members were happy to help a new Jewish family settle in. The Perth community, though small—at the
time it numbered about 3,000—was nevertheless a well-established, vigorous, and affluent one. (It has now grown to around
6,000, following an influx of Jews from South Africa, Britain, and elsewhere.) When some community members came to visit us
in the warehouse and saw that my father had purchased a piano, they were absolutely astounded. “How can you go out and buy
a piano when you don’t even have a place to live for your children?” they asked. I remember clearly that my father just looked
them straight in the eye and said, “But you can’t live without a piano, you can’t live without music.”

That’s what my father was like. His passion for music and the vision he had of teaching us the piano was fulfilled not only
in David, but also to a lesser degree in myself and my other siblings. That we all absorbed such a great love of music was
due to my father.

But although music for him was as essential as bread and water, he was not obsessive nor did he lack a sense of proportion
about what was important. What he had was a spiritual side, a dream of enriching our lives, which paid as much attention to
cultural values as to material comfort. Buying us a piano when he did was not a case of his being in any way neglectful. We
had plenty to eat during that period, as we did at other times. In fact, my father was not only a great believer in making
us take sufficient physical exercise, he was also a stickler for ensuring that we always had the correct nutrition. He constantly
made a point of giving us the right quantities of protein, fruit, vegetables, meat, and salads.

After moving out of the refrigerator warehouse, we lived in a number of houses in and around a working-class neighborhood
in the northern part of Perth, called Highgate. Highgate, which was populated by many new immigrants, mainly from Italy, Greece,
and Yugoslavia, was next to a much wealthier area called Mt. Lawley, where many of the better off, well-established Jews lived.
(Like Carlton in Melbourne, Highgate has in recent years become extremely chic, full of new bars and boutiques.)

We first stayed for a few weeks at a boardinghouse in Lake Street, and then for the next two years we rented a house in Beaufort
Street. While we lived at the back of the house, my father decided to turn the front part, which was formerly a shop, into
a European-style tearoom. We ran up pink curtains, decorated the tables, and made everything look as attractive as possible;
but the venture wasn’t very successful and after two or three months we had to abandon it. My father then went to work as
an electrical fitter for the State Electricity Commission.

We were really quite poor. When we needed to economize further, we moved to a house we rented from the state housing commission
in an area called Maniana. The house was cheaply constructed, made primarily of asbestos. Later we lived in a dilapidated
house in another part of Beaufort Street, which is now a veterinary clinic. There were a lot of problems with the sewage there,
and my father spent a great deal of time trying to fix it. The landlord just neglected the problem.

When we first lived in Perth we didn’t have a fridge, which is rather ironic after being surrounded by them at the warehouse.
To keep everything fresh, we had to buy an ice chest. In those days an ice delivery man would come down the street every few
days, and the families in the neighborhood would buy a block of ice and put it in their chest along with perishables. Eventually
my father had saved enough to buy a fridge.

Growing up in Perth, with its white sandy beaches and long summer days, was very different from growing up in Melbourne. They
were two different worlds. Perth seemed much more informal to me. Maybe it was the more Mediterranean-like climate and the
big open spaces that made life there seem to go at such a relaxed pace. Melbourne’s weather is much cooler and more rainy,
and above all changeable. Its inhabitants say of it that there can be four seasons in a single day. Perth had not only the
beaches but the wide, tranquil Swan River, which cuts through the center of the city and is often dotted with yachts and sailing
boats.

I had always worn shoes and socks in Melbourne, but in Perth a lot of people seemed to go around barefoot, and I quickly discarded
my footwear when running around both at home and when playing with friends in the streets nearby.

Although Perth may be isolated, many people have heard of it. In the 1960s, its citizens burned their lights all night to
guide the American astronaut John Glenn, who in 1962 became the first American to orbit the earth. The first thing Glenn saw
when he entered the earth’s stratosphere were the lights of Perth, and the city is still now known by many as the City of
Lights.

It came to international prominence again in 1987 when it hosted the America’s Cup—the first time the famous yachting trophy
had been held outside the United States. Perth has also had its share of wealthy tycoons, such as Alan Bond, who in 1987 paid
a then world record U.S. $53.9 million for Van Gogh’s
Irises
, and Robert Holmes a Court, who in the 1980s was one of Australia’s richest men.

The city’s climate was truly tropical. Summer nights could be very hot, and sometimes we used to drag our mattresses out onto
the back lawn and lie on our backs, looking up at the stars. And Dad would then treat us to an astronomy lesson. He had taught
himself an impressive amount. He would explain the way the galaxies were constructed. He would point upward and show us the
Milky Way, the Three Sisters, the Southern Cross—everything that could be seen in Australia’s night skies.

The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, was four and a half light-years away. My father would explain how the light took off from
it and how it would take four and a half years to get to Perth. All this was fascinating for young children: David and I just
absorbed it all and asked lots of eager questions. These were our science lessons, although we didn’t even think of them as
lessons; it was just a natural part of growing up. And where another family might talk about who won the soccer game or what
the neighbors were doing, we would discuss the nearest star to earth, or which ran faster, a leopard or a puma, or the best
move to make in a chess game when your king is trapped between two bishops.

We regularly crossed to the south side of the city to visit the zoo, one of our favorite places. We all loved these outings,
especially since my father was such a great guide. He told us all about the animals, and would conjure up wonderfully exotic
memories from his time in the circus.

We had a good life, even though we were relatively poor. My father even bought me my first camera when I was eleven years
old. I loved it, and started taking pictures of the whole family; most of the pictures of my father and David in this book
are ones that I took myself. There aren’t many photos from earlier years because no one in the family actually owned a camera
before that.

I
asked my father one day why he had taught us all music and he replied: “If I had given you money and possessions, they could
have been lost. But if I give you music, no matter where you are in the world, even if you are alone or without money, music
will always be a friend to you.”

His passion for music was tied to the notion that once you mastered it, it was yours, it was part of your being and no one
could take it away from you. His love for music was, I believe, innate and not the result of some external factor or influence.

As with most of the things that he had learned, Peter Helfgott was a self-taught musician. He had mastered the piano while
living in Melbourne, essentially by going to the houses of friends whose children were learning to play. He would sit with
the child who was taking piano lessons and ask them to show him how they played, tell him the name of the notes, and so on.
In this way, he learned both the piano and later the violin.

He was always drawn to music. He often used to play for us at home in the evenings. He would pick up the violin and play various
Gypsy tunes—both joyous, invigorating ones and also melodies of the haunting, soulful kind, the product of centuries of persecution
and rootlessness that the Gypsies have suffered in much the same way as the Jews. When in a different mood, my father would
play the romantic Mendelssohn violin concerto, a melody from Tchaikovsky, or music such as “
Liebesfreud”
or “
Schön Rosmarin
” by the brilliant Vienna-born violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler.

At other times he would sit down at the piano and play something from the romantic period such as Liszt or Chopin, or a more
popular piece such as “South of the Rio Grande” by Jacques Miller. It was remarkable how much he had taught himself, considering
he had never taken a proper lesson in his life.

He told me that he would love to have become a musician but that the nature of his family in Poland had prevented him from
fulfilling this dream. My father’s longing for music dated back to his childhood in the
shtetl
. At that time he had even managed to scrape together enough money to buy a little violin. But when he brought it home, my
grandfather, who intended my father to study to become a rabbi, was horrified. He took the violin and snapped it across his
knees. This broke my father’s heart and may well have contributed to his longing to run away.

Eventually, in Melbourne, my father did get to perform a little, entertaining the customers in his coffee lounge by playing
the violin or piano and singing. But the fact that he was never able properly to fulfill his dream may have given him an added
incentive to pass the gift of music on to his children. All of us play an instrument, and, at present, four of us are earning
our living from music. Leslie plays the violin, performing in various ensembles as well as appearing as a soloist. He also
teaches school children Australian bush dances together with other local folk dances. Louise has been teaching piano in the
last few years. Perhaps more than any of us, she resembles our father in the sense that she is completely self-motivated and
self-taught. She recently put herself successfully through both her theory and practical examinations without having had any
formal training at all. Her pupils do exceptionally well. I myself teach piano and accompany various singers and instrumentalists.
And of course, there is David.

Even Suzie, my one sister who doesn’t actually earn her living from music (she’s a social worker), obtained a music diploma
from the Australian Music Examinations Board, which is a university-standard qualification.

There was other musical interest in the family, too. My father had a cousin who sang in a chorus in Czestochowa for two years
and another who sold miniature musical instruments. According to Zelig Lewcowitz, my cousin in Tel Aviv, my father’s father
was also a very musical man, in spite of having broken Dad’s violin. He would sing for hours on the Sabbath, which is a common
practice in religious Jewish households. “David Helfgott loved to sing Hassidic melodies,’ Zelig told me. “All the family
used to go to David’s sister Zelda on the Sabbath and gather round and listen to David sing. These were wonderful occasions.
It was a way of life that has all but disappeared from eastern Europe.”

Each night when we were children, my father would come home from work, have something to eat, and then sit with David and
me and teach us to play the piano. The odd thing about David is that, though in the end he really did emerge as a child prodigy
(he was undoubtedly a better pianist as a teenager than he is now), for the first two or three years of studying piano—until
he was about eight—he totally failed to recognize the various notes that my father taught him. He was completely incapable
of distinguishing one note from another. I used to think: Why can’t he remember a C from a D or a G from an A? My father would
say, for example, this is a G and it’s on the second line of the treble clef, but the very next day David couldn’t remember
or began playing some other note. My father would patiently explain to him over and over again. “David,” he would say, “that’s
a G, not an E or a B,” and so on.