The Fig Tree (3 page)

This is how Meier would have put it because verse was his great passion. As a child, he became infatuated with that outpouring of creativity called Yiddish literature. Above all, he was entranced by the poets. And in this he was far from alone.

Can you imagine it? Poets with a mass following? Travelling bards reciting their works in provincial towns where they were welcomed as heroes? Writers intoxicated by the power of the word, and the nips of whisky that helped stoke their literary fires?

They wrote of impending revolution and private love. They waxed lyrical about the scent of resin, the lure of the forest, the melodic flow of the Dnieper River. Others dreamed of the rivers of Babylon, and wrote of their longing for Jerusalem. Often enough their poems were set to music or incorporated into the repertoires of theatrical troupes who transported them the length and breadth of Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe.

As for Meier, he preferred to retreat to the edge of the forests, alone, to sit with his back to the city, while he absorbed the works of his idols. He preferred silent communion to the tumult, although he too was sometimes swept up by the upheavals of the times.

It was an era of prophets and preachers, wide-eyed fanatics and inspired teachers who took their rival manifestos to the streets. It was a time of fervour and ferment; yet it was also a time of chronic poverty and pogroms, of war or the continual threat of war. Tsarist soldiers rampaged through the Jewish quarters of Bialystok in the year Meier was born. Twelve months later, Tsarist police escorted bands of hooligans armed with crowbars and axes as they looted shops and houses, and slaughtered at random over eighty Bialystok Jews.

Indeed, a pogrom took place in the Polish town of Przytyk at the outset of 1936, just days before Meier's departure from the country of his birth. The folk poet, Mordekhai Gebirtig, a carpenter by trade, captured the growing mood of unease in his prophetic song, ‘
Es Brent
'. ‘It Is Burning'. Written in the wake of the Przytyk pogrom, it was as if in a flash he saw thousands of potential Przytyks:

It's burning, brothers, it's burning.

Our poor village is burning.

Bitter winds are fanning higher,

Leaping tongues of flame and fire.

Stronger now the flames are leaping,

As through our town the fire is sweeping.

And you stand and look on helpless, with your folded arms

And you stand and look on helpless, as our
shtetl
burns.

Meier was one of the fortunate. He left on the eve of the Annihilation. All who had been near and dear, his entire family, his comrades and friends, were wiped out. There was no going back. There was nothing to go back to. The future was Wellington, New Zealand, where two of his three sons were born immediately after the war and, after 1948, a single-fronted terrace in Carlton. The future was the new world, for better or worse.

And, increasingly, it was for the better. At least this is how Meier came to see it. In his final years he was grateful for the absence of that undertow of menace he had felt in Bialystok. He came to see his later life as graced by a sense of freedom. In his ageing he revelled in a playground of gardens and parks, nature strips and squares, and the poplars and palms that greeted him every morning as he sat down by the front window to read the works of his lifelong companions.

Yet there was a price to pay for this freedom; and, in the wake of his death, as I reflect on his legacy, I begin to see how high this price may have been. I see the detour he was forced to take from his natural calling. I see the years of frustration in which he was denied the practice of his craft. I see the fragmented journey, the unfinished works, the aborted melody of a poet in an alien world.

It began at an early age, Meier's first attempts, as he put it, ‘to take the bow in my own hands and play the violin of poetry'. I set out the files of his writings on the desk in the front room, his bedroom study. I sat here every morning in the days after Meier's death, so that, in a fashion, I was observing the traditional Jewish custom of mourning, of sitting
shiva
.

For seven days the family of the deceased sit on a small bench, their clothes rent, the mirrors in the house covered so that there is no reflection of ego to distract the mourners from focusing their thoughts upon the departed. I sit in the same chair on which my father spent so many hours, during his final years of life, immersed in his work, lifting his head occasionally to view the passage of the seasons. He marked the turning of time by the leaves of the poplar, the migration of birds, the subtle shifts in daily light, just as I now mark the passage of his life through his poems.

In the months before his death, Meier arranged his work in order of publication, beginning in 1925, when he was twenty years old. The early poems are full of exuberance. They celebrate the forests and streams of White Russia, the swamps and river valleys of the borderlands. Others sing the praises of his loved one, Hadassah Probutski, ‘the pale flower of the Chanaykes', the slum quarters of Bialystok where she was raised. He sees her walking on a road ‘woven out of stars'. She wears ‘a silk blue dress embroidered with stars of green and red'. She moves within an aura of stillness. She walks with quiet grace.

Hadassah becomes his muse. She joins him on his evening strolls to the forests. They share a love of solitude. They also share a social conscience. Like so many of their times, they are drawn towards the ideals of the left. After all, they were nurtured in the midst of mass poverty and unemployment.

In a poem entitled ‘Need', Meier opens with the lines: ‘In a cellar somewhere, lies a woman with her infants; thousands of miles from the land of joy.' The children suck ‘at their mother's yellowed fingers, instead of bread'. Such scenes, writes Meier, ‘cut into my heart'. The poet can taste the essence ‘of their desperate need'.

In ‘An Encounter with an Unemployed Man', Meier identifies with the plight of those who wander the streets in search of work. They are outsiders, invisible to those who have their place, their measure of worth. Those who are more fortunate rush about the streets, and in their self-absorption they push aside the people who walk about the city without purpose. Instead of stopping to help them back onto their feet, they glance at them with contempt, before hurrying on.

In subsequent poems Meier depicts the plight of other outcasts, those who live in the shadows, street walkers and the destitute, ‘broken women hidden behind smiling masks', and lonely drunkards bereft of love. He writes of children, born into poverty, and fated to live ‘like flies trapped in a jug'. Their ambitions are condemned to ‘whirl about like chaff'. The poet fears for their future. He foresees a time when their desire for freedom, for a place in the sun, will be worn down and silenced.

Meier writes also about his own sense of unease. Perhaps he too is fated to work in menial jobs. Perhaps he will not be able to practise his vocation as a poet. Like so many of his generation, he must find work wherever he can. He is subject to the whims of his superiors. He is selling his longings for a mere pittance while, in the recesses of his being, he burns with a desire for expression and knowledge.

One of Meier's most striking poems, ‘On the Death of Sacco and Vanzetti', published in 1927, is a fiery lament over the execution, by electric chair, in the United States, of two Italian socialists whose crime, it seems, was a desire to help their fellow man.

News of the execution was received with dismay worldwide, and it struck a chord in young Meier Zabludowski. He takes on the pain of Sacco and Vanzetti's final moments, and writes of the ‘eighteen-hundred-volt current' that silenced them ‘like a snake, cutting through the black horizon of the world'. Although their ‘grave lies so many miles distant,' writes Meier, ‘we all felt that current, is if a close friend, a loved one had been cut down.'

Meier's output increases. His poems are published in local broadsheets, journals and newspapers. He takes part in literary evenings during which he recites the works of his favourite writers, interspersed with his own. He is a part of a literary tradition. He has found a community of kindred spirits and a receptive audience. He is revelling in the musicality of words. He is developing his skills, finding his voice. He is connected to a sense of place, and evolving time. Until the early months of 1936.

Then silence. The song seems to have disappeared on the long sea voyage to New Zealand. In August 1936, Meier arrived in Wellington to be greeted by Hadassah, the woman who had preceded him by three years. As it turned out, she had saved his life; but what time was there for poetry when there was a new life to be made? And where was there an audience for a Yiddish poet in New Zealand? Even as he rejoiced in his new-found freedom, and in the daily sight of radiant seas, his poetic voice was being stilled. And after he moved to Melbourne, in January 1948, when was there time for a poet to practise his craft, with three children to support and, yet again, a new life to be made?

For twenty-five years, Meier made the daily trek, along the cobbled back lane, from his Canning Street home, suitcase in hand. He turned right into Fenwick Street, and walked the four blocks to the tram stop on the corner of Lygon Street. The tram conveyed him past the Melbourne General Cemetery to the edge of the inner city, where he alighted and continued on foot to the low-slung sheds of the Victoria Market.

For a quarter of a century Meier sold socks and stockings at the market, cast-offs that he collected from the hosiery mills of Brunswick. He would set up his stall in the pre-dawn glow of electric globes. He would lay out his imperfect goods with a weary submission. He did not like what he was doing. My enduring childhood memory of him is of a quiet man, somewhat bent and despondent. On his work days he was gone long before his three children rose. And he disappeared, in the evenings, into the front bedroom. He seemed to find his only pleasure in reading his fraying volumes of Yiddish verse.

I would glance into the room and see him seated by the dressing table, at his makeshift desk, swaying over books like a pious Hasid at prayer. He seemed immersed in another world, in the poetic dream he had carried with him since his childhood days in a distant place.

Meier retired in 1975. I helped him dismantle the market stall. We packed everything into a van—the wooden trestles, the chipped tables, the remaining stockings and socks, the dummy legs he used for displays of hosiery, the price-tags he had painted with so much care and artistic flair in white paint upon red cardboard—and conveyed them north, back through the streets of Carlton to the family home.

Meier was depressed on that first day of retirement, and remained so for several months as he stumbled towards new ways to fill his days. He returned to the back garden, which he had never quite forsaken, and expanded his crop of vegetables. He took to the small patch below the front verandah, and planted geraniums, rose bushes, carnations. The rhythm of gardening conveyed him back to the rhythm of words. And towards the end of the year, his spirits soaring, Meier showed me the first poem he had completed in over four decades. Others followed soon after. The muse had returned in his old age.

The first cycle of new poems is imbued with longing for the past. He listens to the radio, and cannot be consoled:

Cold silence on the walls,

Cold fingers on the hand,

Cold the voice from the radio,

My ear is tuned to a distant past;

To a past, so far gone

When my own heart was full of music.

Meier is fighting his way to a new lease of life, in the only way he knows how: through words. In one poem he writes of an evil spirit, a dark force, known in Yiddish folklore as a
clippe
. Why is this dark force forever present, he asks, always trying to insinuate itself, to poison the skies, to stop a bird in mid-flight, to distort a radiant reflection in a mirror? This evil spirit, Meier writes, can even cripple and deform the meaning of words. In a subsequent poem he laments the passing of close friends. Each week seems to bring a new loss. Meier openly expresses his fear of death:

No more day after such a night

No more light-filled eyes in contemplation

No more eyes that will awake to the light.

The poet's saving grace is language, and the power of speech. Yet some day soon, Meier writes, he will lose this hard-won power yet again. His only consolation is that perhaps his words may live on. Yet as he walks, and gardens, and writes, and makes his way through each successive day, his mood lifts. He moves through the streets of the neighbourhood, which seem so alien, when unexpectedly he sees a familiar face from a world that was no more:

Among strangers, thousands of passers-by,

Among faces, indifferent,

A sudden joy comes my way—

A hand, so warm, reaches out,

And an old friend asks me: how are you today?

And no longer the city seems so strange,

And the skies—no longer grey

An old friend brings back the glow of youthful days.

Meier's love of words, and their power to console, returns. As, too, does his capacity to respond to the moment. In the winter of 1976 he revives a ritual that had threaded through our childhood. He draws back the curtain that has covered the kitchen wood stove for many years, rekindles the embers, and falls into a reverie, a meditation on gold and fire: on the power to destroy or heal, to create or deceive. The only true gold, he concludes, is the fire that burns within, the gold of one's own soul.

The following year Meier honours the one constant in his life: the alphabet, the building blocks of expression, of understanding. The Hebraic script is: ‘So crystal clear, past and present can be clearly seen; so light, so close, as pungent as freshly baked bread. Through aleph, beit, gimmel I came to know the world, to see the sky, to discern its rays of wisdom.'

‘This is my great wealth,' he concludes. ‘And when the time comes to leave this world, this will be my greatest regret—to be torn away, forever, from my sacred Yiddish alphabet.'