On Writing As the Lonely Fly, Sara Dowse

Sara Dowse

It was a winter’s night in Canberra, 1974. My American mother had come from sunny LA to help look after my kids, but she found Australia’s capital less than hospitable. It was too cold and I was too busy. The Whitlam government had just been re-elected after Gough had called a double dissolution. It took two weeks to learn whether they were still in office or not.

I was the bureaucratic back-up to Elizabeth Reid, Whitlam’s women’s adviser, and we had a lot of work to do. We were working to get a child care program up, finding funding for refuges and plans were afoot for the International Women’s Year program the following year. We had done our best to make my mother feel welcome, but she was bored in the company of women. We were going to change the world, but my mother had been around and had her doubts. Would Australia become a feminist paradise? She didn’t think so. I did arrange for her to have dinner with Moss Cass, Whitlam’s environment minister, and she was happy with that, but she remained highly sceptical. She was an actor, and had been blacklisted in the McCarthy years. She was exasperated with our seeming naiveté.

The kids had gone to bed, and we were trying to get warm in front of the house’s one oil heater. (This was Canberra in the 70s.) Suddenly my mother blurted out, ‘You women think you’re such hot shots. You had an aunt who was a member of the Soviet Politburo!’

What? I had never heard of this woman, but it turned out that she was one my grandfather’s sisters. I had known the other two, but not this Lisa. That was her name – Lisa Fich. It also turned out that my mother had all her facts wrong. Yet when I eventually did learn the story, I found it far more compelling than anything my mother had said. Of course, her aunt had never been on the Politburo – no woman had. And though my mother had said she was some kind of high-ranking apparatchik, that wasn’t true either. Lisa Fich was a dedicated Zionist who went to Palestine after the First World War, changed her name from Lisa to Leah, and joined the G’dud Ha’Avodah, or Labour Battalion. Even before the Battalion split into factions, she and some of her colleagues had joined the Communist party and in 1929 were sent back to Russia, where they set up a kolkhoz, Voya Nova, in the Crimea.

My dream was to write a biography of her, and I began by learning Russian, and saturating myself in Russian and Zionist history. In my search for her story, I interviewed many people, including one who knew her when she was still alive. But I was stymied on a couple of occasions – once, when I got to Israel and found that the Central Zionist Archives were closed for renovations; another time, in Moscow, when I was given a wrong lead and lost an opportunity to look for her in the recently opened Soviet archives. And because of changes in my personal life, I wasn’t able to travel anymore, so I finally decided to abandon my idea of a biography and write another novel. This is As the Lonely Fly – my sixth. The shorthand is that it took 25 years of research and writing, but there were many interruptions, including two other novels in the meantime.

Only last year, as this latest novel went to the printers, an Israeli friend found a mention of my great aunt. She was listed as the G’dud’s delegate to the Histadrut conference sometime in the 1920s. This would have been before the G’dud was ostracised by the Labor Zionists – Ben Gurion’s crowd. I would like to follow this up, but it was clear almost from the beginning of my research that she and her comrades were dissidents who came to renounce the idea of a Jewish state. Their reasons were partly ideological – they subscribed to Trotsky’s permanent revolution, to which they gave priority over nationalism – but the catalyst for their breaking with Political Zionism was what they saw happening to Arab labour. With the advance of Jewish settlement, idealistic as it was, many Arabs lost their jobs, and they were as well excluded from the Histadrut. For the first time in my life, I began to see, through this story, that the path that Herzl laid out for us was a very dangerous one indeed. It was sobering to realise that there were many, including my grandfather’s sister, who saw that right from the beginning.

Now, some say, we have the fact on the ground - Israel is a nation, a Jewish state, and it’s far too late to question the wisdom of its creation. But my answer to this is that knowing that there were paths not taken can help us find a way out of the very grave situation the Jewish-privileged state is in. I have come to believe that we in the Diaspora have a very important role to play in this; we need to probe our consciences and recognise our responsibilities. There is, in my opinion, no escaping this.

As the Lonely Fly is a novel, not a polemic. The characters throw light on the complexity of the situation and, through them, various perspectives are explored, each of them with sympathy and understanding. The story is the story, and it’s a big one – bigger than you or me – but the Jewish tradition that I was raised in was, above all, a tradition of justice, and I’m very proud of that. But I have had to ask myself, where does justice lie now?

Sara Dowse

August 2017

To hear Sara speak about this story she had to tell, join her at the Shalom | Sydney Jewish Writers Festival on Sunday August 27th at 3.15pm.

GripLit: Some Thrilling Reads

The weather is perfect for curling up in bed with a thrilling read and this week I've been doing just that with some of my favourites appearing at this year's Shalom | Sydney Jewish Writers Festival - Nicole Trope, Megan Goldin and Lexi Landsman. I don't want to share any spoilers, but I do want to tell you that each of these three authors is well worth reading!

Nicole Trope's sixth book, FORGOTTEN, tells a story that many of us will find familar. Malia is a young mother with three young children, an absent and distracted husband and a pile of bills. One morning she races to the petrol station to buy some milk and makes a decision that in an instant alters the course of her life and leads to the disappearance of her baby. The Detective, Ali Greenberg, who takes the case has her own demons that she is struggling to lay to rest and she knows that solving this case and finding this baby will present some closure to her that she cannot name. Edna, an elderly resident at a boarding house provides a third perspective on the turmoil that unfolds in this gripping domestic noir thriller that critics have compared to the work of Jodi Piccoult.

Megan Goldin's novel, THE GIRLS IN KELLERS WAY, tells the story of Detective Melanie Carter who is charged with identifying a body found buried near the desolate forest road of Kellers Way. The crime is a cold case and Carter has to rely on Julie West who regularly jogs along Kellers Way to clear her head and escape her own disatisfying existence. Goldin has crafted a story that seems to follow a logical path and then twists to disorient readers, leading them to question everything that they thought was true. The characters are interesting and complex and not always likable and the plot is just uncertain enough to keep readers on the edge of their seat.

THE PERFECT COUPLE is Lexi Landsman's second book and her first in this genre. It is a book filled with secrets; about the past, about relationships and about our own perceptions of events as they unfold. Landsman has chosen a beautiful setting against which to unfold this story and that adds enormous value to the plot. The characters are layered and wonderfully complex which makes for delicious winter reading. Finally, the plot itself is filled with twists and turns enough to ensure that readers keep wanting more.

Each of these fascinating authors brings something distinctive to the genre by creating complicated and nuanced characters balanced against detailed and unexpected twists in the plot. With the artful guidance of Tali Lavi, Trope, Goldin and Landsman will share insights into the craft, the joys and the challenges and inspiration for writing crime thrillers which so artfully engage audiences. Don't miss this fascinating discussion to be held at the Shalom | Sydney Jewish Writers Festival at Waverley Library on Sunday 27th August at 2pm. Book Now!

The Dark Room, Rachel Seiffert

Posted on July 16, 2017 | Leave a comment

This is the third of Rachel Seiffert’s books that I have read. I have loved them all in very different ways; but I think this one most for the cavernous depths that it attempts to navigate in such soulful and patient ways. It is also the most complex of the Seiffert books that I have thus far read – the others have been relatively straight forward in terms of their narrative structure, but this one presents three vignettes which each shed light on some different aspect of the war. Reading these vignettes made me feel as though I was looking through a tiny porthole, seeing a slice of history, a moment of time, captured and held in the palm of my hand, separated from everything else happening at that moment but somehow connected because of its inescapable context. I loved the way that Seiffert managed to create this reading experience. It made it rich and particular and somehow spirited.

In the first story we meet Helmut. A German boy born to German parents. He is wholesome, the apple of their eye but imperfect, missing a muscle in his chest. The parents mourn but are determined to provide him with every opportunity that other boys his age have. Helmut flourishes, relatively unaware of his difference, until he is rejected by Hitler’s army and then, unable to serve, he becomes the flanuer, walking the streets of Berlin, trying to find a formula to account for the numbers of people leaving. Helmut apprentices as a photographer and it is through his camera lens that we, the readers, come to know Berlin. “He can see the war in the queues outside shops, and the ever-present uniformed figures. But tonight he can also see … an ordinary, busy city. Lively and full. … the faces, arms and legs, the many hats on many heads… His Berlin, his home.”

But Helmut’s Berlin is not as pure as he imagines and one day he stumbles upon a group of Nazi’s herding a community of gypsies to their death. He is shocked by what he witnesses and even more traumatised by the fact that he fails to capture the raw emotion of the moment on film. He flees and Berlin crumbles around him.

The second segment of the book is called LORE. The perspective presented in this piece is vastly different to that of Helmut. It’s Bavaria, 1945 and Lore is one of the daughters of a Nazi officer. The war is over and Lore’s mother is trying to save her children. In desperation, she gives Lore money and jewelry and tells her to take the children and travel to Hamburg to her grandmother. Lore is 12. Her mother is arrested by the Americans and Lore is left to fend for her young siblings. This part of the book is majestic in its scope, and even though it is short, it has epic qualities. I won’t spoil the story but Lore finds help in an unlikely source and eventually finds her way to Hamburg and her grandmother.

The third vignette, MICHA, is set in Autumn 1997. It tells the story of Micha, a young man who discovers that his grandfather was an SS officer and becomes obsesssed with finding out exactly what his grandfather did during the war. He travels to Belarus where his Opa served, carrying with him his photograph, hoping that someone will identify him and testify to his actions. In Belarus, Micha has meets a man called Kolsenik who himself committed terrible sins during the Nazi occupation. Kolsenik says: “I made the choice, you see? I watched the Germans kill the Jews for almost two years and then I killed, too. It was my choice, you see?” and then: “It is hard to say this, Herr Lehner, even after so many years. It is difficult to know this about myself, do you see? I can give all these reasons. I lost my father. I was hungry, I wanted to help my family, orders were orders, I was not responsible, they said the Jews were Communists, Communists caused my pain. Over and over I can say these things. Nothing changes. I chose to kill.”

Although it is spare, her writing is filled with movement, across plains, over hills, through rubble. Reading this book is quite literally a journey through an experience that is at times quite macabrely beautiful and at times so sharp and painful that it hurts to keep going.  The boundaries of the story are as firm as the boundaries of the spaces that Seiffert explores – Micha stands in the room of the museum. He “doesn’t cross to the other side of the room; he doesn’t dare risk seeing the same faces again over there.”

Seiffert’s message is expressed by Micha: How do you make it right? “Is it enough to feel sad?” Kolesnik’s answer is simple: “How can I apologise? Who can I apologise to? Who is there to forgive me?” There is no punishment fit for this crime.

And throughout this magnificent novel, there are the beautiful bookends of photographs – capturing a moment in time in still life frame, artificial but preserved and remembered, a testimony to existence like a forgotten song on the wind.

This is one of those life changing books. You have to read it. At least once.

You can hear Rachel Seiffert speak about this book at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival on August 27th at Waverley Library.

Guest post from Justine Saidman@www.longingtobe.wordpress.com