ARNOLD ZABLE ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney, and today is February 10th, 2017. I am here in Melbourne with Arnold Zable, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

ARNOLD ZABLE: Yes, you have my permission.

CW:Great. So first of all, can you tell me -- where did your family come from?

AZ:Well, my parents come from Białystok and the surrounding shtetlach [small towns in Eastern Europe with Jewish communities]. My father was actually born in Białystok. My mother was born in a shtetl called Horodok or Gródek, which is about an hour or so from Białystok. And also, my four grandparents came from 1:00Gródek, Orlya, and Brańsk, which are all within an hour's drive of Białystok. And I guess there was a lot of migration from those shtetlach to Białystok, because that's where the work was. It was an industrial city; you could get work in weaving factories, for example -- textile factories. So, my mother's family migrated, basically, to Białystok when she was a young girl. That's where they met.

CW:And what was the work in the family?

AZ:Well, from my father's side -- and I record all of this in my book, "Jewels and Ashes," which is an account of my journey back to Poland to track down my ancestry. And on my father's side, my grandfather, Bishke Zabludowski, was an iconic character in Białystok, because he came to Białystok in 1903 to work as 2:00a weaver, but then he became a newspaper seller, and he stood by the town clock for forty years -- until 1943. Even then, he was putting up placards with news, and he was selling "Haynt," he'd say, "Haynt, Moment, Express" -- you know, the newspapers of the day. And he was like the center of the town's gossip. Everyone knew Bishke. He was the newsman. He was the town crier -- that's another way of looking at him. Revolutions and wars came and went, pogroms came and went, and he was still there. Fascists came, lefties came -- you name it, they all came, and Bishke was there selling his newspapers. Until, of course, the horror of the Second World War. And he perished in an incident in the Białystok Ghetto. And Sheine Liberman was his support -- his wife was his great support -- and in 3:00bringing up the kids. And on my mother's side, Reb Aron Yankev Probutski, after whom I'm named, he worked in the textile factories. And he was a Slonimer khosid [member of the Slonimer Hasidic sect] -- he was the son of a rebbe. And Chane Esther Probutski, his wife -- she was like the matriarch of the family. She really -- she did the work. She kept it all together. He'd go off on the High Holidays with a flask of whiskey in his back pocket probably. And he was well known as a -- to visit the Slonimer rebbe. (laughs) It wasn't a bad setup for a guy. And off they'd go. And he was well known for -- like, whenever he'd go to the little shtibl [small Hasidic house of prayer] that they had hidden in Białystok -- the Slonimer shtibl, they'd say, Reb Arn, gib undz a nign -- Give us a song. And I think my mum inherited a bit of that, because she became a 4:00singer of Yiddish song. But I think what's really interesting in all of this is that all four grandparents were from religious families, but both my father and mother broke away and became Bundists.

CW:Did they tell you about that process?

AZ:Oh, yeah. I mean, it was part of the times. They were drawn into the zeitgeist, and many young people were beginning to rebel and to question their parents' values and their religion. And also, I think it was a response to the situation. People felt that they should start defending their communities and they should start -- and the Bund, of course, has got an extraordinary history, being part of the overall, I guess, Russian -- it was particularly Russian, 5:00originally -- movement that included the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, all of them. And then they broke away and enunciated their twin beliefs in both socialism and Yiddishkayt and in the Yiddish language as the culture of the people. So, they were very immersed in all of that. They just loved it. And it became a part of them. My father had an older brother, Zacha or Zachariah, and I describe him in "Jewels and Ashes." And he went off to fight in the Russian Revolution with a theatrical troupe. And there's a long story there. I actually reconnected with his family just a couple of years ago after -- what was it? -- sixty, seventy years of not knowing what had happened to them. I went to St. Petersburg, where the family still lives, and that's quite an extraordinary story in itself. So, they were moving into the left-wing movements of one kind or another. But for my parents, it was really the Bund that became their 6:00extended family in many ways.

CW:Can you just briefly describe -- explain what the Bund is for people who might not know?

AZ:Well, the Bund was a Jewish workers' party, and they were part of the RSDLP in the late 1890s. That was the root body that included the Narodniks and the populists and the groups that were to become the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. And they were both together and beginning to fight as factions, and fighting for the affections of supporters. And I think really, if you want a shorthand summary of what the Bund was about, I think first of all, it was in 1901 -- four years after they were founded -- that they adopted this ideal of doikayt [Bundist concept of "hereness"] -- of expressing who you are, where you are, 7:00wherever that is. So, it's really a non-Zionist view. It's not the dream of going somewhere, then setting up a land. Let's express who we are wherever we are. And to do this, for them, the major vehicle -- since religion wasn't an option anymore -- the major vehicle was the Yiddish language. So, they expressed their ideals of social justice and their ideals of community and community protection and working in with the general socialist workers' movement -- they worked it in also with an ideal of cultural autonomy, a degree of cultural autonomy. And they saw Yiddish as the language of the people and as the vehicle -- of the expression of the common folk, of the masses. The way I look at it now is that they were ahead of their times. The Second World War seemed like the end 8:00of the Bund in some ways, but I think they were ahead of their times. I think they're the idealists of the future. And what I mean by that is that they had a form of multiculturalism. And I think this is what we're facing now: do we have the nation-state based on just one race, one culture, or do we have these glorious multicultural societies like we are evolving in Australia and so-called New World countries? Which is what I feel very passionate about. And the Bund way of looking at things, I think, sits very easily in that. So, I don't see it an anachronism, and I think it's a mistake to see it that way. And I feel that with this kind of revival of Yiddish -- or one could call it a kind of a revival; it's a complex phenomenon. I think the Bund now is starting to have a kind of -- well, people are beginning to say, Oh, there's something here, 9:00perhaps, to explore. I'm even sensing it here -- that, you know, we've hung in there, the Bund has managed to survive here, and we've hung in there, and I think we now are there with something that has got renewed value and interest. I think the other thing that I should say is, I had the gift of being brought up by Bundists -- and also Yiddishists, in a broader -- not only Bundists, you know, here in Melbourne. And what I got from them -- they were great mentors. They were people that -- you know, some of whom had fought in the resistance. They brought over their culture. They brought over an extraordinary -- their "songlines" is the way we say it here sometimes. And they were great mentors. They embodied something. And what they embodied was both looking within and 10:00looking without. Okay, so you are active within your community, but at the same time, you're active in the overall community in which you belong. So, there's no accident that amongst those of us that were brought up in this environment with these ideals, that we've gone on and become -- you know, we're the refugee advocates and part of the broader struggle for a just and multicultural society, as well as remaining active within the community.

CW:So, can you just tell me when and where you were born?

AZ:I was born in Wellington, New Zealand. There's a whole story there of how my mother came here in the '30s. She had a sister here. It's story I tell in 11:00"Jewels and Ashes," but to cut that story short, she was going to be deported from Australia for various reasons, and some of the reasons I'm very passionate about -- refugee issues now. She was going to be deported. And it would have been -- she married my father the day before she left Poland, and the plan was to bring him over. And when she couldn't bring him over and when they threatened her with deportation, she was going to go to back to Poland. Which, as it turned out, probably would have been certain death, because everyone else in her family was murdered. And similarly with my father's family -- they lost everyone, bar this family in Russia, and they didn't fare too well either. So, she fought to stay in Australia. And there are these Yiddish letters -- correspondence between my mother and my father -- that form the basis of my understanding of what went 12:00on. And they're extraordinary. I mean, they're love letters -- people missing each other -- they were apart for three and a half years. But also, you see how -- you know, the delicate balance in people's lives, because she was saying things like, Look, I've had enough. I'd rather be over there with you. I'd rather be back with my comrades. I miss the May Day marches. I miss our wonderful -- because they had something beautiful there. Despite the hardships, despite the persecution, despite the tensions, they had something beautiful there, and no one could have foreseen how horrific it was going to become. Although my mother could see the writing on the wall; it's one of the reasons she came here, and she was quite prescient, I think. But luckily, at the last moment, a number of people in New Zealand interceded and sponsored her to come to New Zealand, and that's where she came. And then, she managed to get my 13:00father out just in time. And she never forgave herself for not being -- I mean, she tried so hard to get everyone else out, but she never forgave herself for not being able to bring the rest of the family. And it weighed heavily on her. In a deep, deep psychological sense, it weighed heavily on her for the rest of her life. But so, two of us -- my older brother and I -- were born in New Zealand postwar, and my younger brother was born in Melbourne. She returned to Melbourne because she had that sister here. And she also returned because there was a far richer Yiddish-speaking community. The Bund was not in Wellington, New Zealand; there was no Bund and those things drew her back here. So, we ended up coming back here.

CW:And how old were you?

AZ:I was just a baby. This was in the late '40s.

CW:And could you describe the svive [neighborhood] that you grew up in?

AZ:Well, the svive that I grew up in -- I write about it a lot. Even now; not all of my work, but there's a fair bit of work where -- novels and stories that are set in Carlton. And Carlton is an inner Melbourne suburb. Carlton and Brunswick -- it's in the northern suburbs. They were typical inner-city -- I mean, our equivalent to the Lower East Side or London's East End, I guess, where many newcomers -- from Italy, in our case, Greece, Yugoslavia, and, of course, Poland and Russia -- settled. Because first of all, there was rental property when there was a housing shortage, and secondly, there was work. There were factories there. But thirdly and just as importantly -- even more importantly, I 15:00think, as it turned out -- there was an active community -- very active. You name it. There is a street, Drummond Street, where you had the Yiddish Peretz Shule [secular Yiddish school] that I attended -- so on a Wednesday evening and on a Sunday morning, we studied Yiddish -- a secular school -- and then within the same block, you had the Talmud Torah for those who wanted to send their kids to get a religious education, and then you had the Bialik School, which was for kids whose parents wanted them to learn Hebrew. And they were the forerunners of what became the day school movement. Personally, I liked what I call the Carlton model. For me, I feel that -- look, it's wonderful -- Sholem Aleichem is a wonderful achievement, but nevertheless, I tend to feel that I was fortunate to 16:00go to the local state school during the week and then to have this rich other life -- which was the Peretz Shule, which was SKIF, where we met every Sunday -- went off every year to camps for up to a month where we had this other world introduced to us. And then, there was the Kadimah, which is where we're now sitting. But the Kadimah moved with the demographics, so it was founded in 1911 and was in the city, and then by 1915 it had moved to Carlton, and finally, in 1933, it moved into a building that the community had built. I call it the secular synagogue -- you know, it's got these sort of arched windows. And these were factory workers, a lot of them, and they put together their money and they commissioned an architect and they built this incredible place, which also had a 17:00stage -- a Yiddish stage -- you know, a stage for Yiddish theater. In fact, when it was opened in 1933, they premiered "Grine Felder [Green Fields]," a play by Hirschbein, I think it was. And can you imagine coming in and the stage curtain opens and there's a pastoral scene from Poland? And for these guys that were coming in as first-generation immigrants, it was extraordinary. And that became the home of Yiddish culture and Yiddish theater for the next thirty-five years. It was in 1968 that they finally shifted to here, where they bought the theater -- and these buildings, where they are now. And interestingly enough, where we're sitting now, the library -- in a way, the library has always been the heart of it, right? So, if you ask me about my childhood, the library plays a 18:00role, too. So, it began as a library in 1911 in a place with English, Yiddish, Hebrew books -- almost a multilingual library. And it was like a traveling library. You know, we're people of the book, so at the center was a library. Peretz Hirschbein came to Australia with his -- Esther Shumiatsher, I think -- a Yiddish poetess -- a very romantic couple. He came here in 1921, I think it was, and he couldn't believe that there was this space at the ends of the earth. We have an expression, "ek velt [at the end of the world]" -- you know, "ek velt," here we are, this small group -- because it was still relatively small then -- of Yiddish speakers who have a little stage as it was then, back in 1921. So, that stage, that building, later on, in the '50s, became pretty much the center of my existence. And as kids, we had bit parts in the Yiddish theater. And we would go to the Yiddish theater. There were two explosions in Yiddish theater in 19:00Australia. One was -- it began in Carlton in 1908, which is an extraordinary story in itself, but it really took off in the late 1930s, when Yankev Waislitz and Rokhl Holzer, two greats of the Yiddish theater from Poland, got stuck in Melbourne -- one on a world tour, the other one was visiting a relative, but they got stuck. The war broke out in the early 1940s. That stage in the Kadimah -- well, they united all the little theater groups into one big theater, the David Herman Theatre. As the Old World was burning, they were putting on seasons of seven, eight different plays per year -- for a relatively small population, as it still was then -- of Yiddish plays. And plays -- everything from Freud's 20:00"Theories of Dreams" [sic], I think it was, or a two-hander with Rokhl Holzer and Waislitz, all the way through to the Yiddish theater classics. I mean, Waislitz staged "The Dybbuk," the greatest of Yiddish plays, I think you can safely say, in 1938 at the Princess Theatre with an audience of fifteen hundred, many of them non-Jews, and it took both the Jewish community and the general community by storm. And Princess Theatre was one of our big theaters in the center of the city. So, every now and then, they'd move out of the Kadimah stage and go beyond that to a bigger venue. But then the next big explosion was the 1950s and '60s, the late '40s, when you had -- coming from Poland -- Holocaust survivors, and Melbourne became a large center of survivors. It's almost like a 21:00joke. People say -- well, it's a bitter, black, ironic joke -- Why did you come to Melbourne? They says, Well, we looked at the map and we wanted to get as far away from where we experienced those horrors as we could, so we came to Melbourne. (laughs) But actually, the reason they came here rather than Sydney, to some extent, is because in Sydney you have a more predominance of Hungarian and German Jews. There's Yiddish speakers, but it's not as strong as Melbourne. It's the classical chain migration thing. So, there was already something here, and they were attracted to that. Then, Yiddish theater had its heyday -- you know, an audience of six thousands. And so, in the '50s and '60s, going to the Yiddish theater on a Saturday night was -- that was it, you know? That was the ultimate.

CW:Can you describe the scene a little bit?

AZ:Yeah. It's something that I've described many times and I've written about. I 22:00lived on Canning Street. Canning Street is four blocks' walk -- a ten-minute walk -- from the Kadimah. And I've often described this -- how you go down -- there was a back lane, so we'd leave by the back door and go down a back lane. And these were very tiny houses, single-fronted Victorian terraces. They were workers' cottages. Now they're worth a fortune -- they've been gentrified -- but back then, they were pretty run-down. So, you'd walk down the back lane and you'd begin the four-block walk along Fenwick Street. And so, that whole walk, you were walking through the heart of Yiddish land. So, you'd reach Amess Street, and that's where Goldberg, the baker, had his house. And then you'd reach Rathdowne Street, and you had the shopping center, which -- many of those shops, for some reason -- a chain migration within chain migration reason -- were run by khelemer -- you know, by people from the city of fools. So, you 23:00know, you had Glickman, and then you had the baker, and you had the kosher butchers, and you had various other shops there that were run by Jews. You had Gottlieb, the grocer, who used to have a horse and cart -- a horse called Molly. And the way I describe it is, he was a heyse komunist [ardent communist], right? So, he'd pull up at the local pub, which was on the corner there, where there was a horse trough, so the horse would have his water and he'd duck in for a drink, and when he came out, he was so happy he'd be on the horse -- you know, on the cart singing "The Internationale" as he wove his way through the streets doing deliveries. Anyway. So, then we move on and then you hit Drummond Street, which I've already described -- a few blocks away was the custom-built Yiddish school that was built in the 1950s. And as a very young kid, I remember making 24:00the walk -- the whole school did the walk from the Kadimah, where the Yiddish school had been centered from the time it was founded in the late 1930s. We made this walk to Drummond Street on a festive occasion and the school was there. So, that's Drummond Street. And then all the way there were houses -- oh, there was Bennie Gottheiner's house, there was Shaya Blumstein's house -- and then you'd finally hit Lygon Street, where you've got the cemetery. We used to call it the dead center of Melbourne. And you go right -- you do this little walk that took you to -- within fifty meters, there it was, all lit up -- a citadel of culture, you know, this secular synagogue. And you'd walk up these steps and into the foyer. And people were talking nine to the dozen -- Yiddish -- this Yiddish was being screamed out. People were just so happy to see each other. Vos makht ir [How's it going]? Vi geyen di gesheftn [How's business]? And us kids were running around like we were at a fun fair. And the warning bell would go up 25:00again and again and again, and no one wanted to go in -- they wanted to keep their discussion going. Finally, you'd go into this hall, which seated several hundred people. And I can just still see it. In the corner there, under the red "exit" sign, there was a little band -- piano, drums, and accordion, sometimes violin -- Miriam Rochlin, who was the village pianist, seated at the piano. And they'd begin a medley of Old World melodies. And then, the stage would open -- and it would reveal sometimes an amazing shtetl scene or whatever -- although there were also contemporary dramas that were coming over from America that were staged and all kinds of theater was being put on. Translations of "The Death of a Salesman" -- so all kinds of -- it was a vast repertoire. But when they had 26:00the music, there was something extra special. The kind of image that's left over for me -- sitting between my parents and listening to the whole hall go into a kind of reverie -- you know, they were sort of singing along -- they were elsewhere. They were somewhere else. I mean, the contrast to that -- and it was a stark contrast and it was a dramatic contrast -- was April 19th, when the community got together at that time in the Melbourne Town Hall, which was about a fifteen-minute, twenty-minute train ride from Carlton, in the center of the city, to commemorate the Holocaust. And sometimes in the Kadimah, too, you had those commemorations. And of course, in the '50s, the grief was so recent that quite often you had this sense of -- say, radiating from your own parents -- a 27:00kind of a mass weeping going on. It was light and dark, light and shadow. And it was so simple to who we were. It defined us so strongly, even though -- and I think this has to be said -- we also had a very, very strong -- we were strongly Aussie at the same time. I mean, it was quite a phenomenon. We were playing footie and cricket. What I loved about that time -- it's a sort of obsession -- it's one of the threads in my writing -- is that there was an interesting kind of synergy that occurred between us and all the working-class Australian families that -- we lived side by side -- who'd lived there for generations. And there were conflicts, but there also were amazing harmonies. In my latest book, 28:00"The Fighter," I describe some of those harmonies, where some of those Aussie parents and mothers saw that there were kids who were hurting because they had parents who had been very disturbed by the Holocaust, and there was an open door for them. It's an amazing period. And to some extent, because of the gentrification -- because the community became more affluent, basically -- I think some of that was lost, that sort of magic. And so, yeah, I think that gives a picture of what it was like back then.

CW:I'd like to talk about your parents a little bit. Can we start with your mother? Can you first tell me her name?

AZ:Well, her name is Odessa Probutski -- her maiden name -- and sometimes Hadassah, we called her. And she was born in Gródek, as I said; came to 29:00Białystok when she was eight or nine, I think. There's a wonderful moment for me in "Jewels and Ashes" -- I went to Gródek on a journey. And I tell the story of how, during the First World War, when she was about eight or nine years old, all of the women got together 'cause Białystok was occupied by the Germans -- and they got on a horse and cart and they traveled back to Horodok. And on the way, the wagon turned over in the snow and kids were running around in the snow. And my mum still remembers her mum yelling, "Loyf, kinderlekh, loyf [Run, children, run]!" And then, a Polish peasant helped them out and righted the wagon and they trundled into the Gródek. And they survived as almost like a family of women -- going out into the forest, scavenging. She remembers it as a 30:00wonderful time. But anyways, so she finally -- she became a singer of Yiddish song at community functions, so that when I grew up, she was constantly singing Yiddish songs around the house, almost to the point of madness. It was her release. And sometimes she'd sing from hours on end as she was doing the chores around the house. There was an edge to it, though. As I said, I don't think she ever forgave herself for what happened, and the loss of her parents hit her deeply; far more deeply than my dad. But there, in Poland -- she loved living in Białystok and she loved the Yiddish language and Yiddishkayt. And her expression was through Yiddish song, and her repertoire was vast. She just knew Gebirtig or Manger songs -- you know, your old standards -- and songs I'd never 31:00heard. In fact, when she was in her sixties, she did something amazing. She had become -- uncharacteristic of her -- because after the war, in a way, she became silent. She withdrew from the community to some degree. There was an edge of mental illness there, which I had to grow up with, as well. And she was a very compelling person, but there was that edge, and she could sometimes go into another space -- like, almost like psychic rages. But she withdrew to some extent, but she expressed herself in song nevertheless. And when she was in her sixties and the kids were grown up, she walked that walk I described, but this time to Drummond Street. Right next door to the Yiddish school there, there was 32:00a block of flats in which one of them there lived Miriam Rochlin. Now Miriam Rochlin, I've already mentioned, (laughs) she was this -- they called her the spinster in those days, but she was a strong, fiery woman who'd been in an all-women's jazz band when she was young, growing up in Adelaide. And she used to speak Yiddish with a very broad Australian accent. And she used to conduct the school choir. "Kinderlakh, zay shtil [Children, be quiet]!" It was such a broad Aussie accent. And she had all the gossip. But my mum went there, and that was the first of a number of occasions where she'd go there and they'd rehearse. And she produced a little record of four Yiddish songs. And it's the most precious possession I've got, or arguably the most precious possession. And the four songs will sum up so much themselves. One of them was "Der naketer yugnt 33:00fun der blotes [The naked youth from the swamps]." It's an unusual -- that's an Itzik Fefer song. Itzik Fefer, as you know, went off and became a gung-ho Stalinist at one stage, and was murdered for all those troubles in that pogrom in the '50s. But this was his amazing song about this nakete yugnt -- this youth from the swamps who was an example of work and muscle and strength. And then, there was this viglid [lullaby] -- beautiful viglid that she used to sing when we were kids. It could have been Sholem Aleichem's viglid, actually. And then there was a thing called the "Tfile," a prayer by -- it was a translation of a Russian song that was originally written by Lermontov, a Russian writer. And the fourth song was "Shpil tsigayner [Play, Romani person]." I think it was a Manger 34:00song. So, even what she chose covered quite a spectrum. And it was an unusual repertoire. In a way, it's not the standards. It's more an expression, I think, of who she was. Because she was also a person of great intelligence. And I think the story behind the story is -- and sometimes, a story which has been overlooked -- maybe now Yiddish feminists have gotten onto it -- of someone who, you know, when she was twelve, thirteen, she had to leave school to become a seamstress. And the teacher actually went to my parents' house and said, "Please, she's a very intelligent woman. You should do everything you can to allow her to have an education." And they said, No, no, no. It can't be done. We need her to work. So, I think she felt very thwarted -- very, very suppressed. And that was part of who she was. And I keep on coming back to creating 35:00characters like that. She was central to my life. A very complex woman. I mean, for me as a kid, my choice was, you know, either to run -- so in a novel I wrote about that time, "Scraps of Heaven," you have Josh, the main character -- he's running into the streets. And I loved the streets, and I loved running the streets with my mates from many different backgrounds. But then, I was always attracted back to this incredible energy -- so you have these gypsy black eyes and you kind of -- and that Yiddish song, you know -- even with that edge, there was something amazing going on. And at night, she'd be sitting at the kitchen table, reading the Yiddish newspapers. And then, there was my father. And my father was very different. My father was a --

CW:Before you talk about him, can you describe what your mother looked like?

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

AZ:My mother -- she had black hair. Really black hair. And black eyes. I've written about this -- she used to use this thing called Restoria cream, and she swore it kept her hair black. (laughs) So, her hair was black right up to fairly -- at least well into her fifties.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

AZ:She was very well dressed. She made her own clothes. She was a very good -- it's interesting, they used to call the women seamstresses, but actually, they were tailors and they had the skills of tailors. She made this amazing leather coat for my father in Poland. It was always there -- this glorious leather coat that she had put together herself. And so, she dressed very well. And she had a good sense of fashion. But it was restrained; it was never showy. She never wore 37:00pearls and things like that. I mean, we were not well-off. We struggled financially -- very much so. Unusually, in a way. I mean, everyone struggled financially when they first came, but most worked their way up, and my father -- his heart wasn't in making a living. We'll come to that in a moment. And so, that was always a part of the tension in the house -- that we weren't making a living. And so, in a way, within the house, she was less conscious of her dress. It was more when she went out there. She was very, very strong in a certain way, and fragile in another -- so that's part of her appearance -- had that within her. When she was strong, you could feel this kind of power emanating from her. Someone who -- for example, if there was any trouble in the street -- I remember 38:00once someone was calling us dirty Jews or whatever -- the other side of it -- the conflict side of things -- I remember once she just grabbed me and we marched down to this person's house and we marched up the steps and she knocked on the door. And I was very embarrassed about it. And she said, "Your child is" -- you know, she'd go and tell them, "You don't do this." So, she had that -- I remember that as part of her persona. But the other side was this -- the other extreme was this great fragility, this falling into almost paranoid rants and raves about Hitler and all the rest of it -- so, very, very complex. And, of course, she got more weight -- weightier -- as she grew older and lost a little bit of that youthful beauty she had. Yeah, I think --

CW:And what was she like on the stage?

AZ:Well, I never, ever saw her perform on the stage, because she totally and 39:00utterly gave up singing in that sense. There were occa-- when I was very young, and I've got a very vague memory of it -- her one sister that was in Melbourne, who had come before her -- she had a son and two daughters, and the two daughters were much older than me, and they were born in the '30s, and they -- both Australian-born, and they married Buchenwald boys. And very, very happy marriages, too, they were -- young, wild Buchenwald boys. And I remember -- so I was about four or five or six or so when I went to their weddings, and my mum was asked to sing. I think that's the only time I vaguely remember her doing public performances. She sang then. But basically, she withdrew from all of it. 40:00I think she felt very vulnerable when she left the house. There was a kind of a -- you know, she withdrew, became kind of a -- there's a word for it -- what is it? Anyway.

CW:Agoraphobic?

AZ:Yeah, a bit agoraphobic. On the other hand, she seemed to deal very well with the local primary school and the teachers there. She had another side to her that -- 'cause she came prewar, I think she was more culturally adept than my father at first. She was more experienced; she had gone ahead. I mean, it's the reversal of the more classic story of the male going ahead -- she went ahead. She had great power because of that. She had great strength and power. And I think it affected the relationship, the fact that she'd gone ahead. It's very 41:00interesting, Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem, "Kaddish" -- a very famous poem. And when I read "Kaddish," I see my mum. And you know that poem and what it's about. So, in a way, I think he describes her to some extent.

CW:And so, turning to your father, let's just start with what he looked like.

AZ:Well, they were both -- I've got a son who's towering over me; I towered over them. (laughs) They were, in the old measure, about five-foot tall. And he was blue-eyed. So, my mum was black eyes; he was blue-eyed. And back in Poland, he was a bit of a romantic poet. And he used to be a bit of a lad, I think. And he came from a better-off family back in Białystok. I mean, my mother lived in the khanaykes -- that was the slum area of Białystok. And even when I returned in 42:001986, it was still there. I returned years later with my son -- twenty years later -- and a lot of it is gone, but those old romantic houses that they lived in -- because my father was a little bit better-off. But as a young man, he became a Yiddish poet and a Bundist. But he was never gung-ho politically. My mother, I think, was more idealistic, and I think she was therefore far more affected when everything was destroyed. She felt a sense of betrayal. My father wasn't like that at all. He often told me he was very happy living in New Zealand. He could have lived the rest of his life there. He loved the sea and the beauty of the place. He was very self-contained. My memory of him -- abiding 43:00memory -- and we became close -- but when he came to Melbourne, they had to pay -- shlisl-gelt, they called it -- key money -- just to get a rented house from a relative who had moved out. It was a huge amount. That was the money they had saved up in New Zealand when they ran a small business, my mum making clothes. They were very well-off there. And they fell in status greatly coming here. It was terrible. He bought a business that didn't work well. First, he worked in the factories, and then he bought a market business. He became a marketnik. So, he worked on the Victoria Market, as a lot of Jewish people did. And he used to sell leftover socks and stockings -- seconds, they were called -- from the factories and hosiery mills of Brunswick, many of which were run by Jews -- by the Ginters, who were Yiddish actors, too. And he'd go there and he'd get the 44:00goods and sell them. And his heart was never in it. And they made just enough to put food on the table. And so, basically, what he did, really, was -- and then so he'd go off every morning at 5:00 a.m. with his tshemodan -- his little suitcase -- that same four-block walk to Lygon Street, to the tram, and take a tram to the Victoria Market. I worked in the Victoria Market, but never for my father -- for two reasons: one, he never paid me; and secondly, he hated what he was doing. People would come along and they'd look at these stockings and they'd say, How much? And he'd say, "Three shillings." And they'd say, Oh, you can get it for two and six at Coles. He'd say, "Well, why don't you go to Coles?" It wasn't for him. I worked for Eddie O'Sullivan, a drunken Irishman who sold nuts. He put his arms around me one day and he says, "Arnold, you, too, can become a professional nutter." (laughs) He was a character. But my father -- at home, he 45:00would withdraw to the front room, the bedroom, and I remember, throughout my childhood, he would be bent over like a Hasidic scholar -- but over Yiddish poets. His great solace was Yiddish poetry. And he worshiped -- his very favorite poet was Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, who, of course, was the voice of the Lower East Side. And he loved his work. He's got a wonderful poem, "An alte bukh mit lider [An old book of poems]." And I think it's his best poem. And it's a poem about this book he's carried with him. I've donated most of his books to this library, but I've kept this book, where he pressed flowers from Białystok. You can still see them between the pages. He got it in 1919 -- it's going to be a century old soon. It was the collected poems of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern. And he 46:00used to perform them. Before the war, he used to deklamir [recite]. And it's interesting that many years later -- he never did that after the war, but many years later, we had a gathering for him, and we put together his poems. And I'll come to that in a moment, 'cause there was a revival for him as a Yiddish poet. But he got up and he began reciting -- there's a famous Halpern poem, "Der gasn poyker" -- "The Street Drummer," I think it is -- and he was another man. He was amazing. He was performing this, and I saw another guise. But what happened to him is that he sort of took a fifty-year detour -- forty-year detour -- or more -- and at the age of seventy, he retired. We packed up his business -- it could all go in back of a Kombi van -- took it home, and he was depressed for a couple 47:00of months. And then, he started doing two things. One was gardening, this little plot in the backyard. By that stage, a house in Carlton was rising in value, and we managed to acquire it -- that's a story in itself. And he was happy to stay in Carlton. But they were one of the last Jews in Carlton. Excuse this digression, but in 1991, "Jewels and Ashes" came out -- my first book. And my mum had died a year earlier, but he came along to a talk -- well, a year or two later -- a year later, he came to a talk I gave at the local library about the history of Jews in Carlton. And it was a great night. We played Yiddish music -- the audience came from Carlton residents, and we played Chava Alberstein's wonderful Yiddish record. And then, we were walking home through Curtain Square 48:00-- this park -- and he said, "You know, the malekh-hamovis [angel of death] has forgotten there are still Jews living in Carlton." (laughs) And I said, "Dad, why did you say that?" And he died a couple of months later, in the kitchen -- in the house, with his boots on, as he wanted. But putting that aside -- so the first thing he started to do is garden, and then the second thing was return to writing Yiddish poetry. And he began to write and publish Yiddish poetry again in the final phase of his life. And I think the happiest years were those final sixteen years. My mum had mellowed a bit. He was actually -- he was able to move into the kitchen. He loved that. And making special latkes -- he made these potato cakes. And he said the recipe came from Sheine Liberman, his beautiful mum, who died in such tragic circumstances. But he used to put in raisins. He said, "I've always got to put in something of my own." Everything for him was a 49:00creative act. And so, in the last sixteen years of his life, he became something else for me. He had been a quiet, withdrawn man -- in a way, beaten. He was sort of beaten -- beaten by his wife's rage, beaten by what had happened. But he had a spark -- he always still had that spark -- his youthful spark in those blue eyes. He was a bit of a larrikin. Whatever he professed politically, I think in spirit he was an anarchist. Like, he lived his own way; he had his own way. And I think he was quite stubborn in that. He followed his own path. And that path came to fruition in those last sixteen years. And the poems he was writing are very, very interesting. There's one that's studied in the year-twelve Yiddish 50:00curriculums -- it's called "A frayndlekher hant [A friendly hand]," which we then put to music. With one of my books, it's called "The Fig Tree," and we had a companion CD where we have Greek, Italian, Jewish, and Australian performers singing songs of the migrant experience basically. And Freydi Mrocki's Klezmania, that wonderful klezmer band -- David Krycer just put it to music and it became part of their repertoire. And then, "A frayndlekher hant" -- it's about a guy who's walking through -- very alienated -- through the streets of probably Carlton, and he feels alien in this land. Beautiful -- I wish I had it here to recite it. And he just feels -- you know, he's just a lost person in 51:00this strange land. And then, all of a sudden, he sees an old friend. And he sticks out his hand -- a frayndlekher hant -- from the Old World. And he says in that moment, the skies were no longer gray, and suddenly it became home -- a place of home. And they were beautiful poems -- very reflective. Like "D'alte bukh mit lider." They were published in the few outlets we had back then still for Yiddish: the "Melbourne Chronicle" that was published by the Kadimah with a Yiddish section, and the "Yidishe nayes," until it was finally caved in. And so, yeah, he was flying. Those final years, he was flying. And he was going faster and faster. He wrote one poem -- "For Each Step" -- all in Yiddish: "For each step, make it count two." And one day -- I had a key to the house, and so I came 52:00there one day and I went in and he wasn't there, but on the desk was a Yiddish poem -- a work in progress. And it was called, "A Beautiful Day" -- "A Beautiful Autumn Day." (laughs) And he was halfway through the poem, and he just wrote, "It's such a beautiful day; why write about it?" You know, "I'm going out." And I found him -- I knew where to find him. He was in that local park -- square -- enjoying the day. I think he really -- he came to himself in those final years. I think he came full circle to what he was like as a young man in Białystok, where he was at home, where he was a romantic poet and a man about town -- all that sort of thing. So, he got there in the end. And the most remarkable thing -- you couldn't script this, really -- is that he was writing his last Yiddish 53:00poem on the morning -- I think the day he died. Because when he died, he collapsed in the kitchen of that house -- uncannily, mirroring a scene that begins "Jewels and Ashes." And that's a whole other story there. Because all in this scene -- I think this is very emblematic of many other things, if we're talking about Yiddish and alter heym [the Old Country] and the New World -- I describe how, as a kid, my father loved this big chestnut tree in Białystok. Bands used to play under it; kids used to grab the chestnuts and play marbles with it, and the parents would tell them to get those cursed chestnuts out of the house. And a funny story he told me then -- he's a little guy, like I said -- he climbs onto the kitchen table -- so he was this big, right? And he's 54:00describing this tree, right? He says -- so, you know, stretched out to the heavens -- "It was such an amazing tree" -- and the kitchen table started trembling, and I said, "Be careful! I don't want to see an uprooted chestnut tree on the kitchen floor." He actually -- I found him there -- where he would have -- it's almost uncanny. But in the final day, he wrote his final Yiddish poem. Now, it was a work in progress. And more or less, the first line said, "The world will get on very well, thank you very much, without me being here." (laughs) And then, there's a little moment -- a little line -- where he says, "I feel like a little leaf about to fall into eternity" -- "into eybikeyt [eternity], into the eybikeyt." So, there was something amazing about how it panned out for him. It really was. Yeah. It was a great gift for me, 'cause I'm getting into that territory now. (laughs) So, whenever I falter, I hear my father say, "For every step, make it worth two." So, yeah, he got there in the 55:00end, somehow.

CW:Were there particular times or places where he would write, as you remember?

AZ:Yeah. He wrote in that front room. He had a little -- it was a makeshift table -- it was the dressing table, and it would double up for him. He was very eccentric, so -- in his older age, he was always very inventive. He had all these little contraptions. He never spent. They were living off the pension by that stage. But he had a board of Masonite, which he'd take out from under the bed and put it on the -- (laughs) -- and so he transformed the dresser into a table, and he'd use that. He wouldn't buy something special for it. But I'm not that different. My office is in the boot of my car. (laughs) And I've brought my bag in 'cause it's got my computer. I write all over town. But he had that space 56:00in the front room. And basically, that's where it was. That's where he had his sort of makeshift -- his little library. There was a small cupboard in the dining room that was magic for us as a kid, 'cause hidden in there were these Yiddish books. We used to take them out on a Saturday morning when they were off at the market, working at the market. And there were these -- it was like the "Yugnt-veker" -- the annual collections of the "Yugnt-veker" -- they're here somewhere. The "Literarishe bleter," a very famous literary magazine of high quality. But also, their equivalent to "Life" magazine -- I forget what it was called now -- pictorial. And we used to pore over them. It was spooky, too, because they'd have contests of the shenste yidishe kind in poyln [the most 57:00beautiful Jewish child in Poland] -- the shenste yidishe froy in poyln [the most beautiful Jewish woman in Poland] -- you know, they'd have these pages. And as kids, we understood that most of these people had perished. It was so haunting looking at them. And every now and then, there were sexy stories too. It was interesting. In Yiddish, they used to have these kind of romances. (laughs) So, I got into them as a teenager. But they also had these letters that my parents had written to each other in that three and a half years. And that later on became a treasure for me, 'cause it enabled me to reconstruct that period when they were apart. So, there was that, and just those few books he valued in the front. And he used to make his own little contraptions -- like, he'd hang up plastic bags to put the rubbish in. He had to do it his own way. And fortunately by then, my mum was, you know, Okay, let him do it. 'Cause he was cooking for 58:00her, finally. She couldn't -- you know, she was getting very frail. But the front room was always his retreat. And there came a point where my mum left the front room and made the big trek to the back room. So, they lived at opposite ends of the house, and they met in the kitchen. I think they found a good way to live together in their old age. So, that became his space. We were very fortunate -- and we didn't realize it then, 'cause we moved into what was literally a rat-infested house -- a run-down house with an absentee landlord ironically living in New Zealand, right -- but we lived in a prince of a street, Canning Street. 'Cause Canning Street has got a median strip. And on this median strip, there are poplars and palms. And so, you can look through the front window, you're looking at a palm tree. My father couldn't get over the fact that 59:00he came to Australia -- to Melbourne -- and there were palm trees that he could see through the front window. And down the road was this Curtain Square, kind of a magic place for us as kids. Because Carlton was designed in the 1850s by a chap called Hoddle, who was a town surveyor who came from England, and they had the garden city kind of plan, with broad streets -- Drummond and Canning had those median strips and village squares. So as it turned out, Carlton became -- he lived long enough to be able to appreciate Carlton. And in a way, it's symbolized by trees in "Jewels and Ashes." And I didn't realize it until I finished the book, or even a couple of years later, that it begins with this chestnut tree, but actually ends with these Moreton Bay figs. In the local park, there were two rows of Moreton Bay figs. Do you know the Moreton Bay fig? They 60:00are an astonishing tree. They are an amazing tree. They're huge. And they have got non-edible figs. And they've got massive root systems that you can actually see -- they're exposed. They're a glorious tree. They come from Queensland. And there are two rows -- six abreast, on either side of a park -- that form a huge canopy. And my father used to love to go and sit on a bench beneath those trees. That's where we used to have our conversations. Because when I came back from Poland after that journey -- of months -- I went for months in 1986, alone, even though I had just gotten married, I knew I had to do this thing, this pilgrimage, alone. I went and traveled Trans-Siberian and made my way, finally, to those borderlands. When I returned, a new conversation opened up, because I 61:00knew the maps of their youth, of their childhood. So, you know, I'd say, "Shenkevitshe Avenue," and my dada would say, "Oh, yeah. That's where we played billiards and [Russian - 01:01:09], the White Russian, sold ice cream, and that's where we had Turkish delight in the Macedonian quarters. So, a lot of that book -- even though it's written as a journey -- a lot of the scenes came out of those conversations. So, we'd sit under those Moreton Bay figs. And he said to me that even back in the '50s, when things were the darkest -- except for those wonderful nights in Yiddish theater -- the community did come to the rescue. And the community did come to the rescue -- the Bund and the family, the SKIF family that they sent me to was for me a release, too, from what was going on in the house -- the darker moments. But he said that that became his shrine, to go and sit beneath the Moreton Bay figs. And I didn't know that at night, he'd sometimes go there and then just sit there and find comfort. And it says a 62:00lot about my father, too, but it says a lot about the fact that he did finally -- he found roots there, deep roots there. Once again, going back to the Bund ideal -- the Bund ideal of looking in and out -- he expressed it, and my mum expressed it, too. Another thing about my parents is, they were always outward. They were very engaged with local politics, the politics of the Labor Party. My mum used to listen to -- she learned English partly by listening to the deliberations of Parliament House. They still had that political consciousness. And they engaged with the neighborhood -- they were a part of both the Jewish and the non-Jewish neighborhood that they lived in. And so, they weren't withdrawn, shtetl people. But they were, in a way, carrying with them the ideal 63:00they brought with them from Poland. So yeah, he lived long enough to -- (laughs) -- you know, have deep roots in this country.

CW:And what does Yiddish mean in your life?

AZ:Well, it's very big. Sometimes, it's bigger than I realize. I'm very active as a writer and part of the Australian literary community, and feel very comfortable in that. And as an activist, I've been involved for many years with refugee activism -- in particular, human rights advocacy. And so, I've moved a lot within many cultures in this city, and have written about it -- written a lot about the Arabic newcomers from Iraq and Iran. And I feel comfortable -- I feel very comfortable in those communities. There's so much ignorance and so 64:00much -- it's interesting, it's the prejudice that's based on not knowing. The less people know and engage, the more prejudiced they are. So, a lot of it, I think, comes out of my Bund upbringing, but my Carlton upbringing, too, where we had that open -- just by necessity, where we had that street life, and we connected in the local schoolyard. So, one part of me has carried, I think, that model into my life. And so, I've been very, very connected, and especially as a columnist, I've written about it, and as an activist, being very, very involved. At the moment, I'm very involved with what's happening on Manus Island in Nauru, and it's a big part of my life -- continues to be. And as a writer, I've written about other communities. But Yiddish has just always been a part of me. And first of all, I'm fortunate to be reasonably fluent in the Yiddish language. As 65:00a kid, I was a Yiddish bookworm. So, we're coming now to the library -- the story I wanted to tell you about the Kadimah library. We had an old patriarch -- I call him an old patriarch -- Yiddish patriarch -- called Yoysef Giligitsh. Now Giligitsh was the headmaster of the Peretz Shule for many, many years. It was founded by Melech Ravitch. He was in Australia in the '30s. That's a whole other story. And his nephew just died -- the famous painter, Yosl Bergner. And his sister lives in Melbourne -- ninety-nine years old, and still a lot of clarity. And we engage a lot. I'm writing a lot about them via these conversations I have -- never with her directly -- she never wants to be seen by men -- she's got the -- too old -- but we have these telephone conversations where she's bringing old 66:00water to life. So, as a kid, I was immersed in Yiddish literature. I loved it. I was reading Sholem Aleichem when I was about nine, ten, eleven. And there was this guy, Giligitsh, who was the headmaster of the Yiddish school, and he saw my passion for Yiddish literature. And there was a cupboard of Yiddish books at the Yiddish school, and he gave me the books. And I read all of them. So, unusually, he said, "Look, I'll introduce you to the Yiddish Kadimah library, and you can become a member." So, I was about eleven or twelve when I became a member of the Yiddish library. The Yiddish library is a whole other world. So, you had this Kadimah building, which -- I don't know if you've seen it yet, but we've got to take you down there, the center of Yiddish life there. I took Shane Baker down there, and we actually met ghosts. That's another story -- we actually got in there and saw a few ghosts. I write fiction, you see, so anyway, we saw ghosts. 67:00But we did see ghosts -- we saw the last remnants of the old stage. So, you had this building, and right next door, they had this little cottage -- single-fronted cottage. And that's where they housed the library. So, when I was a kid, you would go at night -- that same four-block walk, down the back lane and those four blocks -- and you'd go in there, and there were these guys bent over newspapers that came from Russia and Israel and New York, and it was full of these old Yiddish books and had the smell of the books. And I began to borrow books from that library. And when you stepped in there, you stepped into another world. And it was a great comfort for those people, too. So, that was a big part of my childhood. And then I was very active in SKIF.

CW:Did you have any favorite authors growing up?

AZ:Yes, I did. I loved Sholem Aleichem. And when I first began reading him, I couldn't understand a lot of it. So, I had this sort of -- like "Di royte mentshelekh fun kasrilevke [The little red people from Kasrilevke]" -- I saw this in this very kind of fantastical way, right? (laughs) I was reading Dickens as a kid, it was the same with that. I didn't quite understand; I just loved the worlds. I would disappear into those worlds, I immersed myself in those worlds -- which I think is why I can write about those worlds, and why they were so familiar when I did go to Poland, finally. And so, Sholem Aleichem was one. I liked Itzik Manger. From the moment I began reading him, I was very attracted to his extraordinary, surreal, romantic world that he created. Through my father, I 69:00got to appreciate poets like Moyshe-Leyb Halpern at a reasonably early age. I loved, of course, Itzik Bashevis Singer, although he I was reading in the English. But I loved, in particular, his older brother's works. I thought his older brother was, in some ways, a greater writer. So I remember reading, you know, "Di mishpokhe [The family]" --

CW:"Karnovski."

AZ:-- "Karnovski," and the "Brider Ashkenazi [Brothers Ashkenazi]" -- and especially "Yoshke Kalb [sic]," which was also staged as a play, so I saw it as a play as a kid. And in Bund, in particular, we got to know the Yiddish authors, too. They were part of the experience. I remember in 1955 -- you know, when we were very young -- SKIF staged an extraordinary concert. And it was 70:00extraordinary. That was the height of when we had people like Romek Mokotow, who died recently in his nineties. It's a pity you couldn't meet him. He was the go-to Yiddishist guy. But then, they were very young. They were young, and yet they looked like elders to us. And they were very energetic. And he brought with him the script for a play called "Mister Twister" -- we may have memorized it -- which is a play about a rich man; a typical socialist, Bundist play. But in the first half, they had Peretz's "Bontshe shvayg [Bontshe the silent]" -- choreographed by Ruth, I think -- Ruth Bergner, Yosl's sister, who became a dancer. Maybe she did; I'm not sure. But Amos Blustein, who you may meet -- he acted as Bontshe shvayg. It was phenomenal. And so, I was drawn into the world 71:00of Peretz to some extent, too. But yeah, I think it was fairly broad. I liked -- Dinezon was another writer that I -- he was one of Peretz's acolytes. Yeah, so it was quite broad. But then in a way -- it wasn't that I left it, but I became -- in a way, I took my outwardness to an extreme. At a certain point, I was studying European history and doing a history and politics degree at Melbourne Uni. And I tutored in politics -- I was moving in that direction. But at a certain point, something happened, and my focus shifted, and I became very involved with the Asia-Pacific region. Began to travel there, became very involved with Papua New Guinea, with its politics. Did a master's degree at Columbia University. I came and lived in New York for three years and did a master's degree. I studied with Margaret Mead, who was the great doyenne of -- 72:00she was very old at that stage, but a wonderful teacher. And I started getting out, so my world broadened. But I always -- you know, it's interesting -- and I spent years traveling and years living -- a year in China -- teaching and working in China, a lot of time in India. Always where I went, I'd spend time and work. And yet, I think wherever I went, I saw the shtetl. I think part of the attraction of those places -- the reason why I immediately felt at home in the village, the New Guinea village, or immediately felt at home in some of the Asiatic places I was spending time in is because -- I think it was the shtetl -- alive still, right? But my world broadened. And interesting enough, when I was in New York in the early '70s, even there, I became involved in the New York neighborhood project, which meant I was doing projects on the graffiti artists, 73:00those kids -- Puerto Rican and Dominican -- the kids -- there's a whole story there. I was very involved with that, New York -- the way I was involved with Carlton -- being immersed in it and part of it. But occasionally, I'd go off to a Bund meeting, and I got to know the Bund lokal [(union) local]. And so, that was always there. And then, when I came back to Melbourne -- I think it's interesting, if you look at the Yiddish in Melbourne, I think in a way it kind of -- well, it's gone through phases. It's hung in there. And now it's part of this revival, right? When I came back, I was always active. In 1987, I wrote a script with Michael Gawenda called "Nigun." And we staged this huge con-- so part of my creative life was always expressed through my Yiddishkayt. So, we wrote a script -- it was phenomenal -- you can see the video of it in the Palais 74:00Theatre. It was part of the Yiddish song revival. That's where Klezmania had their roots; I think they performed for the first time. So, it was a journey through Yiddish song. And I remember we had this wonderful -- this is when I was starting to come back and be active much more directly in a creative sense. And I remember we -- Fay Mokotow was a wonderful theater director, and she passed away from a brain tumor -- it was very sad -- when she was about forty, and we staged something in honor of her. And then, we also staged an evening -- back in the late '80s -- that Michael and I also combined to write the script for. It was for an evening on Yiddish literature in Australia. And actually, on Sunday, I'm launching this book. And that night, we were reading from the works of Goldhar, one of the two seminal Australian Yiddish writers -- with Herz Bergner. 75:00And I was writing about them, and they were part of me. And even when I did my doctorate -- I ended up doing a doctorate in creative writing. By then, I'd become a writer. And even then, I chose Bergner and Goldhar as a major part of that thesis -- on the immigrant experience. So, I had a very creative relationship. In the 1990s, I wrote a script for the Yiddish theater stage -- the songs of immigration -- "Vu ahin [Where to]" -- it's called "Vu ahin zol ikh geyn [Where should I go]." So, we took that song and we built a whole script around it. So, I've always been involved in that creative sense. And last year, we scripted "Balagan-eydn," a Yiddish cabaret, where I tried to channel the voice of Moyshe Broderzon with these rhyming couplets. In fact, now I'm -- I've 76:00never seen those -- I'm trying to find those rhyming couplets so we can do it again. It was just a wonderful -- we were staging songs that hadn't been staged for years -- the Yiddish cabaret repertoire. And then we did that Sholem Aleichem play, where I wrote the role of Sholem Aleichem as a ghost, a hundred years after his death. So, creatively, it's been a big part of my life. And even in the work that I write that's in the mainstream of Australian literature, it comes in -- it works its way in to some of my novels, where I weave in the song, I weave in --

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

AZ:-- some of that culture. So, it's always been a big part of me. I'm a member of the Bund committee, but we had a deal -- I said, "Look, I just can't" -- and I still live on the other side of the river, so I'm not part of the Caulfield 77:00shtetl. So, in a way, I've kept a kind of detachment, too. (laughs) And I married -- my wife is from a Greek background and comes from an island called Ithaca. And that became a big part of my life, too. And once again, very familiar. The life in the [patrikot?], the patriarchal village where we used to go quite often and spend even months on end -- and led to a novel, "Sea of Many Returns," about Greek immigrants. I mean, even there, I felt once again it was familiar -- it was the shtetl, right? One of the awards I'm most proud of is that I was given an award by the Greek community for contributions to Greek Australian literature. To me, that expresses the Bund ideal. That's a great 78:00expression of the Bund ideal. So, I've always seen -- I'll tell you this. This happened yesterday. This is an example of how it lives for me in every way. Yesterday, I was in a tiny flat -- a public housing flat -- and I was sitting there with Michael Aboujundi. Michael Aboujundi was an asylum seeker from Syria -- beautiful man. And he came on a boat in 2000 after horrific persecution, left behind a family of thirteen brothers and sisters and his parents -- or his father had already died, a couple of brothers had already been murdered -- that were civilians, not even involved in politics. We met. He was in a detention center called Woomera. And we met because in 2002, a group of us got together and wrote a play called "Kan Yama Kan," which means "once upon a time" in Arabic. And it was asylum seekers telling their stories. It was a wonderful 79:00piece of community theater, and we traveled even to Canberra. And the cast were asylum seekers who were still learning the language. Working in that sort of community theater -- it's a bit like being involved in the Yiddish theater in the '50s here. And so, recently, what's happened with Michael is that he's finally been able to get his sister Miriam and her husband and their seven children -- are coming to Melbourne from Jordan -- they had escaped to Jordan. Same week. But he needed money to get them over here. So, we set up a campaign. It was amazing. We raised twenty-six thousand dollars in a week -- just from little contributions from people on social network. And he's elated -- but his mum died, too, three or four days ago. So, like in the Jewish tradition and the 80:00Greek tradition, you go and you sit. So yesterday, we're sitting there around a cup of coffee -- he said it's a tradition for Syrians to sit with coffee without sugar after a death. So, take the sugar out. And there was this other -- and I'm going to say this on Sunday -- there was this other Syrian guy that came from Palmyra -- you know, that ancient city that ISIS has destroyed. The night before -- because I've got to launch this book -- I was reading a story. One of the stories I didn't know. And it's set in a shtetl called -- it's in Melbourne, but it's a shtetl, I think, called Zanov -- Zadov or Zanov, I can't remember the name offhand. And it's these landsleit [plural of landsman (fellow countrymen)] -- it's called "Landsleit" -- it's called "Compatriots" in English -- these typical Goldhar characters. In the summer, this guy shows him that Zanov has 81:00been bombed, so it must have been set in the 1940s. And kind of like the line that threads through these -- "Zanov is no more. Zanov is no more." And it comes up in that story. Yesterday, we are sitting with our coffees, and we mentioned Palmyra. And this guy turns to me and says, "Palmyra is no more." And a chill goes up your spine, and you say, Yeah. This is the first generation story, and it's also the story of immigrants and refugees who -- you know, whilst they're here, their communities are getting destroyed. So, to me, that's at the heart and soul of who I was as a kid -- and what I picked up as a kid. So, the other part of Yiddishkayt for me is, I did become involved with the -- familiarizing 82:00myself with the work of Herz Bergner, Melech Ravitch's, brother, Yosl's uncle -- they were literature's mafia (laughs) -- and with Goldhar, who's a better writer, I think. But they're both -- did terrific works. And so, that's part of my expression. And I might bring this along on Sunday as a kind of show-and-tell -- the collected works of Pinchas Goldhar -- it's a wonderful achievement -- are now going to be published in English translation. And they're both specific and they're both universal -- you know, Palmyra, Zanov. But at the same time -- four or five years ago, I persuaded Text, my publisher -- a wonderful publisher -- to republish "Between Sky and Sea" -- "Tsvishn himl un yam" -- which I think is the 83:00greatest work of Herz Bergner. And it is prescient. It was written in about 1943, '44, in the late years of the war, and yet it's about a boatload of Yiddish refugees making their way on a Greek tramper towards Australia. And the boat is just like a ship of fools -- a ship of traumatized people. It's an extraordinary novel. It was actually published first in English. 'Cause there was a wonderful kind of thing that happened back in the '30s and '40s, where people like the Bergners and Goldhar connected with the progressive left in the Australian literary scene. See, that's another thing about Goldhar and Bergner: they knew Australian culture very quickly. They were writing about the Australian landscape. And it's a quite extraordinary coming together of people like Vance and Nettie Palmer -- they were the great literary promoters of the 84:00'30s and '40s -- and with artists like Noel Counihan, whose illustrations are in that book. There was a kind of a wonderful coming together of these progressive forces feeding on and inspiring each other. So, Judah Waten, a well-known Australian Jewish writer who wrote in English -- he translated "Between Sky and Sea," and it came out in about 1946 in English, and I think the next year in Yiddish. But I persuaded Text to republish it. And it's now been republished again as a Text Classic, and I've got an introduction. And in the introduction, I tell the story of Herz Bergner and his life. I had fifteen hundred words, so it's quite brief, but I managed to get what I could across. But I also tell the story of the St. Louis, which I think it's partly based on -- you know, the boat 85:00of Jewish refugees in 1939, I think it was -- making their way to Cuba and America and returning back. And then, also the story of SIEV X. SIEV X is a boat -- in 2001, there was a boat of over four hundred mainly Afghani and Iraqi refugees -- asylum seekers -- en route to Australia, and they sank -- it sank. And 353 men, women, and children drowned. And it's a story I became very involved with. And in fact, there's a woman, Amal Basri, that I describe in this piece, who I became very close to. She died of cancer, in a cruel irony, and she used to tell the story of how she survived by clinging to a corpse for twenty hours. It was extraordinary. And yet, in a way -- the descriptions I got from 86:00survivors -- there were forty-five survivors; seven came to live in Australia, three in Melbourne, and I got to know them very well. And when I heard their descriptions of the sinking, it's almost exactly the description that Bergner gives in the final pages. 'Cause he didn't compromise -- the boat sinks in a storm. It's just uncanny. And I think it's extremely important -- that Yiddish, to me, is worth nothing if we don't understand this. I mean, what's the point of it, you know, if it's a means of just turning inwards? The heart of Yiddish is that, I think. It's a language, of course, of other languages. It's a language -- you pick it up. And the stories that you tell, I think, have got echoes across the board. I think that young generation that comes through SKIF really 87:00understands it. They get it. I think there's a wonderful energy in that organization now. And I think they've got that balance of understanding the importance of the bigger picture. In Australia, the bigger picture includes the preservation and the renewal of Aboriginal languages. Here, if you want to understand how precious language is, you go to the original communities. Melbourne -- we are on Wurundjeri land -- or here, we're on Bunurong land. So, they're two major groups who kind of occupied Melbourne. And they're part of five nations that made up the Kulin federation. As kids, we didn't even know 88:00these names. When I finished "Jewels and Ashes," I thought, Well, look, I want to explore this other vast mystery -- you know, who were the people that came here? And I met Wurundjeri elders and we became close. And in fact, when we launched "Café Scheherazade," one of my novels, a Wurundjeri elder was one of the people that launched it. That was a great moment -- a great, kind of symbolic moment. And she presented me with the eagle feather of the -- they believe the Bunjil eagle is the primordial ancestor of this city. So, I began pursuing their story. It's interesting that their language had been suppressed and driven underground -- in the early '90s, when I was exploring this story -- and they told me that they were beginning to get the language together. Well, the women knew -- some of the terms had been passed down through the women, as is often the case, and they spoke it secretly. But then, they were putting together vocabularies from books of anthropologists that had kind of put 89:00together some of the vocabulary in their studies, and there's great irony there. And they can now get up -- and they're beginning to write songs in the language, they're beginning to -- but, you know, it's a long, long way to go. And they're engaged in language retrieval. There are still places in Central Australia where the languages have lived, and they're still alive. But many, many, many have become extinguished, and some are now being revived. When you speak to indigenous people about language, they just -- you know, they understand what it means for a language to die and what it means for a language to be revived. So that, to me, is a great parallel. So, whenever I have any doubts about what Yiddish means, I just think of that. And so, it's a treasure. But whenever 90:00anyone asks me about the future of Yiddish, my answer is different. My answer is: Look, it's only worth what it is now. It's only worth what it is now. It's only worth -- in how it's -- if it's creativity, if it's an expression of it -- whether it is in recreating theater, cabaret, the amazing music revivals that are going on in this city, whether it's whatever way you want to express it -- then it's here and now. It's alive, and the future will take care of itself. So, that's the way I see it. (laughs) Sorry to take such a long --

CW:No, that's great.

AZ:-- path to get there. (laughter) But I think it's important to me to see it within context, always. Otherwise, it's meaningless.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

AZ:This is a good story. So, I take Shane Baker down to Carlton and we go to La 91:00Mama, which is based on New York's La MaMa, where they staged "Got fun nekome [God of vengeance]" recently. And then we go down to the Kadimah. And we go across the road, and I wanted to show it to him close up. And this guy walks out -- a little guy -- he's this historian of the Aeolian Society. When the building was sold in 1968 and the Kadimah moved here, it was sold to the Aeolians. The Aeolian Islands are off the west coast of Italy -- Stromboli, Lipari -- the volcanic islands. And I've been back a few times. And when this Kadimah celebrated its hundredth anniversary, we actually went there, had this wonderful afternoon there. But the stage is gone -- they took it out and they replaced it 92:00with a kitchen. But I've been there -- I've gone past on nights where it's like, Oh, all these cars are drawing up and these people in their finery are going across the road, and I followed them in there, went into the big hall, and there was -- they had bay gedekte tishn [formally set tables], like the old days -- and instead of lokshn mit yoykh [noodle soup], they were having minestrone; instead of schnitzel, they had pasta, but whatever. So, the atmosphere -- it was great, I think, that that community took on this hall, and they've been there now for longer than we were there -- we were there thirty-five years; they've been there for forty-five, fifty years. But anyway, so this guy comes out, and he says, "Oh, you can come inside." And he's standing there with me and Shane. This guy really knows his history, was raving on about it. He says, "Oh, there's 93:00this thing we sometimes read at our historical society written by someone about this boy who walks down a back lane and he walks four blocks and he gets to Rathdowne Street and Drummond Street" -- and it was, you know, the stuff I'd written about that walk. That was hilarious. And then, he said, "I've got something special to show you. I've got something amazing to show you," he said. And he took us to where the kitchen was -- where the stage was. And then, behind is the last living remnant of the original stage. And it's where the dressing rooms used to be, and there's these wooden stairs that go up into this place where you -- it's kind of like an attic. And there, you see -- he pointed to the hooks where the curtains -- the back curtains used to be. And so, I said to Shane, "This is 'The Dybbuk' all over again. Watch out -- you're gonna get 94:00possessed by some old Yiddish actor." (laughs)

CW:(laughs) Isn't he already?

AZ:"The spirit of Waislitz is gonna take you and destroy you. You'll never leave. You'll end up in the beys-oylem [cemetery]." So yeah, it lives on in us in its own way -- the old Carlton. And I've got to say that part of the Yiddish story -- it's a huge story, as I mentioned -- is the story of Yiddish theater and how it flourished. I can't believe that in the 1920s, there were three separate Yiddish theater groups here in Melbourne. You know, for such a small population, I think that's extraordinary. So, yeah. I think we'll end on that story.

CW:Oh, great. (laughs)

AZ:We'll end on yet another story -- another maysele [little story]. A mol is geven [Once upon a time], in shtetl Carlton. And I think that's a good note to end on.

CW:Dray teater [Three theaters] --

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:I just want to say, a hartsikn dank [thank you very much].

AZ:A sheynem dank [Thank you very much].

CW:Thanks for giving us this time and sharing all these great insights and memories.

AZ:Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]