Sunrise West (18 page)

‘I don't know. Ever since I lost my home I've been haunted by a story — you may have heard it too — about the fate of the man who, according to Chinese legend, was condemned by a king to exile in a foreign land, where he must live as a stranger among the local inhabitants and forget his past, his language, even his name. When he died he was buried not as himself but as someone else.'

‘I understand the meaning of your fable, Anton, but that is not your situation. Woe to the man who has
no
home to go to. For what is freedom if there is no one to await your coming? Even so, one cannot afford the luxury of disenchantment. Long faces are the privilege of the well-to-do.'

A day or two before Passover we docked at Fremantle. We were welcomed by David Abzac, representing the Jewish welfare society in Melbourne. He was tallish and effervescent, and seemed an optimistic man of enormous vitality and benign wit. He had brought on board a supply of
matzos
and kosher wine, and when evening fell our shipboard
Jewish community, festively attired, sat down to celebrate our everlasting Exodus.

Anton, seated beside me, was brimming with chatter. ‘Look, look,' he cried ardently, ‘we are witnessing an event that should be engraved with golden letters in the annals of mankind. Jews are sitting around a table celebrating Passover, attended upon by an Egyptian crew, descendants of our former masters and pursuers.' He turned to me. ‘I don't mean to blaspheme,' he muttered into my ear, ‘but I must share a thought with you. Do you believe it all really happened, or are we clinging to a cosy fairytale?'

‘Did
what
really happen?' I asked.

‘The Exodus. Moses. Everything!'

‘Anton, please, it's Passover,' said Esther, who had tuned in to our private exchange.

‘And it will never
stop
being Passover,' our shipfriend answered bitterly, ‘not to our dying days.' He was probably seeing, in the candles burning on our table, the fires that had engulfed his mother's home.

That night an almost visible heat hung over our sleeping quarters and I couldn't settle. I walked out on deck to catch a breath of fresh air and there stood Anton Rakow, gazing into the depths of the sea. He greeted me with a dark smile and I embraced him. We leant against the railing in silence for a while. Then, like some homeless wind, he murmured: ‘
And they turned my land into a heap of dung, and set the houses aflame, and the days were hot like the desert sand, and the nights a mount of ice.'

‘Let's go, Anton,' I urged him. ‘It's late, very late. It'll be sunrise soon.'

 

 
Melbourne
 

I had been seasick right throughout the voyage, but when they told me that the most stormy, most perilous stretch of sea lay between Fremantle and Melbourne, I felt as if a ton of bricks had been dumped on my heart. The prospect of having my body entombed beneath the waves was not too appealing. Esther endeavoured to borrow some money so that we could fly from Perth to Melbourne, but her efforts came to nothing. And so, as in the past, we left things to fate. To our pleasant surprise, the voyage towards our final port of call was enjoyable and peaceful.

More than ever before, passengers gathered on the deck, talking about the weather and other trivia, and of course discussing a subject very painful to Esther and me: Family. ‘I'm going to see my sister, I haven't seen her for six years,' a short man with a trembling voice shouted happily. ‘And also my uncle, my mother's brother — he went to Australia in 1939, on the brink of war.' The man beside him rejoiced at his companion's good fortune. A young woman nearby remarked, ‘We'll have a roof over our heads at last, and a warm bed.'

‘And what about us, whom are
we
going to see?' Esther asked me, her face clouded. ‘Who will be there to welcome
us
?'

No one, I admitted to myself. No one, not here, and not back there.

The excitement and the chaos of emotions among those on board grew by the minute as we sailed through the heads and entered Port Phillip Bay. When we touched
berth at Station Pier, and people leaned dangerously over the ship's side, and names were shouted and yells of recognition rang out in the air, I was struck again by a dismal thought: We, Esther and I, are on the wrong ship; we don't belong, we're just two peripheral superfluous individuals. Then Esther was pushing her way through the throng, and suddenly I heard her hysterical cry:

‘Quick, Jacob, come quick! Someone is calling out your name!'

I elbowed my way past a couple who were leaping up and down, waving ecstatically, and I peered into the crowd of faces on the ramp below. And there he stood, my little school friend ‘Mendele' — Mendl Blicblau.

‘Where is your luggage?' he shouted. I held up our one suitcase above the railing. ‘Is that all?' Quickly I lowered the suitcase down to him on a rope. We barely had time to say goodbye to Anton, who was continuing on to Sydney.

And a few minutes later, there we stood, shaking hands, squeezing each other's shoulders.

‘I've been informed,' said Mendl, who never minced his words, ‘that you are entitled to a place in one of our Jewish welfare society's houses. But you have a choice,' he continued. ‘You could come to us. I've prepared a bed for you in our flat, and temporary lodgings for Esther with your father's friend Nusbaum, your librarian before the war. He lives upstairs from us.'

Not wanting to burden anybody, we decided on the Jewish welfare's facilities.

Esther had not met Mendl before and didn't know that his generous heart was easily masked by a frugality with
words; that this was a man who adhered strongly to the economy of language. When we arrived at our temporary lodgings she could scarcely contain her tears of gratitude. ‘There's no need to cry,' Mendl assured her, ‘this is a free country. Tonight you're eating with us,' he added succinctly. ‘I'll come for you at six-thirty.'

There were candles of welcome burning on the Blicblaus' table as we entered their flat that evening. They had once been a family of seven. Four had survived: Mendl, his older brother Lipman, and two sisters, Rózia and Tobcia. No questions needed to be asked. They knew, and so did we.

And all at once it dawned on me that my friend Mendl and his siblings had already managed to replant, in remotest Melbourne, the warmth and decency of their parents' home; a home where family life was not just an idea but a living thing.

Very few words were spent around the table, and yet there was so much said. The six of us, torn inside out, unable to return to the land of our birth, shared the knowledge that only four years ago we had been shortlisted to die — that our being here on this night was but a miscalculation in one of Hitler's equations.

I soon discovered how Mendl had learnt of our arrival. He always read the published lists of newcomers, Tobcia explained, and whenever he spotted a name linked to his past, he was there to greet, to offer help, to clasp a hand.

Late that night, travelling back to our lodgings at the Jewish welfare house in Camberwell, my friend quietly slipped a ten-pound note into my pocket. It represented his weekly wages. ‘Please don't say anything,' he whispered.
‘You'll repay me once you start earning money. You have come to a golden land.'

At daybreak the next morning I walked out to an amazingly peaceful world soaked in sun. In all my life I had never seen such lush greenery! I looked about me, took in the quiet, orderly street. A bed of brilliant yellow daisies against a fence caught my eye. Simultaneously, as if in a dream, they seemed to be reflecting my new golden country, my old yellow patch.

 

 
Snow on my Windowsill
 

Three days after we arrived Esther and I both had jobs in clothing factories — where, naturally, the bosses and some of the employees spoke Yiddish. We left the lodgings we had shared with another couple at the welfare society's house and rented a room in a cottage at 68 Brunswick Road, Brunswick, from a pretty, red-headed divorcee with three beautiful children. The eldest, Kay, immediately began to teach us English songs.

We had come from Italy, where the price of a tram-fare was 500 lire, so when Mrs Francis told us that our rent would be 20 shillings a week, I promptly replied: ‘I'll give you 25.'

The summer of 1948 was oppressively hot. For days on end, temperatures climbed well past 100 degrees Fahren-heit (40°C). I remember how Esther's high heels punctured the pavements, and a hilarious radio newsreader announcing, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, another scorcher today. It will be 110 by noon, but I'll give it to you for 99.'

Air-conditioning at the time was rare enough to be a dream, especially in clothing factories. This made our working day longer than it was. I sat next to a jesting prewar immigrant, Morris, a marvellous fellow who kept everybody's spirits up. When I walked into our workroom on a Monday morning, he would say: ‘Chin up, man! Tomorrow evening is practically Wednesday, on Wednesday evening it's already Thursday, and Friday is payday. If Adam had a life like this, he'd never have touched the apple.' On one occasion he confided: ‘My grandfather, who lost his eyesight to old age, wore a heavy pair of glasses without lenses. If you asked him why, he'd answer, “Well, it's better than nothing, isn't it!”'

Morris's humour may have been balmy but it couldn't lessen the heat — which, however, never dampened his wit. When I asked him if there was some sign that would herald the coming of cooler weather, Morris had a ready response: ‘Absolutely,' he said. ‘As soon as the papers tell you it's forbidden to heat your room, you'll know winter is on its way.'

But when Morris buried his eyes in his work, when he let his needle fly like a kite attached to white yarn, he entered another reality. I would often hear him humming an old Yiddish folksong that carried the scent of tragedy. For Morris dwelt in a sad and murky past. He had come to Australia from Poland in August 1939 — Germany had already made up her mind how to deal with the land of his birth. He left behind a young wife and an infant girl, whose photos he carried in the pocket of his shirt. I realized that all his jesting was a façade, or perhaps a shield not only against collapse but to protect his heartache from intruders.
At tea-break, when his joking tongue had run dry, he would divert his moist black eyes from mine in order to forestall any attempt at conversation — as if to plead,
Let it go: permit me to suffer alone.