My Mother's Spice Cupboard

Our guest blogger ELANA BENJAMIN sets a place for Sephardi Jews at history’s table

It’s impossible to imagine a secondary school Jewish history curriculum today – at least an Australian one – that doesn’t include an in-depth analysis of the Holocaust or of Australian Jewish history.  But apparently, that’s exactly what was happening at Sydney Jewish day school Moriah College in the early 1960s.

I stumbled upon this piece of information while flicking through the glossy pages of the latest JCA (Jewish Communal Appeal) Community Source magazine.  The Australian Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) is one of JCA’s member organisations, and I was startled to read about a woman named Sophie Caplan OAM, whose involvement in the AJHS began when she realised that while her sons were attending Moriah College there were no Australian Jewish History or Holocaust History subjects being taught there.

No Australian Jewish history or Holocaust studies?  Well then, what were Moriah students in the early 1960s being taught in their Jewish history classes? By the time I was at Moriah in the mid-to-late 1980s, it would have been unthinkable to contemplate Jewish history without discussing Australian Jewry and Holocaust experiences.

Yet for all the progress made between Sophie Caplan’s kids’ schooldays and my own, there was – and as I understand, still is – a huge void in the teaching of Jewish history.  Although I was entirely educated in Jewish day schools, I never learned anything about the history of my ancestors: the Jews of Iraq and India. Similarly, there was no mention of the Jews of Egypt, or of Morocco, of Syria, Iran, Singapore, or China. In fact, the teaching of the history of the Sephardi Jewry stopped dead in its tracks after the Spanish Inquisition of 1492.

This lack of knowledge and awareness of my family and community’s experiences was my primary motivation for writing My Mother’s Spice Cupboard:  A Journey from Baghdad to Bombay to Bondi. 
My Mother’s Spice Cupboard is the story of my family’s migration from Iraq to India to Australia, intertwined with the history of the Baghdadi Jews of Bombay (now Mumbai).

The book is also about what it was like for me to grow up in a family where kitchens were filled with the aroma of spices and curries, where conversations were peppered with Arabic and Hindustani words and phrases, and where the traditions of Iraqi Jewry were followed.  Not your standard Australian Jewish upbringing.

I’ve always considered that my Jewish education almost entirely excluded the experiences of Sephardi Jewry.  And this huge omission made me feel that the lives and stories of Sephardi Jews weren’t as important as the stories of other Jews.  As a minority within a minority, I felt that the Sephardi Jewish experience had been marginalised.

But reading Sophie Caplan’s comments, it struck me that there was never any deliberate scheme by Jewish educators to exclude say, the stories of Iraqi Jews or Indian Jews from the teaching of Jewish history.  Just as there was no deliberate omission of Holocaust history or Australian Jewish history at Moriah 50 years ago.  It’s just that if no one implements change, then things simply stay the way they’ve always been.

So if I want today’s generation of young Jewish adults to understand the heritage of Sephardi Jews, writing My Mother’s Spice Cupboard is a good start.  But people also have to read it and talk about it.  And perhaps one day, my humble book will be incorporated into the Jewish history syllabus of Australian day schools.

Thanks Sophie, for your inspiration.

My Planets: a fictive memoir

Guest blogger DR DAVID REITER tackles the vexing problem of adoption and identity

An early photo taken just after I was adopted
from the Jewish orphanage

Imagine this. You're 50 years old. An only child, from a Jewish family. The people you thought of as your mother and father are dead. Then, in the middle of the night you get a phone call from the other side of the planet telling you they've found your mother. Alive. Your real mother. Suddenly, you become the oldest of seven across two families. All your assumptions about yourself are swept away. 

From Ground Zero, you begin a journey of rediscovery to reclaim your identity. But the truths you gather are relative, subjective. Like speculating on the nature of the universe from the perspective of one planet and then again from another. 

My Planets is in fact a suite of works – a physical book; an enhanced eBook incorporating images, music, sound and video with spoken word and text. Soon, it will be an app and possibly a film. 

Just after the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival, I'll be taking up a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, one of the leading New Media centres in the world, to adapt it into a more interactive form. The themes of adoption, loss of and reunification with biological families are themes that touch many people. Yet most of the coverage we get from the media is in carnival mode – people reunited after 50 years of separation, tears of joy, etc. etc... for ten minutes. Few opportunities to engage in a substantial discussion of the effect on those separated by force or circumstance. Just under the thin skin of bravery,  for the sake of the media scrum, lies the truth. The ambivalence. The incurable sense of loss. Self-doubt. And so forth.

For separated Jewish children of my generation, there were no counselling sessions, no thought of psychological impact. You were just expected to get on with it. Many weren't even told they had been taken from their biological parents and adopted out – or in my case placed in an orphanage for the first two years of my life. But even for those who were told, there could be problems, too. The context in which the truth was delivered, and revisited after that, could be damaging, especially in a mixed family where some siblings were 'natural'. The sense of otherness, of being welcome as a concession rather than a given, could take its toll. Ironically, it dovetailed very well with the lessons we received about being Jewish in a Christian and often alien world.

Most of the scenarios that warrant media attention dwell on the positives. How the adult child, nervous at first, is embraced by the biological parent as though the separation had happened only yesterday. And with the reunion comes a New Life, building on the positives earned through the persistence of the search. There's seldom discussion of the negatives. The guilt felt by the biological mother who surrendered her child, often under duress. Problems within the adoptive family. In my case, my adoptive father, with whom I was very close, died when I was only eleven, leaving my adoptive mother to support me. She couldn't handle it alone. Her mental fibre was weak, and the relationship became destructive. How do you discuss something like that with your biological mother in the first conversation you have during the reunion when she asks – fearing the worst – how your life had been as an adopted child? Do you tell the truth and risk the worst, knowing she's been wracked with guilt all her life? Or, as you've done for your whole life up till then, just internalise it?

The My Planets project uses the metaphor of the planets as a means of creating some distance between the rawer aspects of adoption and reunion, moving the personal into a more universal space occupied by parallel worlds, realities. Themes of conflict, for example, are dealt with in a Martian 'reality', providing a more measured view. Mythology can act for adults as fairy tales do for children – appealing to the unconscious, playing out the themes on neutral ground.

During and after my residency at Banff, I plan to have an active Wordpress site for the project, where I'll invite people in to respond to the project as it's being composed. My hope is that the Project will be dynamic, a work in progress, for some time. Perhaps it will never be finished. Hopefully it will give rise to other works and to a constructive exchange of ideas that allows for visible healing in its participants – and greater understanding from those who have been touched indirectly by the themes involved.

Ten Jewish books to read before you die

One opinion – what would you add, what would you delete?

1.     THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL  Anne Frank

A record of a young girl thoughts whilst in hiding from Nazis during the occupation of Holland.

2.    THE TRIAL  Franz Kafka

The ultimate experience of a world that’s now universally understood as ‘Kafkaesque’ – the story of a man, arrested, prosecuted by a remote authority. A study in powerlessness.

3.    TEVYA THE DAIRYMAN Shalom Aleichem

Amidst our collective suffering and angst, we need to be reminded to laugh.

4.    A TALE OF LOVE AND DARKNESS  Amos Oz

From Europe to Palestine, from a childhood in Jerusalem to time in the IDF, his Israeli story is one that resonates for many.

5.    HOWL  Allen Ginsberg

A celebrated poem by one of the leading figures of the Beat generation. It denounces the damaging forces of conformity and rampant capitalism. “Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!”

6.    FUGITIVE PIECES  Anne Michaels

A Jewish child in Poland escapes the Nazis, and is rescued by a Greek geologist. The narrative peels back layers of time and change, exploring trauma, loss, memory and migration in poetic language that successfully straddles the personal and the scientific.  

7.    REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST  Marcel Proust

The ultimate memoir.

8.    WHO KILLED DANIEL PEARL?  Bernard-Henri Lévy

Through telling the story of the journalist Daniel Pearl’s murder, Lévy provides a comprehensive overview of the jihadist movement and the profound affect their violent actions have had on the early 21^st century.

9.    GOODBYE, COLUMBUS Philip Roth 

Captures the zeitgeist of the North American Jewish community in the late 1950s, and deals with the problems that have resulted from the successful assimilation into the broader culture.  

10.  JULY'S PEOPLE  Nadine Gordimer

A study of racism and shifting power in pre- and post-apartheid South Africa.

11.  TORAH

Fear of retribution if we leave the Holy Book out.

Fire and Song

ANNA LANYON, our guest blogger, tells the story behind writing the story of Luis de Carvajal, the Jewish martyr who died together with his sister in Mexico City in 1596.

I came across the story of Luis de Carvajal in May 1994.  I was in Mexico City at the time, working in the Archivo General de la Nación, gathering material for my first book about a young indigenous woman caught up in the Spanish Conquest.  A friend and fellow historian told me about Luis. She said she believed that he had been a Jewish mystic who had lived and died in Mexico City. She mentioned also that his inquisitorial trial transcripts were held in the archives.  I thought about those transcripts for a while and decided to take a look at them, although I knew that this would mean neglecting my work in progress.

For the next three days I sat in my usual space at the Archivo, quietly turning the pages of Luis de Carvajal’s trial transcripts.  It was difficult at first. Not so much the language - Spanish has altered little since the sixteenth century compared with English - but these were not printed texts. The scribes who recorded Luis’s trials before the Mexican Inquisition in 1589 and 1596 had scratched his words on parchments with quill and ink. It took me a while to familiarise myself with their handwriting and the abbreviations, loops and flourishes they liked to use, but eventually I did, and Luis’s story began to emerge.  

I learned that at the age of fourteen he had left Spain with his family and crossed the Atlantic to Mexico in the hope of starting a new life in the New World. I learned that during the years that followed he had become increasingly devoted to his family’s secret ancestral faith – secret because Judaism had been prohibited by the Spanish Crown in 1492. By the time I reached the end of Luis’s long second transcript, I knew that he had been executed in Mexico City in December 1596, along with his mother and three of his sisters. I returned the documents to the archivist feeling sad and exhausted, but before doing so I made some notes and requested copies of several parchments. Next day I resumed my work in progress.

Trial transcript of Luis de Caraval,
 Mexico City, 1596 

Spiritual testament of Luis de Carvajal

Eleven years passed before I felt free to start work on my book about Luis de Carvajal. Another six years elapsed before I held the first copy in my hands. I’m not a fast writer. I spend a great deal of time thinking and mulling things over before I get to the writing stage. With this book I also had to spend a great deal of time translating documents from sixteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese into English; not just Luis’s trial transcripts and his personal writings, but those of his mother and sisters, and other relatives in Portugal who died before he was born. At times I felt like a character Jorge Luis Borges might have invented: an absurd soul lost and wandering in an endless labyrinth of words. But in the end I did find a way through the labyrinth and managed to complete the book. 

When I first began reading Luis’s trial transcripts I was driven by simple curiosity. The more I read, the more determined I became to ensure that his story would not be forgotten. Two factors kept me going during the six years I devoted to this book. One was the sentence pronounced by the city magistrate on the day that Luis died: that after his death his body would be burned to ashes so no memory of him would remain.  The second was something Luis himself wrote when he was 24 years old.  In a notebook he called his ‘book of miracles’ he declared that he wanted to record his experiences so that the many gifts and mercies God had granted him would be known ‘to all those who believe in the Holiest of Holies.’ I’m not the first person to have written about Luis de Carvajal; others before me have produced very fine work.  But Fire and Song is my own humble attempt to fulfil his wishes and keep his memory alive.

For more information ... 

Interview with Anna Lanyon on 'Late Night Live'.

To buy the book through our partner, Booktopia.

Publisher's information.

Surviving Post-Natal Deprivation

Written by guest blogger Loren Suntup, The Real Housewife of Sydney™

Four years ago my firstborn was born.

What an awesome, heaven-inspired moment to be cradling this miniature descendant of the Priestly Tribe of the Kohanim - 3.385 grams of perfect miracle and blessing. Giddy with joy and high on adrenalin I had no idea of what was to become of me.

Then, when my baby was two weeks old, and all the whisky from the Bris had finally worn off, the post-natal deprivation set in. 

I realised that I was never, ever going to have time to read again.

Before I became a mother I could cope with the concept of pre-natal deprivation - depriving myself of my favourite kosher delicacies - soft cheeses, Kosher Rose' wine and the Jewish staple of smoked salmon.

But the post-natal deprivation - now that's a topic that's more hush-hush than Joan Rivers' real age.

Of course I knew that there'd be certain depriving aspects of motherhood - like post-natal depression, the baby blues, the lack of sleep, limited adult conversation, not to mention getting around in clean clothes most days.

But during my entire pregnancy, no-one gave me the heads-up about a fairly rare form of post-natal deprivation that affects avid readers/un-maternal types – No more reading, ever - total literary deprivation. What a shock to the system that I would never read a book post-natally.

I started to wonder why post-natal deprivation is not widely documented.

Perhaps, because there is no real evidence to suggest that new mothers will never be able to read again after giving birth. That sort of statement would surely be absurd, because there's absolutely no reason why becoming a mother precludes you from enjoying the written word from time to time.

No, after having a baby, there's tons of stuff you can still read, like:

• The Kashrut Authority Kosher List every time you're at the supermarket
• Mothers’ self-help / parenting books, which chart your kid’s developmental milestones against a bunch of statistics based on obese newborns from another country in the 1980s who were weaned on Coca Cola and started solids at 4 months old, and were written by 1950s-minded mothers who think you're doing a rubbish job because you've let your baby cry in the pram while you scull your third coffee of the day, right before a breastfeed
• Street signs (that is, if you're not too tired to get behind the wheel to brave a journey from A to B), and
• Text messages from anyone who still contacts you, because G-d knows you don't have time to speak on the telephone anymore!

Clearly, a treasure trove of stuff to read for new mothers, just forget reading entire books that don’t relate to a new baby and/or how to raise it.

For me, my descent into post-natal literary deprivation left me pining for a Tudor fix of historical fiction books. I yearned for just a brief escape into the luxuriously glamorous Golden Ages.  Not to mention a book or two about the handsome, bad-boy King Henry VIII (who, by the way, would have completely adored the likes of me, not only for my acerbic wit to rival Anne Boleyn any day, but also because I am genetically prone to producing male heirs!)

But, forget the deprivation of reading whole, entire books, because I'm not the greedy type. Since having babies, I couldn't remember the last time I read a real newspaper cover-to-cover, or even paged through the Sunday Magazine. In fact, the last thing I could actually recall reading were the jokes on the back of the Libra Maternity Pad tear-off slips!

I realised my dire situation and decided to start the process of self-recover from my post-natal deprivation. One book at a time.

So. I booked a babysitter (read, husband), did something to make myself feel better (read, dropped the new-mothers’ guilt trip and left the house, alone) and bravely went in search of some real books for myself. I had to remind myself that I was not looking for books that fit in a baby's nappy bag or mouth, require you to scratch, sniff, feel and lift tags, or books with chewed corners that only have four pages made of board.

No, to dig myself out of this post-natal deprivation I needed proper books. Grown-up books with at least 400 pages, gold-embossed writing on the cover and a fresco of a real life Tudor royal on the cover.

At the time of this post being published, I’m proud to say that I’ve made a near-complete recovery from my post-natal literary deprivation. But the healing is in the reading. Simple as that.

So, every Shabbas afternoon I try to make it my business to make myself scarce and get stuck into a good old tale about one of King Henry's wives and their escapades. And what's more, by over-coming my post-natal deprivation, I think my boys will turn out all the better for it and hopefully, they'll learn a love of reading from me too.

Loren blogs at www.therealhousewifeofsydney.com and you can contact her at therealhousewifeofsydney@gmail.com | Twitter @RealWifeSydney| Facebook The Real Housewife of Sydney