Sunrise West (19 page)

Despite all the settling-in difficulties we experienced in common with most migrants, we loved Melbourne from day one. I said to Esther, ‘How can one handle so much freedom, and such peace?' We could eat and eat the good, healthy food without upsetting our stomachs, while our red-headed landlady and her children made us feel so at home that we soon became like a family.

One Friday night, after we had lit our candles, there was a faint knock on the door. It was our neighbour from number 66, a woman crippled by some disease; she was wheeled in by a tall man. She had come to beg Esther to let her gaze on the flickering candles for a while. ‘I am Jewish,' she told us timidly, ‘but I married in a church. This is my husband, he's Catholic.' Tears rolled over her cheeks, wrinkled like old parchment. ‘He's a wonderful, generous man, he looks after me as if I'm the child I never gave him. But the Sabbath candles, these Sabbath candles — oh, how I miss my mother's Friday nights.'

It's Saturday, the small hours, Brunswick Road lies enfolded in deep darkness. Suddenly Esther is awake, screaming. ‘They're chasing me, help, please help me! The bricks are burning, they're sticking to my feet like leeches!'

Esther's nightmare was nothing new in her postwar life. It kept recurring, and it wasn't the only one she had. Whenever
her sleep was disturbed by another bad dream, it took her a few days to return to herself.

On one such morning we got up later than ever. There was tension in our small room. Esther stood in a corner, cutting bread on a fruit crate. ‘Will they ever let me go?' she whispered. ‘Will they, or is this for life?'

Breakfast was sardines in oil, buttered bread and hot milk. To make up for the lost time we ate vigorously, without speaking. The silence was broken only by the music on our radio, and then the voice of our witty announcer: ‘The temperature has already reached 90, and our weather wizards are forecasting 110. But you good people out there know me better, I won't allow it. Ha, ha, ha.'

It did bring a smile to Esther's lips; and while she went to clean up in the kitchen, I quickly reached for a rag and wiped the windowsill free of snow.

 

 
Conversations
 

One Sunday morning about six months after our arrival, a young man with bushy hair and urgent eyes came to our door at 68 Brunswick Road. He wore a military-style grey-green jacket over a polo-neck shirt, and a pair of threadbare blue slacks that brushed the rubber thongs on his feet. Across his arm he carried a sheaf of newsprint.

‘Sir, would you like to buy a copy of the workers' paper?' he asked politely. Of course I obliged — I thought it was the right thing to do, if only out of gratitude for being let into Australia, though I knew it would be a struggle
for me to read it. The following week the man showed up again.

Tutored by our landlady and her young daughter Kay, I was steadily learning to navigate the necessities of daily life in my new tongue, learning to explain myself and even to argue my case a little. So when, on his third visit, the young man remarked that ‘We in our party like to teach,' I promptly asked, ‘Teach what?'

‘About socialism, sir, and Communism.'

‘No, thank you,' I answered in my broken English, and tried to point out that in these matters I was already reasonably well taught. ‘I have read Marx and Engels and I do not like them, especially Marx, who said the bill of exchange is god of the Jews.'

The young man was stunned. He apologized forlornly and left, never to return.

Sunday mornings we usually spent at St Kilda beach. After that we would go to the Blicblaus', where many newcomers just like us had found a home away from home. We would climb the staircase to their flat at 365 Beaconsfield Parade, a building inhabited mostly by Bundists who had lived through the war in Shanghai and, thanks to the generosity of Mina and Leo Fink (who were prominent communal philanthropists), had received small rooms here at nominal rent. These incurable Bundist universalists had dubbed the house ‘Karl-Marx-Hof', in honour of the Austrian socialists and the original Karl-Marx-Hof, headquarters of the Schutzbund and site of the valiant but unsuccessful stand against the onslaught of Fascism in 1934.

On this occasion, as I reached the first-floor landing we were stopped by Motl Nusbaum, known among our party colleagues as Mottele. He had been a part-time librarian at the Bronisław Grosser Library in my city. ‘Ah,' he said, ‘just the man I want to talk to. Could I buy you a cup of coffee?'

How could I not accept? Signalling to Esther that she should continue on without me, I followed Motl back down the staircase. He was a man in his late forties, of slender build with thinning hair. He was known for his decency and fairness, and for being cautious with words.

‘So tell me,' he began without preliminaries the moment we had sat down in the restaurant located in the basement of the building, ‘how was it over there? I don't mean our city, we all know about that; but I'd like to hear from you, my friend Gershon's son, what happened to our party. I know there are many versions, some of them contradicting others, and I can understand that — we don't always see things the way they are but how we want them to be. Each version may have an element of truth as well as an element of fancy.'

‘How should I begin?' I asked myself out loud, while Motl gazed into his coffee, stirring the murky liquid much longer than necessary.

‘Begin at the beginning,' he suggested. ‘That's always a good idea. And keep in mind that what was done can't be undone. One cannot drive a river back into its mouth. What's done can't be undone,' he repeated.

I tried to gather my thoughts. ‘Well, when the Germans marched in, the Bund leadership — like that of the Zionists, Communists and others — canoed into safer waters. Those who couldn't were murdered outside the city, at Radegast.
When the ghetto was established, a few among us appointed themselves as a so-called governing body of the party. Did they do the right thing? Were they politically mature enough to cope with our new reality? Maybe yes and maybe no. I don't think I'm qualified to sit in judgment.'

‘And where was my old friend Gershon?' he asked.

‘Father didn't want to accept any position. He said he was too old, that the situation demanded younger, more daring people.'

‘I see.'

‘But of one thing I'm certain: that Germany's and Austria's workers joined the Nazis. And the Polish Socialist Party, whom we considered our trusted allies, kept an undignified silence in the face of the antisemitic plague that engulfed Poland. This had a devastating effect on our morale and damaged our once influential position among the Jewish communities.'

‘And how was it over there in Italy?' Motl asked. ‘I mean, there are rumours that not everything was as it should be.'

I gave some evasive answer — not because I was afraid but because I didn't want to hurt this good man, with his unbending loyalty to the Bund.

Eventually I would learn from Mendl Blicblau that the management of our Roman collective had written to Jacob Waks — leader of the Bund in Australia and a friend of Arthur Calwell, minister for immigration at the time — to revoke my and Esther's landing permit, on the grounds that I was a renegade. Luckily, Motl Nusbaum was present at that meeting and, in his customary manner, had quietly
but firmly stated: ‘Comrades, I will take responsibility for my friend Gershon's son.'

 

 
Berish
 

He walked in as Motl and I were about to order our second cup of coffee. ‘I'll have it black,' he said to the waitress, making himself at home at our table.

Berish, whom I had not met before, was known among his friends as ‘the grey man', not just because of his grey hair and eyes, and the grey suit he always wore, but because of his sombre demeanour. Berish carried a grudge against his own life. Motl, whom he had befriended in Shanghai during the war years, had told me that Berish had been a noted writer in Warsaw, a member of the prestigious Yiddish Pen Club at Tłomacka 13. At present he was married to a wonderful woman, but was unable to forgive himself for the death of the young wife and baby girl he had left behind in Poland during the war. He thought his happiness was a mistake. ‘Decent people,' Motl had remarked with a deep sigh, ‘find it hard to forgive themselves their own failings.' Every year on his little girl's birthday Berish bought a toy and gave it to a disadvantaged child.

‘And so, what are we discussing here today?' Berish asked, taking a deep puff of the cigarette that was forever attached to his lips. He needed only one match to light his first cigarette in the morning: the rest of the day he spent in a cloud of grey smoke.

‘The past,' said Motl.

‘Forget the past,' came the instant reply. ‘We are facing a new reality. All the noble “isms” perished in the gas chambers. Most of the immigrants to these shores — workers who once walked with socialism — dream of becoming shopkeepers, milkbar owners, fruiterers. To a people who spend their lives in holes, a two-bedroom flat with a private bathroom
is
socialism. The same passion, dear friends, that once carried a worker to the barricades now compels him to buy an automobile.' He took a large sip from his newly-arrived coffee.

‘So do you mean,' I interrupted, ‘that what we once believed in is gone forever?'

Berish inclined his head towards me. ‘To explain in one breath our dream of a just world after what we went through is a philosophical dilemma. I don't want to be a Cassandra, but I suspect that in a community where middle-classness is not just a material but an aesthetic ideal, there is no room for red flags.' He leaned back in his chair, lingered with us for a while. Then he downed what remained of his coffee, inhaled deeply from his cigarette, got up and walked out, leaving behind his hovering nicotine ghost.

‘What a character,' I said to Motl.

‘Yes. A fine human being, with a good pen and a sharp tongue, but always lonely in any crowd. The murder of his first wife and child has never stopped tormenting him.' And Motl went on to relate a recent incident. During one of their regular Saturday-morning strolls through Elwood, the two men had stopped to rest on a park bench not far from the local synagogue when, out of the blue, who should come past but the rabbi, in his black suit, black hat and prayer-shawl
. Berish at once artfully obscured his glowing cigarette between his fingers.