Sydney's wealthy worlds

By Ros Reines

Ros Reines 

Soon after my latest novel, The Social Diary (Allen & Unwin), was published earlier this year, people kept asking me who the characters were based on and whether or not the story line actually happened.

This is one of the drawbacks of being a journalist turned novelist, many readers forget that a novel is first and foremost a work of fiction. Many expected that I had simply threaded my Sunday Telegraph' gossip columns together and connected them with a plot. If only it was that easy.

A lot of champagne is consumed in The Social Diary

Perhaps it's  to be expected because just like my column, much of The Social Diary, is set in Sydney's eastern suburbs but it's back in the eighties, which was a key moment in the city's social history. This was when the `old money' set was suddenly swamped by a brash breed of entrepreneurs who cared little for traditional social mores. They were outrageously flashy and downright decadent, taking over the restaurants for endless lunches and almost draining the city of vintage French bubbles. 

Even more confronting, while the establishment families had always shunned mentions in the media, the new guard thrived on it - however they didn't just want their pictures just  in the social pages but splashed across  the front page. They were contenders not pretenders.

Meanwhile they held over-the-top parties, which almost rivalled  the recent wedding of Auburn deputy mayor, Salim Mehajer. But unfortunately while eighties' entrepreneurs had plenty of choppers at their disposal none had thought of hiring fighter jets to make a statement.

Salim arrives by helicopter for his lavish wedding which reportedly cost $1.4 million.

The central figure in The Social Diary is a gossip columnist, Savannah Stevens who resists certain identities who try to bribe her to put them in the paper and she also has to dodge the odd  businessmen who is desperate to stop her writing unflattering stories about them. Finally she has to make the ultimate choice: Does she take on a thrillingly precarious life with a new partner or sacrifice it for a career changing story? It's a moral dilemma.

And just like Savannah, I am also a columnist  and I was working as a journalist in Sydney back in the eighties, having just returned from London as a music writer. There are a lot of similarities between Savannah and myself because it's always easier to write about something you know well but I am not Savannah.

So is my novel inspired by  real identities and are any of them Jewish?

Certainly there are lots of diverse  characters in the  book whom you might recognise. After all, when it comes to being colourful and flamboyant, the Jewish community have pretty much got that covered thanks to our rich culture, our sardonic humour and the resilience that is part of our DNA. We might be only a small community in numbers but it is almost impossible not to write a novel set in Sydney's east without at least one Jewish cameo.

Double Bay cafe

However in The Social Diary, the identity of those who inspired the characters has been well concealed so as not to offend.  There's only a fleeting glimpse of few identities and also restaurants and bars that once existed in the heart of Double Bay.

Right now I am working on the sequel, which is set in the current time in Sydney and Melbourne and there will also be people leaping from the pages whom you might recognise -  but it is first and foremost a novel.

Ros Reines and Eva Novy will talk about Double Bay and much more in their session with Kathy Shand, Schmoozing in the Eastern Suburbs on Sunday August 30, 5:45pm - 6:45pm at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival. 

Book today at www.sjwf.org.au 

Why I wrote about the Holocaust

by Alice Nelson

Alice Nelson 

After This: Survivors of the Holocaust Speak was not a book I ever imagined writing. I am a novelist. My work is the translation of fragments of life into fiction, the crafting of beautiful sentences, the careful weaving together of imagined strands of narrative.  But sometimes in the life of a writer a project simply presents itself to you and cannot be turned away from. They had come upon me from time to time in my fiction, these unexpected obsessions and pressing imperatives to tell a particular story. In my first novel, The Last Sky, my research into war-time China led me on a literary detour into the lives and experiences of Jewish refugees in Shanghai. In my short fiction, I have written about pearl divers in Broome, cockle pickers in England and the rural poor of France, among other things. But I did not envisage that I would become engrossed in listening to and recording the stories of Australian Holocaust survivors for a non-fiction collection.

Alice Nelson with Holocaust survivor Isaac Piller at the launch of After This: Survivors of the Holocaust Speak

All writers believe in the power of witnessing, in the preservation of slices of life, in the tremendous power of telling. It’s the work we do in our fiction, no matter how varied. Two years ago, immersed in my doctoral research on the narrativisation of traumatic experience, I met with a local Holocaust survivor. Over morning tea in the sunny kitchen of his Perth home, he shyly pushed a pile of handwritten pages towards me. Scribbled in pencil on airmail paper, these were his memories of the abyss. He knew that I was a writer. Perhaps I could help him with his story.

Rosa Levy, whose story is included in the anthology, with her parents in Poland just before the war broke out

He was not the only one. All over the city were frail, elderly survivors whose stories had never been recorded in written form. They served me cups of tea and apple cake and told me their stories of extravagant cruelty, of humiliations and betrayals, of brutal mockery and grotesque torture. The unspeakable, incomprehensible past worked its way into their light-filled sitting rooms and pleasant homes. All the survivors I met with were aware of their own mortality, of the scarce handful of years or months left to them. 

Rosa at the book launch

Despite what it cost them to go over the details, they wanted all of their experiences to be recorded; the world that was destroyed, their war-time terror and, just as importantly, the life that came after. I also want you to write about what happened after this, one of the survivors implored me, tapping his finger on the sheaf of notes about the war years I had taken during the interview. All the survivors wanted the horror chronicled, but equally important was the tale of the new beginning – the long, full lives that came after.

And so the book came about; long, painful interviews, meetings with the children and grandchildren of survivors, painstaking research, searches for documents and photographs, a sustained limning of the kind of losses from which it is not always possible to recover. Fourteen narratives were ultimately included and the book was published by Fremantle Press in July 2015.

The postcard tossed from the window of a cattle train to Auschwitz

In 1943, The father of a Dutch survivor, Betty Niesten, whose story is included in the anthology, scrawled a few words on a postcard and tossed it from the window of the cattle train that was transporting his family across the country towards Auschwitz. Dear Family, he wrote. We are on transport. Tell it to others. We hope to come back.

Dear family, we are on transport. Tell it to others. We hope to come back. Levie, Floor and Jet

The stories in this collection are, in their own way, a series of letters scrawled from the haunting traces of memory. Letters tossed from the window of a sealed train to an unknowing and neglectful world where people kept on sowing their fields and mending their fences as the cattle cars lumbered by full of their desperate human cargo. These are letters written with terror, with desperation and, ultimately, with the hope that they might be read and understood.

Tell it to others, a doomed man wrote. With their precise details of human lives bent out of shape by a horrifying history, these narratives are at once a bulwark against forgetting, a warning and an inheritance. I am here. I endured, they whisper to us

As the Holocaust recedes in time, as the last living witnesses to its terrible memory pass from the world, it becomes ever more important to listen to the stories of survivors. To listen and attend and remember.

Alice Nelson will speak with Israeli Professor Zehavit Gross and Dr Avril Alba on Sunday August 30 from 3:15pm - 4:15pm on After the Survivors - Holocaust Memorialisation at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival.

To see the full program and to buy tickets: www. sjwf.org.au

Why kill a man when you can kill an idea?

By Elle Kaye

Winner of the Australian Jewish News 2015 Writing Competition

Award winning series Homeland and Prisoners of War

To coincide with the Australian visit of Emmy-award winning Israeli writer/director Gideon Raff, creator of Prisoners of War, the Israeli television show that led to US blockbuster series Homeland, we asked readers to submit a short story, poem or screenplay that starts with the line "Why kill a man when you can kill an idea?", a quote from Homeland. 

The graffiti stared at her. Bright, dripping yellow on the grey tunnel wall, illuminated haphazardly by a flashing, fluorescent light. She tried to imagine what would possess someone to risk their life to write such a thing. Tried to ignore that gnawing sensation that told her that she was meant to see it. Today. Now. Urgently.

This wasn’t the train she had meant to catch home. She was early. Classes had been cancelled in advance of the exam period starting the following week. But here she was. Stopped. Blinking in time with a fluorescent light and a spray of graffiti.

She imagined the anonymous author. An utter cliché, baggy jeans, skateboard, backpack full of spray-paint canisters. And as she imagined him there she shouted to him: “Hey! Does it even matter which you kill? It’s not the answer that matters. It’s the question itself. Asking yourself the question matters. Thinking is what matters. Intention matters.” And as her monologue played out in her imagination and as her eyes scanned the text again, the bag on her lap began to feel heavy.

She had never had access to her papers before. But today she had had to reapply for the next year at university. On the previous two occasions she had been escorted. But because she had been such a good girl for the past two years, because she had returned home daily, because she continued to tow the line, she was allowed to have her papers for today only. She had stood passively as she watched the safe being unlocked and her papers retrieved. She had promised faithfully to return them.

Every day she returned to her community was another day she risked being married off. She knew how it would be. Knew that the marriage would happen without her knowledge. Knew that she would be woken one morning and married before the sun had fully risen.

Being different was not a good thing in her community. Unless, of course, you could be useful. And so, improbably, she was given the opportunity only a handful of women had been given before, a degree at university. And because of her obvious aptitude for numbers, stellar lineage, her quiet demeanour and outward piety, she was not seen as a flight risk.

She would have liked more time. But as the train continued to stand still and as the light continued to flicker against the yellow graffiti, she knew she needed to act.

She got off the train. She walked into the first bank she saw. She opened a bank account with her papers and two cheques she had received only that day. She had won two prizes this year. $6750 all up. Not enough to live off. If it were only for the cheques, she never would have had the courage to leave. It was actually having work prospects that did it. The other piece of paper weighing down her canvas bag. A job offer. Full-time over the summer then part-time when university returned. Mentorship. Even rental assistance.

She thought of the question again as she walked out of the bank into the glaring sunlight. She laughed aloud as she thought of the irony of her choices. She hadn’t killed a man or an idea. She had killed herself  … by giving herself a new life. Back home, she would be mourned as if dead. Excommunicated forever. And she knew that there would be a deep and heavy sadness to reckon with. But for now, all she felt, was free.

Gideon Raff is a guest presenter at the 2015 Sydney Jewish Writers Festival

Gideon Raff will be speaking at the opening night of the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival on Saturday 29 August from 8:30pm - 10pm, I love a complex country: Views on Israel with Dvir Abramovich, Jennifer Teege and Debbie Whitmont. 

He will also be speaking on Sunday 30 August from 3:15pm - 4:15pm, TV espionage: In Conversation with the creator of Homeland, Prisoners of War & Dig, Gideon Raff with Michaela Kalowski. 

To see the full program and buy tickets: www.sjwf.org.au 

Israel. A Country Overflowing with Stories

By Leah Kaminsky, www.leahkaminsky.com

Photo credit: Nicola Bernadi 

My mother was a sole survivor of Belsen. After she died I promised myself I’d write a book about her, but all I had were small snippets of memory of stories she had told me when I was much younger. I’ve drawn on these, as well as my own real experiences living and working as a doctor in the Middle East, to weave together a tale about values we share in common. The novel took me over ten years to write. 

It started with a childhood memory of a story my mother once told me about her father. He died in the Lodz ghetto aged 42. He was a pious man who insisted his six children burn their nail clippings in the fireplace, using matchsticks as witnesses. I found out years later, while researching THE WAITING ROOM, that according to the mystical thinking of the Kabbalah, the fingernail is a remnant of the membrane covering Adam’s body before he ate the forbidden apple. Nails are pieces of the soul and if you do not burn or bury them you cannot pass into the afterlife until you have found each one you have scattered. 

A pregnant woman, who represents life, is in danger of miscarriage if she steps over a stray nail clipping, which is dead matter and represents our own mortality. This intrigued me and became the prologue for the novel, as well as one of its leitmotifs – the wispy realm that lies between life and death.

The face of war has changed dramatically over recent years. In the past, those at home used to mourn for their fallen soldiers who died far away on foreign battlefields. Nowadays, as civilians, we have all been conscripted into global conflict and are threatened with random acts of terror as a part of our everyday lives. Even the countries we once thought blessed with peaceful borders have now become non-too-safe sanctuaries.  THE WAITING ROOM is a love-story, set amongst this new landscape of war, affirming that at heart we have more in common with each other than our differences might suggest. Trauma carries down through generations, but so does love. And love is ultimately what gives us hope.

Dina is an Australian family doctor, trying to live her day-to-day life in Haifa, a port city which prides itself on being an oasis of co-existence in the Middle East. Pregnant with her second child, she juggles her patient’s needs and eccentricities, a fraying marriage and the demands of motherhood, with the threat of terror looming near. Trying hard to hold everything together, she is haunted by the legacy of her holocaust survivor mother. 

Despite attempts to escape the persistence of her ghosts, focusing instead on her relationship with her Israeli husband, her young son and her work, Dina finds herself reliving her mother’s imagined past. She can’t keep out her mother’s presence, the weight of their history and the reality of living in Israel; everything is seeping through the cracks and imploding. Dina’s internal psychological bomb is ticking away alongside the sudden terror threat that casts a shadow on an otherwise ordinary day. THE WAITING ROOM explores what it means to be a mother, a lover and a listener (for her patients), at a time when Dina can’t even hold herself together.

THE WAITING ROOM has all the elements of misery woven into its narrative – death, war and depression – but at its heart it’s an uplifting love-story about hope and that’s the overriding message of the book I would like people to take home. 

Pre-order copies of the book from Random House. 

The Sydney-launch of THE WAITING ROOM entitled Israel. A Country Overflowing With Stories: In Conversation with Leah Kaminsky will kick off the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival from 7:15pm-8:15pm on Saturday, 29 August at Waverley Library, Bondi Junction. Book here! 

To see the full program: www.sjwf.org.au 

Resistance and courage during World War II

By Kate Forsyth 

When I was twelve years old, I read The Diary of Anne Frank and found myself changed forever.

Anne Frank

Up until that point, my reading was dominated by Enid Blyton and C. S. Lewis, books in which there was always a happy ever after. I had never before read a book in which the heroine died in such awful circumstances. Anne Frank’s story sent a shock wave through my psyche.'

Author Kate Forsyth

World War II has fascinated me since, especially stories of resistance to the Nazis. I began to read books like I am David by Anne Holm, and The Silver Sword by Ian Serrallier.

As I grew up, I continued to read all the books I could find about World War II, from spy thrillers to Holocaust memoirs and poetry. I knew that I wanted to write a novel set during those dark and terrifying years.

I had always imagined I would set my novel in France, or Italy, or the Netherlands. It never occurred to me that I’d set my novel in Berlin itself, the nerve-centre of the Nazi death machine. Yet that is where my new novel, The Beast’s Garden, is set, among the courageous men and women of the German underground resistance.

Kate Forsyth's latest novel

I did not know, when I began working on The Beast’s Garden, just how many different German people had risked their lives – and the lives of their loved ones – to stand up against the Nazis. I had heard about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose group of students in Munich, and I knew about the Generals’ Plot to assassinate Hitler, given the Hollywood treatment a few years ago by Tom Cruise in the movie ‘Valkyrie’. Otherwise, I believed the Germans had been – in Daniel Goldhagen’s chilling phrase – ‘Hitler’s willing executioners.’

Over the course of months of research, I discovered that there were others who had tried to resist Hitler. Some worked together in large, well-organised groups that infiltrated the Nazis’ key organisations and sent inside information to the Allies that may have helped them win the war. Others were individuals who did small acts of extraordinary bravery on their own, risking everything for what they thought was right.

Most were betrayed, and paid for their courage with their lives.

In The Beast’s Garden I focus on five different circles of resisters.

The first was called THE RED ORCHESTRA by the Gestapo, because they were suspected of spying for the Soviets. In fact, this Berlin-based group did most of their work trying to change the attitudes of the German people towards the Third Reich. They published leaflets, spread anti-Nazi graffiti, and collected proof of German atrocities.

Mildred Harnack 

Its members were a mix of Jews, Catholics, Protestants and atheists, and included artists, musicians, journalists, actors and academics. Their ages ran from 16 to 86, and about 40% were women – including Mildred Harnack, the only American woman to be executed by the Third Reich. In The Beast’s Garden, my heroine Ava is drawn into this underground resistance group, risking her life to help those who were suffering under the Nazis’ brutal regime.

The group called THE BLACK ORCHESTRA by the Gestapo is better known today as the perpetrators of the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler, called Operation Valkyrie. In The Beast’s Garden, my hero Leo is employed by the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris.

Admiral Wilhelm Franz Canaris 

The Abwehr was the German military intelligence & espionage. They played a double game for most of the war, helping Jews escape Germany and the Netherlands, providing Hitler with false information, and making numerous attempts to assassinate him.

The Abwehr was ultimately brought down by the Gestapo’s infiltration into another small circle of resisters, generally called THE SOLF CIRCLE. A small group of friends who hated Hitler and his policies, they mainly worked to help ease the lives of the Jews and political prisoners used as slave labour in the armaments factories in Berlin. They smuggled them food and old clothes, and helped a few escape from Germany. One day, meeting to celebrate Frau Solf’s birthday, they were tricked into expressing anti-Hitler sentiments by a Gestapo spy posing as a doctor. They all paid for it with their lives.

One of the accused managed to send a warning to friends of his who were working for the Abwehr in Istanbul. Ordered back to Berlin by the Gestapo, they instead defected to Great Britain. The scandal brought down the Abwehr, and Admiral Canaris was one of those executed in the last days before the German defeat in April 1945.

Helmuth James Graf von Moltke

Another group of non-violent dissenters were THE KREISAU CIRCLE, led by Helmuth James Graf von Moltke. He and his friends met to discuss what kind of society they wished to build after the collapse of the Third Reich. Von Moltke was connected to both the Red and the Black Orchestras, and to The Solf Circle, and was arrested and executed after he tried to warn one of the Solf resisters to flee.

Herbert Baum

THE BAUM GROUP was one of the most tragic circles of resisters, with the participants nearly all in their late teens or early 20s. Led by the pro-Communist Herbert Baum, the resisters were mostly Jewish, and worked as slave labour in Berlin’s factories. They tried to blow up Goebbels’ anti-Soviet exhibit, “The Soviet Paradise”, in 1942. Not only did most of them pay for their defiance with their lives, either being beaten to death, beheaded, or sent to Auschwitz, but their action led to an escalation in the round-up and deportation of Berlin Jews.

Finally, in my novel I refer to THE BUCHENWALD RESISTANCE, one of the most valiant and heart-breaking bands of underground resisters. It was formed in one of the largest and most horrifying of the German concentration camps, infamous for its brutal commandant, Karl-Otto Koch and his wife Ilse (called ‘the witch of Buchenwald’). With no hope of escape, the Buchenwald resisters worked to sabotage the production of weapons in the camp’s armament factory, hid Jewish children from deportations, set up schools and hospitals for inmates, and stockpiled weapons in the hope of manning a camp insurrection.  They took over the camp just before its liberation by Allied forces, and, after the war, set up a support group for survivors.  

There were, of course, many hundreds of thousands of people in Germany (and elsewhere) who supported the Third Reich, whether through conviction, self-interest, or fear.

I have tried, in The Beast’s Garden, to imagine what it must have been like to be an ordinary person, living in such terrible and extraordinary times.

Would I have had the courage to resist?

I can only hope so.

Kate Forsyth will speak about Reimagining our History with Alan Gold on Sunday August 30 from 10am - 11am at Waverley Library in Bondi Junction as part of the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival. Book now at www.sjwf.org.au