In the long ago, when confessing to a bipolar episode that had impacted my ability to complete an essay by the due date, my Jewish History professor greeted my admission with a lack of sympathy accompanied by a nonsensical rebuke. ‘All Jews are bipolar,’ he pronounced. ‘The infirmity arises from demographic and historical rather than biological imperatives: the frontal lobe obsessed by exile, the occipital dreaming of redemption, both connected to memory.’ His authority on the matter was unmerited, his expertise clearly lying in matters of apocrypha rather than history.
Nevertheless, although scholars still debate the issue of bipolar’s ethno-genetic seedbeds, I’ve often found myself wondering whether a proclivity to the disorder might be a windfall specific to Ashkenazi Jews. I refer to those stemming and descending from Central or Eastern Europe where, over the centuries, this imperfect cluster was forced by their God, their rabbis, and ghettoisation to intramarry, making bipolar one generation’s legacy to the next.
No argument exists, however, over Mary-Claire King’s demonstration that a significantly increased risk of breast cancer was heritable due to mutations in the gene she called BRCA1. Subsequent research established that women of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry had a one in forty chance of carrying a BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation, with at least a ten times greater probability than the non-Jewish population. It’s old news now but when she located the region on the genome which became known as that gene, it was overwhelming. It was also the year the lump appeared on my left breast. The affliction did not strike my sister for another fourteen years. Eight years after that, courtesy of the gene—and ovarian cancer—she was dead. I think she would have accepted, albeit not gladly, my double affliction of sarcoma and randomly occurring mental distress had it meant she could have lived longer. Fifty-eight was far too young. But that was not the hand dealt her. My hand was different. Chemotherapy worked and then there was the psychiatrist who thought of Lithium.
*
I look like what I am. Aided and abetted by the Star of David I enduringly wear dangling from a gold chain to the hollow at my throat, I am dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a nose some might charitably describe as aquiline. I can be nothing else. Some of my fellow Jews contend sporting the Star over my outer wearables is simply asking for it, an argument always striking me as too depressingly similar to the one claiming a girl has only herself to blame should she presume to walk alone flimsily attired—or perhaps just alone. So, come what may, I wear it. I am not afraid; I am forever afraid, particularly with the stink of Gaza pungent in the global nostril and every Jew beyond that tormented border being fair game. I am not afraid; I am forever afraid. If you prick me…
Now, in the words of a gifted Welshman, as I was young and easy under the apple boughs, I had never experienced anti-Semitism in Australia, land of my birth. No real surprise. My generation was sheathed in a chrysalis spun by the scarred and hard-bitten ones who came before us, managing to escape the Old Country with their lives after 1945. It was not a cocoon designed to split open, much less allow the wings of its homelings to unfurl.
For in the New Country our forebears built Jewish kindergartens, followed by the monolith of Mount Scopus Memorial College, largest Jewish school in the southern hemisphere, never mind Australia. The word, ‘Memorial’ daily reminded us of those who had perished by pogrom, ghetto or gas. And, due to its location in Burwood, an outpost so inaccessible from the CBD in those days—and therefore eminently affordable—the city’s public transport system could never reach it. Instead, students were ferried to and from their sequestered seat of learning by chartered buses, thus avoiding those non-Jewish schoolchildren on their way to their non-Jewish campuses. With the advent of Jewish youth movements, Jewish holiday camps, Jewish chapters of Brownies, Cubs, Guides and Scouts, one could go almost two decades from birth without engaging with a single non-Jew.
*
Despite these inhibiting factors, I managed to light upon the exceedingly multicultural Prahran College, at that point, the only tertiary institution in Victoria offering a combined creative writing and literature module. To enrol, I dropped out of Melbourne University’s uninspired Bachelor of Arts program, my people looking askance at what they deemed a grievous intellectual regression. Any academy not bearing the word university on its masthead was beneath their regard. Of equal import, university corridors—unlike those of the imperfectly protected colleges—delivered social and political associations designed to keep their Jewish attendees safe, separate and untouched by a society that did not worship at our altar. Signing my Prahran student union card, I persuaded myself I was ready to renounce such asylum.
So there I was, green and if not quite carefree, already famous, as the aforementioned Welshman would have it, among the barns, about the happy yard, for my seemingly inexhaustible vocabulary and inability not to flaunt it. Time let me play and be until one day at a coffee break, Jimmy Danielopoulos said to me, ‘Don’t jew the sugar, love. Pass it over here.’ At which point Sofia Bertelli elbowed him in the ribs and hissed, ‘She’s Jewish, you moron.’ Jimmy looked at her, surprised. He was using the word ‘Jew’ as a verb, as defined in its OED 19th century infinitive context: pop. usage of “to Jew” — to cheat or overreach. He did not intend it as a racial slur. For my part, I was left gasping at a taxonomy I had never before encountered.
I passed him the sugar.
But that night, child as I was of survivors whose first law of motion was don’t poke your head above the parapet, I experienced an anxiety attack. I had done my best to asphyxiate the messages daily breathed into me through my early years: ‘Safety exists only among your own kind. Anywhere else? You’ll see, the stones will start to fly. And if you marrythem? One day in an argument you know what they’ll say? ‘Bloody Jew—yes, ‘Bloody Jew!’’
A consequence of our indoctrination was spiralling panic whenever I or my contemporaries encountered even the mildest whisper of what we believed was a manifestation of anti-Semitism. Demonstrably the next Holocaust was just waiting to erupt. We were unable to conceive of, never mind distinguish between, any forms of antipathy that were not harbingers of death. To this day, many in my generation still respond with knee-jerk, often disproportionate, aggression to anything suggesting an iota of negativity. Mired in received narratives, we pass them down to our own children: ‘Trust no one. They’re all out to get you. Us.’
Even in the absence of any desire to marry Jimmy, the message had reclaimed its oxygen. And it does that every so often, especially in these days and years after October 7th when Lithium does not always manage to keep me grounded. It is good but not infallible. There is a six-month period when I wake after only two hours sleep—a typical symptom of the depressive feature of my malady. (No sleep at all signifies mania, but that is not my problem these days). The protest marches through the streets of my home town send me spiralling into inter-generational dread, waiting for the windows to shatter at the hands of a mob. Come morning, bipolarised perfectly into an inability to rise and face the day, I cry out to a God I don’t believe in to rescue me. That doesn’t work either.
*
Prahran’s syllabus unwound in all its heresy before my ever-astonished gaze. I say ‘heresy’ because it eventually dawned on me that the one text absent from the personal library I was accruing was the Christian Bible, by reason of its having been the most reviled and outlawed tome for students quarantined in the Jewish school system. Apostasy, perfidy, to suggest it might contain any material of merit! Yet, having worked my way through only a few of the prescribed novels by that stage, I began to see that if I did not dare examine the aforementioned illicit volume, there would be mysteries I would never unravel in the literature I was being asked to analyse. Except… never having laid eyes on a copy, with no idea of its nomenclature, I whispered a garbled request to the librarian, all the while eyeing autumn’s skies uneasily through the slightly begrimed windows. When lightning did not strike, I stuffed the book deep, deep inside my backpack, praying my contraband might thus evade God’s notice. Yes, that God, the one the entire Scopus faculty had programmed my psyche to believe Saw All.
I dived in, but it was a tough read, what with Matthew calling the Jews poisonous vipers and my realising that the expression, ‘the blind leading the blind’ originated in Jesus telling his disciples with regard to the Pharisees: they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit. I was the descendant of Pharisees. John condemned them for rejecting the commandments. And Luke—again with the poisonous snakes! Repeating his censure of Torah scholars and Pharisees, John moved on to declare Jews were descended from the Devil, who was, in fact, their father. In the Acts of the Apostles Peter repeatedly accused Jews of killing Christ.
After finding more of the same in Paul’s Letters and Epistles, by the time I completed my self-prescribed homework, I was unable to appreciate much of the rest of the Testament. Outrage, sadness, impotence: was that what my teachers had tried to protect me from? Even so, I knew I would rather relinquish that protection—one thousand times rather know than not know—the only drawback being that once a thing is known it can never again be unknown. But my hard-won knowledge brought its own reward: a sharper sense of how so many literary texts through the ages had been shaped. Their protagonists fascinated me, for now I could recognise figures modelled on a suffering messiah sent to stir the world’s conscience. Bitter irony in finding that the immaculate guiding essence of this hyperbolised presence emanated from a barefoot Jewish rabbi, a Sabbath breaker, whose origins, disturbingly, straddled my own.
*
Almost all Christian-themed fiction was practically unknown to me before I found my way to Prahran, and later, back to university. At Scopus, The Merchant of Venice and Oliver Twist were taught chiefly as cautionary tales: ‘This is how the goyim see us!’ thus consigning the Bard, as well as a giant slab of English literature, to Gehinom, the rabbinic version of hell. Nevertheless, having been ably assisted by Melbourne University’s poetry syllabus—inside which I discovered T.S. Eliot’s viciously elegant Judeophobia—my teachers’ fearful sectarianism seemed all but confirmed. If April was the cruellest month, Eliot’s mean-spirited spleen was one of the cruellest blows dealt me as an undergraduate. And far from the only one.
T.S. and his royalist compeers aside, however, and provisionally freed from the bonds of a well-meaning but doctrinal alma mater, I found myself overwhelmed by a torrent of mesmerising storytelling, a canon wholly other. In I plunged with the fervour of a convert. Simultaneously, the oral tradition of my parents did not cease its competition for my attention, although those tales were generally brief and pithy, lacking art or artifice. Their power lay in the casualness by which they disclosed details, ostensibly unexceptional, of, say, their first meeting, which just happened to be in Auschwitz. Or of how my father escaped being forced aboard this train with lots of carriages, which just happened to be travelling from the Lodz Ghetto to Treblinka’s fatal chambers. And then there was the one about how my mother got separated from her mother and brother one day, never finding them again because they were being pushed to the left and she to the right, with a chap named Mengele directing the pushing. Those were my first encounters with sagas of danger, serendipity, bravery and even romance and, temporarily, they sufficed. Many of my peers, after all, had grown up with parallel chroniclings: this was how love, heroism, survival and, yes, normality, manifested. We knew neither better nor different. I would be much older before identifying the bleakness within.
*
What did my mother think about, I often wondered, when for weeks every year my father left her in the hands of psychiatrists and hospitals? When the wires were tripped, when they frayed and snapped in spasms of remembering? I had no way of knowing, but suspected that Australian-born victims of bi-polar disease weren’t plagued by recollections of Josef Mengele pushing them to the right and their mothers, clutching their baby brothers, to the left, to the gas, where the only way out was up. In smoke.
*
Dreaded essays with their dreaded deadlines kept materialising. They tripped my own wires: depressive fear of failure, of disappointing those convinced education was the surest escape, the surest route to freedom, and therefore, not so bizarrely, forced upon our entire generation. But escape to, freedom from—what?
‘I came across some figures once,’ I never dared say to either parent. ‘Did you know that it was the ones with degrees, the Jewish academics, who perished first in Germany? So well-educated, they knew they would always be safe in das Vaterland…’
It followed that inside the frozen darkness, where all creativity dies and not even a skerrick of intellectual thought can survive, those deadlines came to haunt me. Countless doctors’ letters, explaining my inability to function, saved me from being tossed out of the department but they could not make the essay requirements vanish. Eventually I would have to submit, to tender the required word count. As I hibernated with permission of the medical and academic fraternities, I could not begin to imagine how I would manage it.
*
Yet it was not all misery. That is bipolar’s mischief. There were times when the veil lifted and I did not retreat into clouds of melancholy, nor did my mind leap and race into the fearful but exhilarating zone of mania. Instead, I could rise regularly, attend lectures regularly and find I was able to remember great swathes of the required reading. And each time it happened I was deceived, convinced that this time I had broken free of the disorder’s clutches.
I call it The Great Escape, the Jewish Version: not only breaking free from my inheritance of cognitive chaos, but also, during those periods of deliverance, being liberated from my own people’s narratives. I should mention that the diversity which, nowadays, is de rigueur as far as syllabus-content is concerned, was a requirement not sought after, much less lauded in academe back then. In that traditionalist, white-bread environment, it was considered sufficiently, no, abundantly radical to be including so many women writers in the mix. But the meteoric nature of my voyage into the literary unknown spun me past that irony: Malory, Marvell, Marlowe and Milton, Defoe, Swift, Blake, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Hardy, Yeats, Auden, Wilde, the Brontes, Eliot (George), Austen, Woolf (Mr and Mrs), O’Brien, Lessing, Joyce, James, Conrad, and Orwell. Not necessarily in that order: this inventory merely a random and pleasurable reminiscence of the various classes I took. Have I missed anyone? Surely Chaucer and Donne. Not forgotten.
Yet could I forgive them their Jew-malevolence? Another blade. Another bleed.
Then the adrenaline rush of the Americans: Emerson, Poe, Longfellow, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Lee, Oates, Angelou, Didion, O’Connor, Twain, Frost, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck. O, but et tu, Hemingway? And Gatsby’s Wolfsheim? The great escape, I found, carried its own contagion—freedom, its own exile.
Next, no debt owed to Melbourne University, its culture of cringe brushing off Australians with only a passing reference to Judith Wright, A.D. Hope and a smattering of Lawson, Prahran led me to encounters with Furphy, Clarke, Franklin, Richardson and Thomas Keneally’s devastating The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith. Four years later he would write another tale of another genocide. And almost an entire semester was devoted to Patrick White, Australia’s sole Nobel laureate in literature.
White’s Voss took me to the outback. Armed with New Testament insight, I could identify its protagonist as a flawed Christ figure in a tale replete with the tragedy of a doomed quest. But it was in Riders in the Chariot that I was confronted with Mordechai Himmelfarb, a definitive incarnation of a Holocaust survivor and, finally, martyr to Australian anti-Semitism. I read it with a critical eye, my Year 11 Religious Instruction teacher’s voice ringing loud: What can goyische writers really know about Jewish characters? It soon became apparent that this one understood ‘from the inside,’ as our Talmudic scholars are wont to say, the minutiae of Judaism. He would also have understood how anti-Semitism, not a common phenomenon in 19th century Australia, was mounting: thus the wrenching scene of Himmelfarb’s mock crucifixion at the novel’s climax. And when the Aboriginal character, Alf Dubbo, claims three times that ‘he does not know’ Himmelfarb, a cold hand brushed the nape of my neck. I grasped that White was turning Peter’s betrayal of Jesus on its head: now it was the Jew being protected by the denial.
My reading of Voss, however, delivered an unintended consequence, arousing in me a fierce desire to see the wilderness for myself, albeit one far removed from Sinai. Jews, supposedly, have an affinity with the desert, forty years of wandering hard-wired into our notions of identity and self, deeply embedded within our foundation narrative.
*
When first I travelled to the MacDonnell Ranges, a small group of us left for Black Tank north of Alice Springs before making our way along the Larapinta Trail. We walked what was for me the terrifying Euro Ridge. My companions, strangers to Jewish fatalism and raised in milieus far less alarmist than mine, seemed to skip lightly along its narrow corridor. Did they not realise that one false step could see them tumbling into eternity? At Mt Sonder we were in Namatjira country, the sight of the sad painter’s twin ghost gums quietening me as his spirit seemed to hover somewhere just out of reach.
All the same, I was thirsty and exhausted, feeling too much like Voss for comfort. The next day, on a supposedly easy walk to Rocky Bar Gap, somewhere between the vicious spinifex and the uneven terrain, my gait became increasingly unsteady. A bus-ride to the Ellery Creek Big Hole was a welcome reprieve. I could not scramble into my bathers fast enough, anticipating how the lake would soothe and heal me. But my homeland’s primordial badlands were a perpetual shock to my overheated body, the lake’s deep iciness a distressing jolt. Still, I am a strong swimmer, buoyant and fast through water as I could never be on land where Newton’s rigid codes of gravity constrain me. Archimedes’ laws are far better suited to my roundness. Nonetheless, for all my prowess I could not swim home. Like those other Jews before me, I was condemned to wandering the desert until, by the grace of God, I was shown the way.
In those days spent trudging, laughing, crying, unfurling my swag, furling it, missing home and simultaneously dreading my return, I excoriated myself. What was I doing? I was the daughter of rag traders. It was not my process to keep a notebook out here, to be putting down words in the Dry. I needed caffeine; street-cacophony, searing synapses, a desk and deadline to activate that moonstruck finger-gallop over the keyboard, that driven urge which forced—and kept—me from my bed. My soul, if I have one, is a city soul, something to do with strands of urban DNA, ghetto blood.
Another time, painfully aware of my trespass over unceded land, I write of a landscape that allows me to sit on its raw-boned lap only grudgingly… as an uninvited guest at a 70,000 year old party.
*
I have not yet mentioned the subset of authors, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners who mocked, sometimes lovingly, sometimes with astonishing savagery and wild sexuality, the places that bore them and the places to which they or their kin fled: Babel, Levi, Richler, Heller, Schwartz, Malamud, Bellow, Roth, Sontag, Stein, Paley, Olsen, and Ozick. Et al.
Jews. All Jews…
By ignoring these works, Mount Scopus betrayed its students yet again so that there was this breathless, uncritical excess with which I reacted to almost all of them, their splendid novelty so mightily assaulting me. And therein the paradox: in my Great Escape, wasn’t I now on some Kafkaesque journey, rushing headlong towards home despite my best efforts to elude it?
*
Enter Sir Thomas Malory whose Le Morte d’Arthur captured my imagination most profoundly, causing many of my contemporaries, perhaps not entirely without justification, to take a dim view of my passion: ‘His knights killed Jews through Europe and then in Palestine. On Crusades. Because they said we were Christ killers, illegitimate occupiers of Jerusalem. That’s good literature?’
How to explain that in reading this ultimate quest chronicle, I had embarked on a strange, most mysterious quest of my own? Forget the New Testament’s multiple infirmities and consider instead that Sir Thomas had shattered a mirror in whose fractured shards I saw reflected fragments of a literature that was strangely familiar. For there he was, interleavingLe Morte with elements of the Hebrew Bible, infusing it with traces of the Exodus narrative, the King David metaplot and random references from Talmudic and subsequent Hebrew exegetical commentaries.
Among the myriad obscure readings I found one linking the very sword Arthur drew from the stone—an action Galahad would be mirrored performing—as having passed from Goliath’s scabbard to King David’s possession. A wonderment. As a conscientious Mount Scopus student, I could identify exactly where in the Hebrew Bible it had been used by the boy who would be king in his beheading of Goliath, immediately following the slingshot event. 1 Samuel 17:51. Quite!
I would also read that King Arthur would be warned that a child born on May Day would one day usurp him. Setting his tragic destiny in train, he would order all babies delivered on that date to be placed aboard a ship fated to sink. Yet Mordred, his bastard son and nemesis, would survive this ordeal. As in the story of Pharaoh’s attempts at slaying all the first-born of the Hebrews to safeguard his kingship, Moses too, survives his trial by water and rises to challenge the Egyptian king. My neurons fired electrical signals throughout my nervous system, transmitting information exquisite and chimerical. Surely Arthur was not Pharaoh, nor Mordred Moses, but the dynamic tension between the two chroniclings was difficult to ignore.
Withal, the truly inescapable connection between texts lay deep within the Sangreal, or Grail narrative. It still makes my Scopus-bred self shudder a little, because the Holy Grail was considered by many to be the chalice from which Jeus drank at the Last Supper. Sharing the wine with his disciples, he declared it to be his blood. But even—or perhaps especially—in simulation, Jews are forbidden from consuming the blood of verily the smallest animal, much less a human’s, deemed, as all blood was, to be the source of life.
The Last Supper giving birth to the first blood libel? A Jew drinking blood? Neurons again.
But I wander.
Hard on the chalice’s trail, I discovered there was an empty chair at King Arthur’s Round Table reserved for the one who found the Sangreal. Galahad, no less. And once he had seen the Sangreal, after a life of surviving ordeals and performing miracles, Galahad asked only to be rewarded by being allowed to die at a moment of his choosing. Eventually, he was whisked to heaven by angels, with a recurring mediaeval trope identifying him as the chivalric representation of Jesus, although Jesus clearly did not meet with an end commensurately merciful.
An empty chair. I shivered. Like Galahad, Elijah is swept up to heaven, but ascends in a fiery chariot led by fiery horses after a lifetime of service to God and His people, having performed myriad miracles. The sages teach he is invited to every circumcision ceremony where an empty chair is left for him. At the Passover Seder, a cup is filled with wine and the door is opened as a song is sung, welcoming him into every house and entreating him to drink. The wine does not represent blood and the chair is not for one of knightly distinction, but as I studied the tales and recalled my lessons, I was beset by an image of those two virtuous men finding their chairs at a table—be it Round or Seder—and raising their respective cups to one another across time.
I stepped lightly from Le Morte to T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. Same story, differently configured, combining the elegant, incisive, if sometimes rambling traditions of the 19th century with the erudite absurdity of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, still decades away from being born. Written between 1938 and 1941, this version argued powerfully against ‘might makes right.’ Its characters were wrapped in urbane metaphor against fascism, totalitarianism and the gullibility of those who would relinquish their power to such malfeasant authorities. Within its pages was also a recalibrated love story of almost unbearable desolation, the famous triangle of Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot with its representation of ways in which an alliance, a marriage, a fellowship and even a kingdom could degrade and die.
*
But because, as Jesus said to Matthew, man does not live by bread alone, I did not survive on a diet of the classics alone. And here is where bipolar enters with an oddly beneficial step this time. Deep in its netherest, bleakest regions, when it is almost impossible to anything but stretch out on the bed and wait for sleep, all I could do was read in an effort to bypass conscious thought. Withdraw from the world and read. And during one of those episodes lasting many months I discovered an obsessive love of crime fiction. Beginning with the great Dames, Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, I graduated to the great hard-boileds: Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler and, in logical progression, unearthed Ross Macdonald, Stuart Kaminsky, Jim Thompson, Mickey Spillane et al. When I began writing for the theatre, it was their style of dialogue which found its way into the mouths of my characters: men and women exchanging fast repartee, demonstrating their smart and savvy take on the world by cracking wise.
I was already completely beguiled by the genre when I discovered Walter Mosley. Writing in the 1990s, Mosley’s alter ego was Easy Rawlins, a Black private detective, a WWII war veteran who had been involved in the liberation of Dachau. Reflecting on the predicament of Jews’ unending and changeless-ever-changing suffering he wrote a sentence my memory has never been able to set aside: That was why so many Jews back then understood the American Negro; in Europe the Jew had been a Negro for more than a thousand years.
I am sure it was as a result of this self-prescribed crime curriculum that an idea, long brewing in my subconscious, now came to a head. I would relinquish the Great Quest Narrative I’d long thought I’d be writing, and instead forge a novel with a private eye at its centre. She would be female and Jewish, trek the desert, be profoundly neurotic, naturally, but would also become expert in hand-to-hand and small-arms combat. And she would kill herself some Nazis. That was pivotal to the exercise, for in it I saw a way I could, in some anti-chronical, time-disordered fashion, redress the injustice perpetrated upon my fallen kin. Fiction masquerading as fact.
What was it about the personalities of these hard-boileds and their authors’ crime-solving avatars that so fascinated me? That made me lay aside the romance and tragedy of King Arthur’s finespun heraldry and turn to a grotesque, far more immediate narrative of slaughter and extermination? Why had following the tortuous routes of the detectives’ life- experiences felt so familiar, even though a nice Jewish girl from the Borscht Belt in Melbourne could surely have little in common with tough individuals solving crimes as they walked the mean streets of their inhospitable American cities?
I reasoned thusly: within the crime-writing genre, the tale is typically told in first person, its hero taking centre stage, and it is the nature of these lonely private eyes that their moral compass is always pointed at true good, not to be confused with the constantly-shifting magnetic good, towards which most of the rest of the world points. Ultimately, right makes might, good triumphs over evil, even if that victory comes at great cost. But the centre holds and the heroes continue fighting the battles of morality and integrity because in the fictional world of the private eye, they can never lose, neither the battle nor their lives. There can be no story if the centre does not hold.
The centre cannot hold.
Yeats’s haunting line filled me with foreboding and melancholy, an endless echo within a desolate universe. Yet when I write my crime fiction, I inhabit an impregnable place of refuge. I am in charge of a centre that always holds and within it, no one can knock at my door in the middle of the night, haul me into the street, shove me onto a train, into an oven or a hole in the ground. I can never be the victim. And I need that world because, as a child of survivors, I have grown up knowing—and know still—of evil’s great power, that all of us are this close to plummeting into the widening gyre where anarchy is loosed, good people die and the centre rarely holds.
*
But if I may borrow from S/Paul of Tarsus, I put away childish things and began post-graduate work. I was all read out and had grown tired of being told exactly through which lens I should look in order to evaluate each literary trope. I thought I would find a cure to what ailed me by studying history. Prahran did not offer the subject but Melbourne University’s Faculty of All-Things-That-Were-No-More welcomed me. Ever conservative across departments, it suggested I begin by investigating the cultural and intellectual life of 19th and 20th Britain. And as though some celestial magnet were in play or, as the Psalms would have it, by some mighty outstretched hand, I was drawn—or thrown—to the wolves: Leonard and Virginia, to be precise
Here they were, the mixed marriage from heaven, nobody calling anybody Bloody Jew, just a scholarly nirvana of sharing work, editing, publishing and mingling with a crowd of the most erudite and sophisticated intellectuals. Or so it seemed.
Before long, my addiction to the novel was reactivated and I was ploughing through Virginia’s oeuvre. I read both of Leonard’s novels, cringing at The Wise Virgins, awestruck by The Village in the Jungle, left wondering how his career as a novelist might have developed had he not played constant nurse-maid and companion to his brilliant wife. I read Virginia’s letters, her diaries; Leonard’s autobiography, all before I even approached secondary sources. Impossible not to see the childhood trauma of Virginia’s losing her mother and stepmother so young, as well as the effects of abuse at the hands of her Duckworth half-brothers. Impossible not to acknowledge the devastating effect of what today would likely have been classified as bipolar disorder and treated with Lithium. Whether or not Lithium impedes creativity—and would therefore have denied the world of Virginia’s genius—is an argument that has raged since 1948, when the Australian psychiatrist John Cade first used it to treat patients with mania. Artists on either side of the divide either embrace it or spurn it. But the point is moot. There was no Lithium. Without it, Virginia was trapped in her madness with only Leonard and some mystified, often ignorant and incompetent doctors offering care.
It was a good marriage but my notion of its interracial harmony was not the whole story. In a letter to Ethel Smyth, Virginia describes a trip to visit her mother-in-law—whom she portrays as ‘aged 80 and as spry as an old tramp.’ After another genial slur or two, she concludes:
How I hated marrying a Jew—how I hated their nasal voices, their oriental jewellery, and their noses and their wattles—what a snob I was: for they have immense vitality, and I think I like that quality best of all. They can’t die—they exist on a handful of rice and a thimble of water—their flesh dries on their bones but still they pullulate, copulate and amass… millions of money.
Why did I chuckle? Where had my outrage gone? Had I been out from under long enough to be able to identify the difference between this sort of affectionate contempt shaded with pale colours of esteem and admiration and that of material acceptable to editors of Der Stürmer? I was not sure, but I could understand that this was not the sort of anti-Semitism that foreshadowed another Holocaust.
There are those who claim, on behalf of one partner or the other, that it was a marriage of convenience, enabling and co-dependence, but I will cast my lot with the biographers who maintain the opposite: while it was always a given that Leonard loved Virginia, there is no question that Virginia also loved Leonard with a passion that was as unconventional—albeit not physical—as it was intense. By 1940, Leonard was a prominent Jew and Virginia an outspoken intellectual, with rumours of an imminent German invasion and an S.S. ‘hit list’ on which both their names were prominent. They made a suicide pact. They would rather die together than fall into German hands.
Such behaviour does not bespeak a marriage a of convenience whatever else it might suggest to modern-day psychologists. Writing in Commentary (December 2006) John Gross asserts that “Virginia did not like Jews,” and claims that Leonard’s marriage was a sham of self-hatred. Refuting this, a journalist for The New York Observer claims that such overweening sensitivity,
is unbefitting to a proud race and religion. Yes Virginia Woolf obviously made anti-Semitic statements; but the dour judgment of her as a Jew-hater is overwrought and particularist. Can we take a joke? Has a Jew ever made a crack about gentiles? I guess not… [S]he made a lot of sharp comments about a lot of people. Hanging her up on the anti-Semitic ones, most of them trivial, is legalistic and pettifogging. Does intermarriage present cultural challenges of mutual suspicion and prejudice? Absolutely. And people say stuff, and also work their way through stuff. (The New York Observer, December 2006)
But it is her suicide note to Leonard which, in more ways than one, must be the last word on the subject. Its final lines are a powerful declaration of allegiance and steadfastness:
What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.
Could Lithium have saved Virginia? Had Hitler been able to invade Britain, her fears for her and Leonard’s fate, were not unreasonable. When she suicided, the Blitzkrieg was at full throttle. The stories emerging from Europe about the attempted extinction of the Jews were already horrifying enough for those who were prepared to listen and believe. Yet, if I believe Lithium could have halted Virginia’s attempt, I would also have to conclude that Lithium could protect me from my own great leap into the abyss. And, from my various journeys into the bottomless pit, I’m not so sure I can, Lithium notwithstanding.
*
But how could all the novels help with what I’ve come to call the Mount Scopus graduates’, (past and present), Chicken Little obsession? The sky will fall. On Jews. They will come. For Jews.
Australia is vast but it is still an island. We of the second generation are elderly ourselves now, but many of us still dream the running dream, the being-chased dream.
I grew up with the story of my maternal grandmother, after whom my older sister, Beyle, was named. And Beyle hated her namesake. She could not forgive the grandmother she never met for risking the lives of her children for a myth, for a god, the curse, as she saw it, of her people. In that woman’s pre-war household, the non-Jewish housekeeper had begged her mistress to flee to her family’s farmhouse. ‘Come, live distant from Budapest, hidden away from the evil. I will visit often, Madame Beyle. I will look after you. They will never find you. Please, you have always been so good to me.’ But the grandmother refused, afraid of the food in the servant’s house: not kosher. ‘The rigid madness of the Orthodox. Their haughty spinning spirit,’ as Saul Bellow described it. So, together with the infant she would not relinquish to the soldiers awaiting them at the terminus, she was flung into the bottomless murk, the final destination. Only my mother survived. Bipolar waiting in the wings
So what do we do? Where do we run? Who would hide us?
Looking for answers, I began to spend my days off reading different texts and documents whose pages incorporated more statistics than words, numbers generated in the aftermath that were more terrifying than any monograph could have been.
Yad Vashem, the official World Holocaust Remembrance Center located in Jerusalem, is dedicated to honouring the six million Jewish victims, survivors, and the ‘Righteous Among the Nations, or Righteous Gentiles.’ These are defined as non-Jews who risked their lives, liberty, or safety to rescue Jews from annihilation by Nazis. Yad Vashem has identified and honoured around 28,000 of them, 7,000 of whom originated from Poland. At first reading that sounded substantial, but I couldn’t leave it alone. The arithmetic plagued me. Three-and-a-half million Jews lived in pre-war Poland among 35 million Poles. Which made it .02% of the population to be counted as righteous. Europe’s total pre-war population was around 530 million which reduced the combined allocation of the righteous to something like .0053%. As my anger rises in the face of these calculations, so does a question that refuses dismissal.
Would I have been a righteous Jew when all around me gentiles were being slaughtered?
*
Jews ran from the blood-soaked soil of Europe to be strangers on the other side of the globe upon what they thought was unsullied ground. That is what we heard at home and what we were taught at school. I never thought much about it except to marvel at Australia’s being a country on whose land no war had supposedly ever been fought. And then one day I found myself at an Australian National Playwright’s Conference in the early nineties. I had truly left my comfort zone. There was not another Jew in sight and I had to make friends with complete strangers. I also had to understand that Australia’s unsullied, unbloodied, unfought-over land was another lie.
I met Bob Maza, Indigenous actor and activist. I was drawn to him because he was strumming a guitar very gently, his singing drawing others to join him. His voice was both tuneful and gravelly, an Aussie Louis Armstrong, with a quotient of grief and knowing woven deep inside his music. I had no idea who he was. All I knew was that even in my Prahran College days, the broad cultural brush had never swept wide enough to paint in our First Nations People. And it had only been so incredibly recent that I’d been able to include non-Jews in my milieu. Now I realised not only had I never met an Indigenous Australian before, the lack of that interaction had never even occurred to me. The cocoon had been immensely effective.
*
Years passed. I became a student of classical Jewish text, drawn by stories older and more outré than those my tertiary institutions had taught. As such, I possess a small but diverse collection of arcane books and commentaries. In one strange little volume of legends from the Jerusalem Talmud, this exegesis jumped out at me:
When the Children of Israel perform the will of God, He searches through the world to find righteous persons existing outside the Children of Israel. He brings them in, so they may be attached to Israel. Such were Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, and Joshua’s future wife, Rahab. But when Israel angers God, He removes the righteous among them. (Jerusalem Talmud, Brachot 2:8)
I discover the notion of the righteous gentile dates back to biblical times. Within our foundation narrative exists the concept of a relationship supposed to be fostered between them and us, Jews and non-Jews. Us and them. When there is danger, the righteous from outside Israel will see our distress, come to our aid. When we conduct ourselves with integrity, honour and decency, we attract those from the outside world who will stand for us, defend and help us through our suffering.
This goes against the contemporary, Orthodox wisdom of my upbringing which preaches blatant isolationism: eat and socialise separately, go to school, sport, worship and stand under the wedding canopy separately. Only thus can you hope to maintain the purity of Judaism. But if we are living like that, with none of the righteous of the Nations of the World among us, according to the exegesis, it must mean that God has removed all righteousness from Israel. One thing I have often wondered is whether having more contacts beyond the community, beyond the cocoon, would have saved more of the Jews of Europe. It is one of the great imponderables.
*
Once my father told me—his mind still hustling, agile—‘So many died in the camps. Just because we survived doesn’t mean we were braver, stronger, smarter. Maybe we made a sharp choice or two, but in the end we were just luckier.’
‘But my cancer? Bipolar?’ I challenged him.
‘Luckier,’ he insisted. ‘You’re still here, aren’t you?’ and I knew he was thinking of my sister.
I’m glad he died before October 7th. I’m glad he did not live to see his beloved Israel descend into corrupt and barbaric chaos with the slaughter of tens of thousands of the Other being perpetrated by his own people. It never stops hurting, this new iteration of being a Jew—being seen as the persecutor not the persecuted, the oppressor not the oppressed. The mood swings were supposed to ease with aging, not become more intense.
And yet, I am still what is called a high-functioning manic-depressive. Not a PC term these days. In polite company, referring to it as Bipolar Disorder is now far more seemly. But over the years I’ve come to understand that a rose by any other name…
Still, I have lived with this rose for 50 years in my Australian iteration. I take the Lithium.
I read somewhere that it works on 80 per cent of sufferers in their early manic phases, but the success rate is far lower in its use as an ongoing treatment. It doesn’t work for everyone.
It does for me. At the moment. Mostly.
Just luckier, I guess.
_________
Yvonne Fein is a Melbourne-based novelist, former literary journal editor, and editor of Abraham Biderman’s award-winning Holocaust memoir, The World of My Past. Her Pushcart Prize-nominated creative nonfiction and short fiction explore the intersections of intergenerational trauma, literature, and health. A passionate advocate for disability awareness, she has also facilitated writing workshops for individuals navigating mental illness and performed stand-up comedy for social action.