ATJT'S COREY FISCHER DOWN UNDER
By Corey Fischer
TJT founding member Corey Fischer was invited to Australia to perform "Sometimes We Need a Story More Than Food" for two weeks in Sydney and one week in Melbourne in November­pDecember 1995. The tour was co­psponsored by the Sydney Jewish Arts Festival and independent producer, Lawrence Jackson.
ATJT received generous support for the tour from The Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals and Qantas Airlines. "Sometimes" was a critical and popular success. We look forward to return trips to Oz in the future. The following excerpts were edited from Corey's journal.
Friday, November 24
Arrived in Sydney this morning.
In my sleep-deprived, time-warped state, what I see out the cab window on the way to the hotel seems to be a stew of elements I recognize from New Orleans, San Diego, Christiansted and Los Angeles. Stucco and wood buildings with grill-work balconies, palm trees, large parks, adult movies, Toys R Us, Burger King and lots of traffic.
Saturday, November 25
Walking by "The Great Synagogue" this afternoon, I read the following inscription through locked gates:"The Jewish Community of Sydney on the occasion of the voluntary retirement of the Rev'd Alexander B. Davis thus records its appreciation of the pre-eminent services rendered by him as its chief minister a position he filled for 41 years with devotion and with permanent benefits to a fond and grateful congregation. 1862-1903."
I meet Margaret Gutman, one of the leaders of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies, the equivalent of Jewish Federations in the US. She tells me that the Australian Jewish community was almost entirely British (there were 16 Jewish convicts in the original settlement) until the late 19th century when some Eastern Europeans came. Recently there has been a large influx of Jews from South Africa and Russia.
This conversation takes place at the "Hakoah Club", a sort of JCC. To get a sense of the place, it helps if you've seen the Australian movie, "Strictly Ballroom". A large part of the club's income comes from a room full of computer poker machines. I'm there to see a performance of Sholem Alecheim stories by an elderly actor from Melbourne. The audience, which is made up mostly of people in their 60's and 70's, behaves similarly to many I experienced at JCC's at home (which is why I much prefer performing in theatres). They are not terribly responsive. A few walk out ten minutes before the performance ends.
The space is not really a theatre space and has poor sightlines and acoustics. The atmosphere in the lobby and cafeteria downstairs is much more lively. I am struck by the same mixture of strangeness and familiarity I have felt in Jewish communities in Prague, Amsterdam, Savannah, Jerusalem. There are faces I almost recognize. They could be cousins. And yet there are enormous cultural differences reflected in speech, body language, attitude.
Sunday, November 26
After a morning spent in the theatre with our lighting designer, I meet Richard Dreyfus- an Australian in his late sixties, not the American actor-who takes me on a tour of the area north of Sydney with its spectacular coastline and many beaches. We walk up a rocky trail along deep sandstone cuts to the Barrenjoey lighthouse. Along the way he tells me his story. He and his brother were among the German-Jewish children rescued during the war on a "kindertransport" that eventually arrived in Australia.
After a year in an orphanage, they were miraculously reunited with their parents who had managed to get out of Germany as well. Richard became a typesetter for a Yiddish newspaper, went on to English-language papers, became a music critic, a financial writer, a stock broker and finally a consultant to a company that develops shopping malls. His brother George led the bassoon section of the Melbourne Symphony before becoming a composer.
We continue on to "Palm Beach" and, even though the day is overcast and breezy, we go in for a swim. Compared to places like Muir Beach, where I usually swim, the water is delightfully warm. Richard, who is involved with the "Board of Jewish Deputies" tells me that the arts festival is the first attempt by the Jewish community in Sydney to relate to the larger community. "We keep to ourselves," he tells me.
Apparently Australia has one of the lowest rates of intermarriage going. Around 60 per cent of all Jewish children go to Jewish schools. Although I feel quite comfortable with Richard, appreciating his dry humor and solicitousness as host, I manage to omit mentioning that my wife is not Jewish.
In the evening Richard takes me to a "function". It's a banquet for The Jewish National Fund, Australian chapter, which is raising money for reservoirs in the Negev. The Arts Festival Committee feels it will be good PR for me to make an appearance. Again, the combination of the familiar and the strange almost overwhelms me. The event takes place in a ballroom at the Sydney Race Track. Yes, there are disco balls. Yes, there is a band belting Hava Nagila and Israeli pop songs. But there's this strange edge to things. Maybe I'm still jet lagged, but there's a certain Fellini tilt to the affair. The main course, for example, is a chicken dish that has crispy noodles on it arranged to look like a bird's nest. After the food, a few people start dancing a frenzied hora that more and more others join until the dance floor is packed. The music gets very loud. Mordechai Richler or Phillip Roth would be right at home.
Thursday November 30
The Sydney Jewish museum is a modest two story building that used to be the "Jewish War Memorial", a hall for weddings, bar mitzvahs and other "functions". A single benefactor, John Saunders, a survivor, funded its transformation into a museum of Australian Jewish history and the Holocaust. The Holocaust portion, upstairs, features video tapes of Australian survivors of the camps and the ghettoes telling their stories as well as photographic and textual documentation of the Shoah. Less familiar to me was the Australian part of the museum.
Australia, as most everyone knows, was a British gulag from 1788 until around 1868. England was having a crisis of overpopulation in their jails, could no longer use the American colonies as gulags and so began the transportation of convicts to Australia What isn't so well known is that there were sixteen Jews among the very first batch of convicts and a total of almost one thousand by the time the transportation of convicts ended. In the museum there's a reproduction of a handwritten list of all Jewish convicts, their names, occupations, crimes and sentences.
All of the crimes were petty. Anything beyond petty theft was punishable by hanging. As early as 1817, Jewish convicts and freed convicts formed a Chevra Kadisha and a Jewish burial is the first recorded act of Jewish observance here. A lay leader organized services and, with the permission of the chief rabbi of London, performed weddings. The first Synagogue was established in 1837 by a congregation of 400. Jews also lived in the outback, in rural settlements, often as merchants, hotel keepers and postmasters. Post-convict waves of immigration occurred during the Australian gold rush (1850-1880), the pogroms in Eastern Europe (1880-1930) and World War Two.
Recently, there have been new immigrants from Russia, South Africa and Israel. Among the early Jewish convicts were: Esther Abraham who became lovers with and eventually married a Lieutenant of the Royal Marines who became interim Governor of New South Wales, making Esther the first First Lady; Teddy Davis, known as the Jewboy bushranger (a bushranger is an outlaw) who led a gang of escaped convicts (the Jewboy gang), gained a reputation for robbing the rich and helping the poor and was hanged in 1841 at Sydney Gaol while a thousand people watched (His last words were spoken to Jacob Isaacs, the reader of the Sydney Synagogue); Ikey Solomon, a fence and a brothel keeper, who actually escaped from jail in London and made his way to New York and then to Australia under his own volition, to find his wife who had been transported there with their children. He was then brought back to London for trial, and finally transported back to Australia. Many pamphlets were written about him during his life and he became the prototype for Dickens' Fagin in "Oliver Twist".
Wednesday, December 6
Today I walked again in the botanical gardens. Hard to imagine the gulag past of this place in such a beautiful, cared-for landscape. I come upon a flame tree full of lorikeets, a small parrot-like bird. They are stunning. I have never seen so many colors on one creature: crimson, yellow, emerald. They look like the leaves and flowers of the flame tree. They hang upside-down on the branches and drink nectar from the flowers. As I pass by a low branch, one of them looks me right in the eye, unafraid. I stay there a long time, completely beguiled by this exchange of glances across the species boundary. If human creatures could look at each other in this way, what might be possible?
Monday, December 11
A Melbourne neighborhood: St. Kilda. Acland Street. It's the kind of street that happens when Europeans immigrate somewhere and improvise. Robson street in Vancouver, Fairfax in Los Angeles, Clement Avenue in San Francisco. You could probably name a dozen other streets in North and South America, Asia and Africa. Acland is a street of smells. Smells of pastry and pickles. Every other shop is either a restaurant, a bakery or a delicatessen. One restaurant/cafe is Scheherezade. It serves glasses of cold, sweet borscht, boiled potatoes, sauerkraut, kreplach, knockwurst, latkes and blintzes. One wall is full of pencil sketches by a Melbourne artist named Karl Duldig. Strong, quick sketches, some on napkins, of faces, only faces. This is the kind of restaurant a Yiddish poet could frequent. Small, it holds about ten round tables with bent wood chairs. The walls are painted in a soft gold floral pattern. It smells of coffee, tobacco and sauerkraut. I hear conversations in Polish, Yiddish and European-accented English.
Besides the food purveyors (including a "Fruitologist"), Acland street has record stores, book stores-at least two are "New Age", hairdressers, one large supermarket, several shops that sell everything from kitchenware to Indian scarves, a florist and a nursery. A few blocks to the North, where it becomes a residential street is the former parish hall that houses Theatreworks, where I begin performing tomorrow night.
Thursday, December 14
I meet a writer named Arnold Zable in Melbourne. He's done a lot of musing on how the Aboriginal People's notion of songlines echoes in the Jewish experience. In an essay called "Singing Eternity", Arnold quotes Bruce Chatwin: "Aboriginal creation myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path - birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterfalls - and so singing the world into existence." Arnold then goes on to trace his father's journey from Bialystock to Melbourne, from a promising career as a Yiddish poet, interrupted by deracination and economic necessity, to a return to poetry in the years before his death. Arnold writes: "Language. This is the primal clue, the code that may enable us to retrace the footsteps of our elders.
Without language, their fading songlines cannot be fully seen, located, deciphered. This was the great gift I received as a child, the gift of a language that would, in time, enable me at least to begin to retrace my ancestral songlines. The Yiddish language - first embedded in the lullabies of my mother. Augmented by the Yiddish language school I attended. In their wisdom, my elders had, to some extent, recreated the Old World in the New - libraries, a Yiddish theatre, a Yiddish press, schools, colleges, yeshivas."
Arnold did, in fact trace his "songlines" back to Bialystock. That journey resulted in a book called "Jewels and Ashes" which is available as a Harvest paperback. Arnold tells me story after story about Yiddish in Australia. For instance, Melekh Ravitch, a well-known Yiddish poet who lived in Melbourne for several years and went on expeditions into the outback to spend time with aborigines, dreamed of starting a Yiddish speaking settlement in the Kimberly Mountains in Northwest Australia. It never happened, but Ravitch wrote many poems about Australia before eventually moving to Montreal.
Arnold is writing a new book from the stories he's been collecting at Scheherazade: stories of the one who went to Siberia, the other who was in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the one who went to England, to America, to Australia and on and on. Again, songlines. The particular Jewish songlines are accounts of escapes, massacres, meetings in unexpected places, new beginnings far from where one first began. And yet, no less than the naming of features and creatures of the natural world, these stories are, indeed, a way that we, as Jews, sing a world into being.
Friday, December 15
I am drawn back to the cafe, Scheherazade, for breakfast this morning. At one table, seven elderly men are engaged in lively conversation in Yiddish. Three more are doing the same at another table. I've never heard this many people speaking Yiddish all at once. It's as if the sounds are thickening the air, making it dense with memory. I meet the owner/founder of the place, Avram Zeleznikow, a survivor and member of the Vilna partisans. I invite him to my performance. He brings his wife, Masha. Afterwards, they invite me back to Scheherazade for a late supper.
I find out that they both come from the Bundist tradition. Avram's mother, Etl Stock, actually ran a printing press for the Social Democrats in Kishinev in 1902 with none other than Josef Stalin. She also was on the Potemkin, as a nurse, when the sailors revolted. She and her husband had moved to Vilna by the time Avram was born. Avram's father was arrested by the KGB, after Russia invaded in 1939, and disappeared. The rest of the family died when the Nazis liquidated the ghetto. Avram joined the partisans and managed to survive. Masha's parents, also Bundists, spent part of the war in the gulags in Siberia and the rest in Khazakstan. By the end of the war, Masha was fluent in Polish, Yiddish, German, Russian and Khazak.
She went to Lodz to study medicine, where she met Avram. Sensing they had no future in Poland, they made their way to Paris and, in 1951, to Melbourne. Times were hard, but in 1958 they managed to buy the lease on "O'Shea's Chocolate Shop" which they turned into a restaurant and named Scheherazade after a Parisian nightclub they had courted in. Melbourne had never seen anything like it. It was as if some seeds that they had carried in a dormant state from Europe blossomed in this new place.
There was no "Cafe culture" at the time. They brought in the first espresso machine to the city. Soon, Scheherazade became a meeting place for holocaust survivors, artists, actors, musicians and business people. 32 years later, that's still the case. Masha and Avram are in their early seventies now, semi-retired. They still have that intellectually lively, socially tolerant sensibility I associate with secular Yiddishkeit. They are widely traveled, well read, avid theatre-goers, connected to the Jewish community in Melbourne and beyond.
As I sit there eating barley soup and blintzes with them, I marvel at the strangeness of finding these people here at the bottom of the world, so far from where any of us began. Masha says "It makes you feel at home, this food?" "More at home than home," I say. I'm not just talking about the food. I'm talking about a dream of a Jewish world that existed in Vilna and Warsaw before the Holocaust. The world of the poets and the painters and the actors and educators who were rooted in Yiddish culture but who were seizing modernity with all the passion of the first generation that was allowed to do so.
Sitting with Avram and Masha, I touch that ancestral culture that I've known mainly through literature and artifact, hardly at all through direct experience. I walk the block and a half back to my hotel filled with their warmth and generosity of spirit, feeling that I've been given back a piece of myself.