The Fig Tree (21 page)

Here paradise was a cup of tea sipped in the shadows of a tree under an ascendant sun. And hell was an army of flies congregated on the backs of overcoats and shirts for a free ride.

It was a land of ‘lonely graves' where a post office was a tin box tied by wire to a gnarled wooden pole. It was a matter of luck as to whether the mail would be received.

Yet Ravich did not feel alone. He was sustained by his curiosity. He was quickly drawn into friendships. He drew close to the driver of the mail truck, ‘the best bush chauffeur in Australia'. He felt a kinship with Angus, the mailman's Aboriginal assistant. Angus's maternal grandmother still lived a traditional life, while his white paternal grandfather lived in London, ‘totally ignorant of his grandson's existence'.

This was the most poignant aspect of Ravich's journey, his encounter with outback Aborigines. He noted their troubled eyes. He could see in them a familiar look, the gaze of the outsider, of a people estranged within their own land. He could see, also, their ability to travel light. They too were eternal travellers, forever on the move, hunting and foraging for survival.

The poet's photographs of Aborigines depict a dispossessed people. Ravich had stumbled upon an under-class of servants and stock riders, an exploited people caught between contending worlds. A black house servant grasps a billycan in the streets of Alice Springs. A water-carrier stands to rigid attention; two buckets sway from a pole slung across his shoulders. The water-carrier's eyes avert the photographer's gaze. An indigenous station hand wears ‘his best evening dress', even in the heat of day. A woman eats ‘a lonely breakfast' by an isolated stone barn. ‘By day she is strictly separated from her white employers,' observed Ravich, ‘while at night she becomes fair game.'

Ravich drew his audience into the heart of Australia's hidden shame. While he displayed some of the prejudices of the times, and depicted Aborigines as a lost and dying race, in his photos he stands beside them, on equal ground. He is pictured arm-in-arm with Angus. They look comfortable in each other's presence. In one image, Ravich leans against a rusting corrugated fence beside ‘the most beautiful woman in Darwin, including the whites'. She stands barefooted, in a white cotton dress, while the poet wears pinstriped trousers, a white shirt and his signature bow tie.

Ravich drew ironic parallels from a photograph in which he is pictured alongside a new-found friend called Charlie. ‘This is his pseudonym,' said Ravich, ‘the name he uses as a house servant. In truth his name is Darbeliali.' As for the man standing beside him, ‘he too has a pseudonym, Melekh Ravich. In truth his name is Mr Bergner. The former washes dishes in Darwin and earns five shillings a week. The other cannot, even with his poetry, earn five shillings a week.'

Ravich journeys across the Nullarbor Plain to the west. He visits a farming settlement ten miles from Perth. The farms are run by Russian peasants who have converted to the Jewish faith. Ravich had glimpsed the essence of the land. Only in this ‘new world' could a traveller come across such scenes. ‘These modest hard working country folk are the only people in Perth who have read the great Yiddish writers Mendele, Peretz and Bialik in the original,' Ravich exclaims.

As his slide show and lecture drew to an end, Ravich spoke of a dream. Perhaps his people, now being brutally assaulted in the streets of Nazi Germany, could settle in the Kimberleys. This bizarre scheme fired his imagination. Ravich had fallen in love with this strange land, with its ochre deserts, and rough-and-tumble ways.

Where else, the poet said, referring to Melbourne's first Tuesday in November, could one find a country that would come to a standstill for a horse race. He applied the Hebrew phrase,
hag ha-susim
, the ‘holy day of the horses'. Surely it is far better, he mused, to come to a halt for a horse race than a pogrom.

Ravich concluded his address with a plea. Embrace the new land, he said. Make it a haven for the dispossessed. But do not forsake the culture of the past. Do not throw out the mother tongue. Acclimatise but do not assimilate, was the poet's catch-cry. There is space enough here to accommodate difference, and to absorb the treasures of many worlds.

Melekh Ravich was farewelled at yet another Kadimah banquet; but he returned to Melbourne within two years. He rented a large room in a terraced house in Royal Parade, Parkville, a tree-lined boulevard on the northern edge of the city. A door opened out onto a balcony. The room was sparsely furnished with a bed, a chair, bookshelves contrived from apple boxes, and a large, worn kitchen table which Ravich used as a work desk.

In that room he stood, late one night, in 1937, and surveyed hundreds of poems which he had written since his last collection was published in Vienna in 1921. He arranged them in ten bundles, which he labelled: Asian, American, African, European, Australian, Oceanic, Yiddishe, Philosophical, Pacifist, and ‘personal poems written within the intimacy of four walls'. He tied them together with a blue ribbon. On a piece of cardboard he wrote, in large Hebraic script, the title of the collection:
Continents and Oceans
. It was somehow appropriate, he reflected, that he had completed this book ‘on the most distant and loneliest of continents'.

It was two o'clock in the morning. The poet was overcome ‘by both a feeling of frightful loneliness and boundless joy'. He had to share this moment with someone. He dashed out onto the balcony but was confronted by darkness. Even the upside-down southern moon had disappeared under a cluster of clouds.

Then he remembered. Just streets away lived perhaps the only Yiddish writer in Australia. His name was Pinhas Goldhar. Born in the Polish city of Lodz, Goldhar had settled in Melbourne in 1928. By vocation he was a writer. By necessity he worked in a factory with his brother and father, boiling dyes and applying them to materials; and in the evening he returned home from the acrid fumes and resumed his true calling. He would write late into the night, and arrive exhausted at work the next morning. He still found time, in 1931, to establish the first Yiddish newspaper in Australia,
Australier Leben
, ‘Australian Life'.

As if driven by a force beyond his control, Ravich found himself descending the stairs. Under his arm he carried his newly completed manuscript. He hurried through the silent streets of Carlton. Every step he took reverberated in his ears. He ran as if pursued by a demon. Or was it an angel? Did he have the right to wake up his hard-working friend at this late hour? Surely he would understand. After all, he was a man with an artistic soul. Ravich wove his way from street to street like a man possessed, until he came to an abrupt halt in front of Goldhar's weatherboard cottage.

And, miracle of miracles, a ray of light shone from the front window. Behind the curtain he could see an outline of Goldhar's profile. Ravich opened the gate to the tiny front garden, stepped up to the window, and tapped softly. ‘It was such a gentle tap, a loving tap,' he was to write in his memoirs many years later. ‘A tap which could not possibly frighten him.' Goldhar gave a sudden start. He rose from his desk, pulled back the curtains, slid open the window.

‘It's nothing…I have only just now, completed my book of poems…
Continents and Oceans
…I know you'll understand…I just had to show it to someone…I couldn't wait until morning…I would have gone mad with loneliness,' whispered Ravich, as he placed the manuscript on the windowsill. In an instant Goldhar understood. He leaned through the window, embraced and kissed his friend, and crept out to the darkened kitchen.

Soon after, in the night darkness, clutching two crystal goblets filled to the brim with fresh tap water, the two writers toasted that most sacred of occasions: the completion of a book of poems. And all this had taken place on the ‘loneliest and most distant of continents'.

Nineteen thirty-seven was a big year for Yiddish literature in Australia. Pinhas Goldhar's story ‘The Pioneer' appeared in the
Australian Yiddish Almanac
. This volume of essays, stories, poems, and translations of Australian literature, edited by Melekh Ravich, was the first Yiddish book published in Australia. And that year, on board the French boat the
Pierre
Loti
, Ravich's teenage son, the artist Yosl Bergner arrived in Melbourne.

They were joined in 1938 by Ravich's younger brother, the writer Herz Bergner, who migrated from Warsaw. In 1939 Pinhas Goldhar published, in Yiddish, his book
Stories from
Australia
. In 1941, Herz Bergner published his first Australian book of stories, aptly titled
The New House
. Both works depicted the efforts of immigrants to adjust to a new land.

Pinhas Goldhar died prematurely in 1947. He was forty-six years old. His tales reflect his own struggle to feel at home in Australia. Loss of purpose. Loss of past. These are the themes that weave through his works. Reading his stories today it is possible to see a gifted storyteller at work.

Herz Bergner went on to write many tales. His masterwork,
Between Sky and Sea
, written as war engulfed Poland, depicts the voyage of a group of refugees on board a Greek freighter bound for Australia. The passengers are tormented by the horrors of their recent past. Their dreams are permeated by the frantic cries of loved ones. They are tortured with guilt at the fate of those who had not survived. The ship drifts helplessly, like ‘a black hearse', in search of a haven, a port of call. It creaks with age and is tossed about by waves which play ‘with her like young children playing with a senile old man'.

With each successive day at sea the passengers edge closer to madness. Their meagre ration of food decreases. Quarrels erupt. Malicious gossip takes hold of the idle hours. A typhus epidemic breaks out. The ship smells of carbolic. The victims are buried at sea. Australia is a receding mirage. The passengers no longer know where they are. And still the ship drifts without any sight of land.

The novel marks the end of a more optimistic era. The romance with new worlds is over. The dispossessed are an unwanted people, condemned to wander many lands. When the epidemic breaks out on the ship, irate crew-members taunt the passengers: ‘Human beings? Important people? You have been thrown out of everywhere and no one will take you in. All doors and gates are closed to you. We can't put in at any port because of you. Everybody is afraid you'll get your feet in and never go away.'

Between Sky and Sea
is a book my mother read many times. I would see her, late at night, seated by the kitchen table after the day's work was done, bent over a newspaper or novel. She leant on an elbow for support. Her feet rested upon the worn linoleum floor. Behind her stood a gas stove with a kookaburra's head on its enamelled door.

I always knew which language she was reading. If it was English her face would be strained. She mouthed the words out loud as if teaching herself to pronounce them. Mostly she read in Yiddish, the works of Goldhar, Ravich and Bergner. They were her holy trinity. Their tales mirrored her own. The fate of the passengers on board the Greek vessel paralleled her frantic efforts to obtain visas for her loved ones in Poland. She understood what it was like to knock on locked doors. She too would awaken from recurring dreams of her childhood village on fire.

Mother's favourite Bergner novel was
Light and Shadow.
She read it like a biblical scholar swaying over a sacred text. The book remained by her bedside as she aged. By then the covers had fallen off. Several times I found her asleep with the book still in her hands.

Light and Shadow
depicts the struggles of a family who emigrate from Poland to Australia in the 1930s. They live uneasily as the only Jewish family in Rosemar, a country town. Rosemar's glory days during the gold rushes are long over. Its fortunes have been revived by the timber industry. The ‘metallic ring of the saw mills', can be heard from dawn till night.

The mother, Sheindle Zeling, feels alienated and utterly alone. Her husband, Hersh, is often away hawking goods to surrounding farms. Her three children, Pauline, Leslie and Morry are, at times, ashamed of her. She is outlandish. They prefer the company of their Australian friends. The surrounding bush intimidates her. The ashen whites of the eucalyptus frighten her. Their trunks seem stained with blood. In summer the threat of bushfires is imminent. The air is tainted with the taste of smoke. Sheindle retreats to the dark rooms of her weatherboard house. ‘Why did you bring me here?' she asks her husband in despair.

There are other outsiders in Rosemar. Charlie Lee Tai runs a Chinese cafe. Australia's immigration laws had prevented him from gaining visas for his wife and children. Rumour has it that Charlie locks himself up in one of his rooms and smokes opium to appease his yearning for his family. Ron the gold prospector lives in a run-down shack. He too is a loner. The residents are suspicious of his friendship with the Aborigines who live in corrugated humpies on the fringes of town. The blacks are outcasts in their own country, argues Ron. If he strikes it rich, he will fight for their rights. Meanwhile Aboriginal children are welcome in his shack.

The Zeling family moves to Carlton. They now live in a community of Jews, a more familiar world. Sarah the Widow's restaurant serves chopped liver and apple compote. Hawkers and tailors sip glasses of tea or borscht, and discuss their prospects in the ‘golden land'. Late at night can be heard the strains of a Yiddish ballad, an Italian melody, a Greek song. They drift from the single-fronted cottages that line the streets. There is a cultural centre where the Zelings can attend a Yiddish play, an orthodox
shtiebl
where grandfather Boruch-Itche can pray. And a library where Hersh can read overseas papers and argue over the politics of the day.

The news is not good. Bombs are falling over Warsaw. Hersh sees the headlines on the way home from his clothing factory in the city's garment district in Flinders Lane. As soon as he glimpses the news he knows life for his loved ones back home will never be the same.