anthology
Serge Liberman
Alan Jacobs (ed)
AT THIS POINT, the reviewer feels duty-bound to tender a confession. On having been previously requested by a certain newspaper to review this book, he declined, thinking it more charitable to keep his views private. When invited again however, this time by ABR in the form of a gauntlet firmly thrown down, he yielded to the challenge, believing that perhaps his first reading had been wrongly unkind and that a second might leaven his earlier reservations.
Enough Already: An Anthology of
Australian-Jewish Writing
Allen & Unwin $17.95pb, 278pp
1 86448 756 9
Substitute 2000 for 1945 and fifty-five years for a week and what one learns is that the Holocaust still remains alive and well and living between the covers of Enough Already, a collection of current Jewish writing compiled by Sydney-sider Alan Jacobs. With all contributors having been born after 1945 -- a defining point for inclusion -- not one has had personal experience of the war. Yet so immense is its shadow cast over them by their survivor parents, through visits to the cities, towns and camps of Europe now largely bereft of Jews or through books and film that, but for a few writers included here, the Holocaust repeatedly rears its head, even when other issues such as the travails of immigration and accommodation to the Australian milieu are recalled, personal identity as fundamentally Australian or Jew is explored or parent-child relationships are recounted.
Even fifth-generation Australian Andrea Goldsmith is not untouched. As a Jew, as she sees herself in her essay 'Only Connect', she has been set apart from other Australians. But even as a Jew, on several counts, she has long been 'the wrong sort of Jew': not at all the 'stereotypical Jew' who is of European background and who has lost family in the war, nor a devotee of Jewish religious Orthodoxy, but rather as the supposed historical Jew who 'inspired guilt, insecurity and fear...[who] required vigilance...required defending.' What these earlier perceptions of herself have led to is the wish to be authenticated as an Australian Jew, one who is at home both in her Australianness and Jewishness, this in turn necessitating the repair of her earlier image and the construction of what she calls 'the only acceptable identity for a Jew in the aftermath of the Holocaust' (my italics). Whereupon, however removed personally and historically she has been from the sites of genocide, yet she is driven to visit Auschwitz and Treblinka and other camps, cities, towns and ghettos to connect in some way with places that have once nurtured her ancestors. The juxtaposition of Holocaust and identity, coupled further with migration and growing up Jewish and/or Australian sets the tone for other ensuing pieces, such as Elisabeth Wynhausen's 'But is he Jewish?', Tobsha Learner's 'My Grandfather's Graves' and especially 'Flying in Silence' by Judy Horacek who, although technically does not belong in this collection, tells of the wholesale destruction of her Jewish paternal grandparents' families in the war.
A return to one's ancestral past that the post-War child can only know by proxy is attended by wariness, inchoate fears of the reality that one may find and by vicarious nostalgia, loss, betrayal and pathos. A pilgrimage comparable to Andrea Goldsmith's is undertaken by Arnold Zable who in his 'You Cannot Imagine' enlivens some of the last of the Mohicans who cling doggedly, as if to a marriage, to the Polish city of Bialystok which had once been his parents' natal home; Ramona Koval in ' Samovar' embarks on a pilgrimage of another sort, one that takes her through time back to wartime Europe across which she holds dialogues with her dead mother and grandmother; while Rosa Safransky's fictionalised 'History in the Kitchen' is a potent narrative (truly fictional/perhaps factual?) of family dynamics poisoned by her father's indelibly scarring experiences of Auschwitz.
While still focused on the more interesting parts of the anthology, one may alight on Sandra Goldbloom's 'Chronicle 1 -- The Massage', a tender portrait of a daughter's love for her ailing father; Alex Skovron's visually vivid, intelligent and cultured poem 'The Violin-maker, the Forest and the Clock' ('Into the thatched night/along the rickety wagon-rutted road/that curved beyond the village/with its fourteenth-century church...'); Doris Brett's slighter but personally felt authentic 'On the Way to the Operating Theatre' and 'After the Operation' emanating from her own encounter with cancer; Ron Elisha's 'Paris', extracts from a projected novel, one telling of a rabbi disgracing himself for laughing at a eulogy over a dead child, the other finding him on top of the Arc de Triomphe; Matthew Karpin's spoof on talkback radio in `The Monitor'; and Bernard Cohen's 'Breitbart, the Strongest Jew'.
To a degree it did. But not -- to his own regret -- to any significant degree.
If no pieces dealing with the Holocaust other than those thus far referred to were here included, then these would indeed have been enough already.
But the Holocaust seems increasingly to be appropriated to less than edifying ends, raising the question: Do works such as these serve the subject or their author? Mark Baker's extract, 'The Fiftieth Gate' from his book of the same name, is a borderline case. As well-intentioned as his offering may be, his imagined reconstruction of the cattle-car transport of a mother and her two daughters to Auschwitz strains for effect, with stock images, emotions and writing that make the end result prosaically commonplace. And if it weren't for such writing as Patrick White's unforgettable sequence telling of the lady from Czernowitz on a comparable transport in Riders in the Chariot or Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, one would be more insistent upon adherence to the dictum that states: 'he who has never been to Treblinka would do well not to write about Treblinka.'
More troubling is Lily Brett whose 'Things Could Be Worse' reveals an unsavoury solipsistic twin obsession by her key protagonist, Lola Bensky -- a ceaseless preoccupation, one, with herself and, two, with the Holocaust, and in that order. But worst of all, to this reviewer at least -- a purist, perhaps, but one who because of the war knew not a single grandparent, sibling, cousin, uncle or aunt -- is the tasteless burlesque on the Holocaust theme by editor Alan Jacobs himself in `The Bar Mitzvah of a Nazi' that tells of a Jewish boy who, caught up by his father's fetish for Nazi memorabilia and ceremony, comes on the day of his Bar Mitzvah to shout from the pulpit 'Pharaoh should have exterminated the Jews!' and 'Another Hitler will come and all of you who missed out the last time will be as lambs to the slaughter!' and finish off with a clicking of heels and a voice-straining 'SIEG HEIL!' In our uncensored days, there is a place for black humour even about the Holocaust -- indeed the death camps themselves were full of it -- but if such crudeness and insensitivity as this falls within readers' tastes -- and the reviewer does acknowledge that some readers have been moved to mirth -- then so be it; no more need be said. Similarly, while pausing on the question of taste in an anthology of supposedly 'healthy', 'mature' and 'rich' contemporary Jewish writing (all of those being Jacobs' terms), if any reader can find any of these in inconsequential pieces such as that of a man seeking to make an art out of photographing all women's vaginas or of shark-gripper and whale-gripper dogs, then Joseph Zaresky's 'Two Codpieces' is for him or her.
The most alienating tussle this reviewer had with the book, however, came at the very outset upon reading its foreword -- here rendered as a somewhat smart alecky Four Words -- both before reading the anthology and after: the foreword came across as a lazy, under-researched, grating and inadequate introduction to a collection that fell far short of its stated promise and conceits.
It is true, as Jacobs writes, that the first collection of Australian Jewish fiction was Nancy Keesing's Shalom published in 1978 (although to accept its truth, one needs to overlook the considerably earlier Yiddish-language anthologies that appeared in 1937, 1942, 1944 and 1967). It is true too that Gael Hammer's Pomegranates followed ten years later in the Bicentenary year 1988. And that, so Jacobs leaves the impression, has been it! Let us then set the record straight and do justice to Robert and Roberta Kalechofsky's Jewish Writing from Down Under -- Australia and New Zealand (Massachusetts 1984), to the second edition of Nancy Keesing's Shalom of 1988 which incorporated five new names, to the two Bicentenary numbers of the Melbourne Chronicle of 1988 edited by Arnold Zable and Yvonne Fein which are collectors' items of Australian Jewish writing and to the December 1996 special issue of Westerly devoted wholly to Jewish literature. Meanwhile, if one were to descend to quibbling, Jacobs' own anthology overall contains relatively little imaginative fiction, with this being in fact its weakest part.