Sunrise West (26 page)

Around October 1949, when the Labor government under Ben Chifley was still in office, we had attended a preelection meeting, organized by the Bund, at the Bialystoker Centre in Robe Street, St Kilda. The speaker was a certain Harry Brown, a strongly-built man with a hefty face and full red smacking lips that bespoke a ferocious appetite. He offered the audience a grim picture of the future.

‘If that Fascist, Menzies, ousts the Labor Party,' he had thundered, ‘I am convinced that he will rewrite the Constitution of this country, curtail civil liberties, build more prisons... Robert Gordon Menzies,' shouted Brown, ‘visited Nazi Germany in the thirties. He has no stomach for the free spirit of the Eureka Stockade.' (This to me was a mysterious allusion at the time.) ‘From behind his bushy brows, Menzies keeps eyeing Germany's law and order of a decade ago, its
resoluteness, its industrial might. That is the kind of society in which he dreams of involving us all.'

Esther had turned white as a ghost, a soundless howl distorting her features. As for me, I recalled the expression on my mother's face when the motorcycles of the German vanguard rumbled through our street. Though I had been told that Brown was a political Cassandra, a master of the histrionic art and a purveyor of mad fantasies, I had not reckoned on the effect he would produce. His dark prophecies had jolted Esther back to the Warsaw ghetto, Majdanek, Belsen and Dachau, and had transported me back, also, to those foggy daybreaks when I stood in deep snow, envying the safe tomorrow of the concrete lamp-post that bore daily witness to my Jewish guilt.

I may not have understood everything Chifley was saying, but I had loved his warm heartfelt voice. The fact that my prime minister was the son of an engine-driver augmented his charisma in my eyes. I would never forget the photos of his drawn, disenchanted face which appeared in the daily press after his election defeat in December 1949. As for the victor, I looked upon his pompous smiling visage as a personal affront.

Not long afterwards our newly-elected leader made his first attempt to outlaw the Communist Party of Australia. He intended to confiscate its property, prohibit party members from employment by the Commonwealth, and prosecute groups and individuals deemed to be Communist. I couldn't help thinking of the anti-Communist paranoia that was sweeping America, and I began to fear that Harry Brown's predictions would come true. However,
the High Court declared the prime minister's ambitions unconstitutional.

I came from an anti-Communist home. All his life my father had been a staunch supporter of the philosophy of the Labour Party in Britain: as a Fabian socialist, he believed not in revolution but in social and political evolution, an evolution that one day would lead our ever-bleeding world to a state of peace and human dignity. So when Menzies attempted to ban the Communists, I felt compelled — despite a certain unease — to support our newly-elected PM's intentions. Yet discussing the issue with Esther over dinner one evening, I remembered the story of the German pastor, Martin Niemöller, and his immortal statement:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out —

because I was not a communist;

Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out —

because I was not a socialist;

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out —

because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —

because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me —

and there was no one left to speak out for me.

As a socialist, a member of a trade union and an incurable Jew, I was guilty on
three
counts!

I thought also of what Ben Chifley had said in one of his speeches: ‘Never is liberty more easily lost than when we think we are defending it.'

Menzies, his plan frustrated by the High Court, decided to take his plea directly to the Australian people. A referen-dum to amend the Constitution so as to give the government special new powers was held in September 1951. It was defeated.

A few weeks later, on my way home from work, I was drawn towards a crowd of people gathered in front of the Town Hall. The speaker, a member of the clothing union, delivered a flaming, abusive speech against the elected government and its leader. The police stood by calmly to keep the peace. No one was intimidated, no one was arrested, no one was dragged off to a prison or a camp. As soon as the demonstration was over, the nearby pubs came to life with laughter and good cheer.

 

 
Sage
 

It was at The Windjammer, a café I frequented in Swanston Street, that I first met Ivon. He was tallish, with a face furrowed like a Greek Stoic's, but his eyes radiated warmth and wisdom. He approached me with an outstretched hand one day. ‘My name is Ivon Sage,' he said. ‘We have crossed paths almost every day. Would you care to join me for lunch?' And overnight a friendship was born which would last until the day of Ivon's death.

That friendship might perhaps seem unlikely. He and I had very different histories; we came from different planets, as it were. Ivon was fourteen years my senior, an eloquently spoken, well-read man, a captain in the Australian army, and
a Past Master of his Masonic Lodge. I was the stuttering camp survivor, a refugee immigrant with a scant education. What attracted me to him was that, from the first, I never had to explain myself. No clarifications were needed — he and I knew intuitively that despite our vastly dissimilar pasts we were united by a mysterious understanding.

Ivon Sage was not overly religious, but profoundly pious. It was not the candle but its flame that he worshipped. As we became closer he encouraged me to read (not that I needed any encouragement), yet whenever he was giving advice he always included himself: ‘We should read,' he would say, mindful that a single unnecessary word might offend. Reading, he argued, was a university of its own. ‘As it is written,
Not to increase one's knowledge is to decrease it
.'

Ivon was a fortress of reason, and a fount of wonderful sayings. On one occasion he observed, ‘The heart of a wise question is the question within the question,' and proceeded to explain this with an anecdote, about a man who was determined to discover what lay at the core of an onion. He peeled away one layer, and then another, and another after that, and then one more, and the next, and the next again, but when he finally reached what he thought must be the very essence of the onion, he found that its core was nothing else than — the smallest and last layer.'

Another time, Ivon the idiosyncratic rationalist — who believed that only the inexplicable is capable of defeating our empty rationalism — told me the following story. ‘The Japanese stood on our doorstep. I was stationed in the
outback, where the heat can ignite the soil, where the very gum-trees pant for air. A couple of days before Yom Kippur I asked my commanding officer to grant me twenty-four hours' leave. I explained the holiness of the forthcoming day; he understood and said yes. In passing I asked if there were any other Jews in our outfit. Yes, there was one, but he was gravely ill; according to the medic he had just a couple of days to live. “In that case, sir,” I said, “he has more reason to pray than anyone else.”

‘Four soldiers helped to place my co-religionist on the cushioned floor of a truck and off we went. I drove down to a nearby river, where, amid the stillness of the sunburnt bush, we set up camp. Once evening had fallen we began to send our prayers up to heaven. The next day we continued praying. By the time we arrived back at the base it was pitch-black. When they came with a stretcher to carry my compatriot back to his quarters, I said goodbye and wished him well. And guess what: I met the man only a week ago — with a young, beautiful, laughing wife hanging on his arm! So you see,' Ivon finished with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, ‘the prayer obviously must have helped.'

Another thing I recall about Ivon from those years is his reaction when I confessed to writing poetry, at that time only in my mother tongue, of course. ‘I don't understand Yiddish,' he replied. ‘But there is always music in poetry, and
that
I can certainly grasp, so please, read me some of your poetry and then try to translate it. I'm sure you can do that.' I hesitated, but tempted by the need to show off I began with a stanza from a poem titled ‘The Violin':

Play, my violin,

My everlasting dread,

That blazing summer's

Death.

Although I translated as best I could, I doubted if Ivon had grasped my meaning in these lines, which lamented the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto. But after a tense silence, when he remarked, ‘There are sorrows that can outlive all our days,' I knew that my friend was with me.

‘I am quite aware,' he went on, ‘that people who have lived through days defiled by hatred and brutality must dwell in two realms at once. There is a constant revisiting of the past, if only to reaffirm one's own being.' He leaned back and sighed. ‘I know that each survivor carries his own private hell on his back. But I can see that you need to talk about it. I would encourage you to write in English as well. Not only will English give you a chance to reach a much wider world. Perhaps more importantly, it will enable you to keep singing, in the language of your adopted land, your people's interrupted song.'

 

 
Norman's Secret
 

Among the characters I met at the Kadimah during the early 1950s was Nahum Kafewicz, known during his Melbourne years as Norman. I used to read his social-political articles and commentaries in the
Jewish News
. It was only much later that I learnt Norman's remarkable story from his daughter.

One of seven children, he was born in 1909 in Stok, a pinhead township on the map of prewar Poland. His father, a profoundly religious man, was a tailor and so too were Nahum's three uncles, his father's brothers. Nahum quickly picked up the trade and at fourteen arrived in Warsaw, where he joined a workshop catering to the military. In no time he became their most sought-after sartorial specialist, a star tailor to the Polish army's elite.