The Fig Tree (18 page)

There are several versions of what happened. The full story may never be known; many documents were lost in the earthquake of 1953. This appears to be the most common variation: when the Germans occupied Zakynthos there was a Jewish community of 283 people. The island's Nazi governor ordered Lukas Karrer, the mayor of Zakynthos, to provide him with a list of the island's Jews. Karrer approached Bishop Chrysostomos for advice. The bishop advised Karrer to burn the list, and arranged for the governor to be bribed.

In mid-1944, Nazi officials ordered Karrer to assemble all Jews within twenty-four hours or face execution. Again the mayor consulted the bishop who told him to burn the list. Karrer alerted the Jews of Zakynthos and urged them to flee before the night was over.

When the Nazis approached Bishop Chrysostomos for the list, he signed his own name 283 times. So one story goes. ‘Here are your Jews,' the bishop is reported to have said. ‘If you choose to deport the Jews of Zakynthos, you must also take me and I will share their fate.'

In the meantime, the Jews stole out from their quarters into the hinterlands where they hid in barns or caves or the homes of Greek friends. The following day the streets were deserted, their homes empty. The people of Zakynthos knew what had happened, but not one person betrayed them. Lukas Karrer remained a wanted man. He fled the island by caique under cover of night.

Victor has accomplished his task. He has moved from one end of the country to the other. He has recorded the fate of an entire community completely annihilated, and another entirely saved. He recalls the words of Elie Wiesel: ‘There are stories that are meant to be transmitted. Not to tell them, would be to betray them.' This, surely, is one such tale.

We leave Zakynthos towards nightfall. Alexander stands beside me on the upper deck. We watch the Venetian fortress that stands above the town disappear. Alexander is now a seasoned traveller. He moves about the boat without fear. We lean on the rails as we sail into the night. Lights appear and vanish on passing isles. We have come to love this suspension of time, the intervals between landfalls. We are being conveyed into the dark. The sea is calm, the boat's engines a restrained hum.

Having stood that afternoon at the gate of the former synagogue, the question arises: why is it that in one place people welcome strangers, while in others they stand by and condone the murder of neighbours? Perhaps it has something to do with an ancient practice, encapsulated in the term
filoxenia
.

Filoxenia
, ‘the love of strangers', is the sacred bond between host and guest. It is the practice of welcoming the outsider, the passing seafarer. In the old
kafeneion
of Stavros, on Ithaca, which lies to the north of Zakynthos, I once asked Panayotis if he had heard of the practice. Panayotis is in his eighties and walks with a limp. His limbs are beginning to tremble, but his mind is fully alert. He is one of the regulars who gather in the
kafeneion
to exchange gossip and while away time.

‘
Filoxenia
is a wonderful custom,' Panayotis replied. ‘First the stranger is welcomed, bathed and fed. Only then do you ask for his name and his business. This is how Homer describes it in
The Odyssey.
On his long journey back to Ithaca, Odysseus was welcomed many times. In those days people believed that a stranger could be a god in disguise.'

Panayotis speaks with precision and an ironic smile. ‘It is a beautiful idea,' he says, ‘but hard to put into practice. Yes, we Greeks know
filoxenia
, but at the same time we may not talk to a neighbour for ten years because of a petty dispute.'

Perhaps there are more mundane concerns that govern the practice. Islanders live in a fluid world. They experience a constant flow of strangers. Especially here, in the Ionian Sea, where boats sail in and out of port day and night.

The islanders are not naive. They know also that strangers can become enemies. The history of the Ionian islands can be read as a succession of invasions. People were often forced to retreat to the heights, where they built fortified villages with lookouts and stone walls. Odysseus himself, and his crew, plundered the islands for their spoils. But islanders also know that, with just an abrupt change in the winds, they too can become strangers.

On Zakynthos, it seems,
filoxenia
endures. Perhaps it is embedded in the island's history. There is a journal, written by an English sailor, Master Thomas Dallam, in which he records his welcome on Zakynthos in 1599. He and his two companions are wary of the villagers. But they are warmly greeted, and invited into homes where they are wined and fed.

As I put the final touches to this story, I come across a more recent episode of
filoxenia
on Zakynthos. In the first week of November 2001, a Turkish-flagged boat, the
Brenier
, carrying 714 Iraqi Kurds and Afghan refugees, broke down in the Ionian Sea. Abandoned by its crew, the ship was rescued by the Greek coast guard.

The
Brenier
was towed to Zakynthos Town. As the crowded boat moved towards the port, the townsfolk lined the waterfront and cheered. The local baker was waiting with 700 sandwiches. Others residents brought food, clothes and blankets. Pregnant women and babies were ferried to hospital, or housed in hotels.

Observers were stunned by this outpouring of empathy. It convinced wary Greek officials to treat the new arrivals humanely. A number of families who arrived on the
Brenier
have since been provided a home on the island.

When I heard of this incident I recalled my night journeys on the Ionian Sea. My lasting impression of Zakynthos is of a glow of lights approaching in the dark. I think of our treatment of strangers, here in Australia, in recent years. At the time the
Brenier
was being towed into Zakynthos, off the north-west coast of Australia, asylum seekers were being turned back out to sea.

Perhaps we need to venture out and become seafarers again. We need to see the ropes being untied and flung on board. We need to cast off and watch the gap grow between water and earth. To drift awhile, beyond sight of all land. And then return, and see the continent anew. To see that it is an island after all. We need to approach with nothing but the clothes on our back, and hope that awaiting us is not one-eyed Cyclops, ready to hurl us into the sea, but people of good heart. Perhaps then, we will recall that our own forebears were strangers who approached these alien shores by boat.

The Treasure

I first saw the village idiot on a winter's night in 1958. I was eleven years old. ‘We are going to the Yiddish
teater
,' father had announced in a tone of voice that suggested he was speaking of something extraordinary, something sacred.

We walked from home, via the back lane, to Fenwick Street. It was a ten-minute stroll from our house to the theatre. We turned right into Lygon Street, and approached a two-storey building called the Kadimah. Lights blazed from its arched windows, the upstairs balcony and through the foyer doors. Directly opposite, enclosed behind a fence of cast-iron palings, interspersed with cypress and pines, stood the Melbourne General Cemetery.

A flight of stone steps led to the portico. The foyer was crowded with perfumed women and men wrapped in gabardine overcoats. The air choked with the smell of cigar smoke. And they talked, everybody at once, so it seemed, in a loud, unabashed, fiery Yiddish that sprinkled the foyer with greetings and gossip. The women glittered with sequined bodices and rouged lips. Occasionally, an acquaintance stooped over to pat me on the head or pinch me on the cheeks. I spun about in a whirl of excited adults who had become like children adrift in a funfair.

The repeated ringing of the warning bell summoned us to our seats. The talking subsided gradually with the dimming of the lights. The hall lapsed into darkness. A spotlight descended upon four musicians seated in front of the stage, to the right, beneath a glowing red exit sign. Piano, clarinet, violin and drums: a medley of melodies enveloped the audience. They were taken up as a humming, a singing under the breath.

The melodies evoked another place, another time: of horse-drawn wagons trundling over mist-laden paths, of village weddings and paupers' banquets, of cobbled lanes and tree-lined avenues that led to the comfort of a mother's lullabies. I felt both entranced and safe, seated among my elders in a hall simmering with longing.

The curtain rose to reveal a transparent inner curtain, a veil behind which could be seen the dimly lit living room of a
shtetl
cottage. To the rear, a large window opened out onto a backdrop of crooked dwellings backed by fields within which stood a cemetery, a jumble of stones leaning askew at acute angles. A woman sat by a table dozing, her head resting upon her arms. The actor was Mrs Blusztein, my best friend's mother. She lived five minutes away, in Fenwick Street. Whenever I visited, she would serve cups of tea and plates piled high with poppy-seed biscuits and honey cake.

While Mrs Blusztein dozed, a narrator's voice intoned the prologue. Napoleon Bonaparte, it was rumoured, had buried a treasure near the old cemetery as he retreated from Moscow through the river valleys of White Russia. Napoleon himself, no less, could now be seen emerging upon the stage. Despite the emperor's uniform, I recognised Meier Ceprow the tailor, the father of another friend.

Napoleon walked in front of the veil, hand tucked inside his jacket. He walked slowly, to the beat of a drum, followed by two aides carrying a casket. The trio disappeared into the wings. They reappeared moments later behind the window and slowly lowered the casket, between the stones, into the cemetery grounds.

The veil lifted. The living room of the gravedigger's hovel erupted into life. Over the next two hours a succession of
shtetl
dwellers—wealthy merchants and paupers, philanthropists, beggars, big shots and small fry—beat a path to the door, all drawn by the rumour that the gravedigger's son, the village idiot, knew the whereabouts of Napoleon's treasure.

The townsfolk were obsessed. They vied for the attention of the village idiot. Their longing inflated into hysteria. Like souls possessed they filed about the dimming stage in a winding procession, led by the idiot grasping a lantern. They followed him outside the house, towards the graveyard, chanting: ‘
Kumt
alle, lomir zukhen. Kumt alle, lomir zukhen
.' ‘Come everyone, let us search. Come everyone, let us search.' The townsfolk reemerged in the cemetery where they hunted among the tombstones in a frenzy of need and greed. And, in so doing, they desecrated the graves of the dead.

It was the cemetery that loomed into view as we emerged from the Kadimah. It was approaching midnight. The spirits of the dead, father whispered, were stirring, arising from their decaying tombs, making their way in white shrouds among the cypresses and vacated graves as they did every night. ‘They are possessed souls,' he said, ‘trying to find a way back home.'

As we retreated from Lygon Street into Fenwick Street, I imagined the shrouded corpses bent over in silent prayer, led by a village idiot clasping a lantern. And all remained in darkness, except for a solitary flame in the hands of a fool.

The actors who portrayed the idiot and his sister were Moshe Potashinski and Mila Waislitz. At that time, I knew nothing of their past. All I recall is the intensity of their acting, their frenetic energy, their manic eyes. It is only in recent years that I have been able to resurrect their extraordinary tale.

Moshe Potashinski was born in the Polish town of Kionz Vielke in 1903. His love of theatre was nurtured in the city of Bendzin, where he first appeared on stage in 1919, in a concert of Hebrew songs. In 1921, he founded a Yiddish theatre club. He was overjoyed when he heard that a drama academy was about to open its doors, in Warsaw, with courses taught by renowned Yiddish theatre directors, Mikhl Weichert and David Herman.

Potashinski was admitted to the studio in 1924. He made his debut the following year in a Warsaw theatre ensemble. He toured Poland with fellow graduates of the drama studio. On his return to Warsaw, he joined the newly formed
kleynkunst
theatre, Azazel.
Kleynkunst
, which literally means ‘small art', combined the work of actors, singers and writers in a tapestry of monologues and skits, satires and songs, and excerpts from the Yiddish classics, held together by a master of ceremonies with a gift for stand-up comedy and small talk.

Yiddish cabaret was to become Moshe's specialty. In 1930, he acted with the
kleynkunst
company Ararat. Its leading light was the poet Moshe Broderson. A fast-talking wit who could produce rhyming couplets on the run, he became one of Potashinski's mentors. He was the cabaret king. He had an entourage of hangers-on who sat with him in the cafes of Lodz and Warsaw, and doted on his every word.

In 1932, Moshe joined the Vilna Troupe and fell in love with an eighteen-year-old actor called Mila Waislitz. Mila was born into the Yiddish theatre. She spent a good deal of her childhood travelling with her actor parents, Yankev and Jochevet Waislitz, veteran members of the Vilna Troupe.

The troupe was formed in 1916 by an ensemble of amateurs in German-occupied Vilna. They first met in a dilapidated circus building. The unheated building was so cold that the actors applied their grease paint only after warming it by electric bulbs. So legend has it.

The Vilna Troupe was driven by a desire to produce finely crafted plays. The performers adopted the Stanislawski method and paid attention to every nuance of the written word. They drew on an audience that hungered after quality theatre. The ensemble toured the provinces and arrived in Warsaw in 1917, where they were hailed as the pioneers of a new era on the Yiddish stage. They embarked on tours of Polish towns where they were greeted by dignitaries, showered with flowers, followed by coteries of admirers.

In 1920 a
dybbuk
entered into the Vilna Troupe. A
dybbuk
is a lost soul in search of the body of a living being to possess. The play,
The Dybbuk
, was written by Sholem Anski, a poet, chain-smoker and revolutionary who sang the praises of peasant life. From 1912 to 1914, he led an ethnographic expedition through the Yiddish hamlets of the Ukraine. The team collected songs and melodies, proverbs, sacred objects, legends and tales. Anski was obsessed with preserving the folklore of a vanishing world. His play was based upon the motifs he retrieved as he journeyed from
shtetl
to
shtetl
.