Has a table got legs?

by Erica Bentel

“Has a table got legs?”  
“No….Yes!...No….??”
“Yes it has.”
“Yes!!!”
“Oh, so does that mean this table can go running around the library??”
“Nooooooo!!!!”

… and then you see their eyes light up. And you see them start laughing as they click onto the humour. And now they are playing with language…. thinking creatively, thinking laterally. 

And the games begin…

But will a four year old get this? You’d be amazed!! How about a 6 or 7 year old? They find it sooo funny. 8 & 9 year olds? Absolutely! In the same way I found it funny when I first came up with the idea for this book. The English language is quirky and when you look at it like this you’ve just got to love it.

“It’s quite simple – if you want your child to love reading, find them books they love to read.”

Parents often ask me how to get their child to like reading. To me it’s quite simple. Find them books they love to read.
… As adults we’re no different. When we read a great book, we go looking for another. When we’re going through a dry phase and can’t find a book that grabs us, we end up watching TV. 
So when people ask me what books to buy for their kids, I have one answer – think about your child and then find them something they’ll love.

Erica Bentel

This is also why I make my children’s workshops laugh-out-loud fun. Reading should be an absolute joy. Lateral and creative thinking should be revelled in. It’s a skill, like any sport. In fact… I see writing as sports for the brain.

“Writing for me is like Sports for the Brain”

So in my workshops with the youngsters I introduce them to this love of language – to the sheer joy you can have with playing with words and language... which leads to the joy of playing with ideas… which itself leads to lateral and creative thinking.

Which brings me to Can You Crack Them? 
The word games in this book are for ages 6 – 106.

Here’s one, see if you can crack it….

The clue is in the sentence above, so the answer means “neat”.

Tie + D = TIDY (which is another word for neat)  

Get it? Neat!

They get tougher and tougher and often your children will crack them faster than you, much to your horror and their absolute delight!

What makes these books special for me is the interaction that takes place. These are books that families can enjoy together. All ages, Bobbas and Zaidas included. 

So… parents, grandparents are welcome to attend these sessions. My only request is, if you are bringing your children to the workshop/s, please don’t let them see the books in advance. They’ll have heaps more fun if it’s all new to them!

If you’re not coming to the workshops but choose to get the books anyway, I hope you have the best fun with them.

Hoping to see you at the Festival! 

Me … I can’t wait!!!!!!!

Erica Bentel will be lead two workshops for children with PJ Library at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival on Sunday August 28: "Has a Book Got a Spine?" at 9:45am - 11:00am suitable for children in Years K to 3; and "Can You Crack Them? Word Puzzles" for children in Years 1 to 5 at 11:00am - 12:15pm.

Book today at www.sjwf.org.au!

Rosetta: A Scandalous True Story

by Alexandra Joel

Imagine a woman. She is twenty-five: an arresting Jewish beauty with thick chestnut hair and restless, toffee-coloured eyes. She has been married since the age of eighteen. Her husband is a respectable man of means. She is a mother with a five-year-old child. The place is Melbourne, the year 1905. All seems well.

But this is the moment when everything changes. 

The woman leaves, abandoning both her husband and her daughter. Even worse, she runs away with a handsome half-Chinese fortune-teller called Zeno the Magnificent.

Alexandra Joel

Zeno has read her palm, convinced her that what lies ahead is an exotic destiny. He practises enchantment, but so does she. Together with her lover and a new identity, the woman travels to the other side of the world.

He claims to be a distinguished Japanese Professor, she decides it would be rather smart to be American. Leading members of the British aristocracy and European royalty are bewitched by her and fall, willing captives to her spell.
She sounds like an invention, a character from a fairy tale. But she is not. This astonishing woman lived. Her name is Rosetta and she was my great-grandmother.

Rosetta created an extraordinary life. 

She took great risks and ignored almost all of society’s constraints, while at the same time forging intimate relationships with lords, ladies, and the heirs to several European thrones. But, after she ran away with Zeno, she never saw her child again.

I have always known that my great-grandmother did a dreadful thing. It must have been when I was very young that I was first told she had deserted her only child. This alarming knowledge – some mothers simply chose to disappear – became a part of the child I was, my identity.

What I did not know was how such a calamity had come about. Where had my errant great-grandmother gone, and why?

No doubt even in the far-off 1950s, when children were not encouraged to be forthcoming but, rather, to know their place, many were braver than I was, asked more questions, demanded answers in response. I did not.

I don’t believe it was simple timidity that caused my questions to remain unspoken; it had something more to do with the risk I sensed. Perhaps all families have secret, bruised place to which one journeys at one’s peril. I was a child, yet still I understood the way in which a misplaced query might disturb these tender realms.

Even after the details of Rosetta’s remarkable life had, finally, been revealed, it was many years before I began to write this book. 

I was too conflicted: one part of me marvelled at her courage, her defiance of convention and brilliant ability to invent an existence as improbable as it way thrilling. But the other part – darker, more turbulent - was furious. A single question resounded in my mind: ‘How could you leave your child?’

Eventually, I found this question impossible to ignore. Conversations might be avoided and thoughts suppressed, but feelings have a way of working their way through the line and texture of one’s being. And there was something else. It was a kind of insistence, as if Rosetta herself were demanding to be brought back to life.

Despite all my misgivings, I went in search of her. Like so many before me, I too had fallen beneath her spell.

Alexandra Joel will be talking about how knowing one's family history can help to make sense of the past but also affect the present in the session 'Inheriting the past - family legacies', alongside Shelley Davidow, moderated by Michaela Kalowski, on Sunday August 28, 11:15am - 12:15pm at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival. 

Book today at www.sjwf.org.au!

Baba Schwartz and The May Beetles

by Joan London

Baba Schwartz, and her husband Andor, survived the Holocaust before emigrating to Australia.

Joan London
Photo: Abby London

Morry’s (Baba’s son) is a brave voice in publishing, and it is now hard to imagine our Australian culture without The Quarterly Essay, The Monthly, and The Saturday Paper. And without Black Inc, with their books, as beautifully presented and edited, and necessary, as The May Beetles.

One of my most intense and formative reading experiences took place when I was 11 years old and read Anne Frank’s Diary of A Young Girl. 

Up until then, I had never heard of the Holocaust, and knew only two Jewish people, a couple who played bridge with my parents. Anne Frank’s diary opened my eyes to mid-20th century history,  to the devastating, incomprehensible mass murder of millions of one race by another, a tragedy that could even sweep up a girl, my age, with my young hopes and aspirations.  

I could hardly believe when I got to the end of the book, that Anne Frank was not saved. It left me bereft, shaken, that in her world, that existed only 15 years before I got to read about it, and unlike any other book I’d read, evil had won.

Baba Schwartz
Photo: Caitlin Muscat

One of the privileges of having spent some time in Melbourne over the past few years has been getting to know Baba Schwartz, and enjoying her wise, calm, and generous company. The last time that I visited Baba was in her new apartment on the 16th floor, where I ate some of her delicious freshly cooked pastries, and where it seemed entirely appropriate that Baba should have such an overview of the world all around her. 

Baba has written a wonderful memoir, The May Beetles. A beautiful, generous, book, both in its  physical presentation – the irresistible cover photo of the girl with the dazzling smile, the quality of the paper, the endpieces which reproduce traditional embroidery that speak of a lost pre-war world – and then, most importantly, in the acuity of the memory that informs the book and the generosity of the spirit of the writing.  

It is, of course, also a horrifying book, with its account of a culture turning on some of its own people, their rounding up, deportation, and subsequent slaughter, made so vivid in the writing, alongside the reproductions of chilling old documents issued with ruthless Nazi efficiency.  

Baba writes: 

This life I am revealing – this father, this mother, this family – is the life I would wish for everyone. No harm in any of us, but a sense of the inexhaustible sources of delight in the world. Yes, if I could bestow a gift on others, it would be to live as my family had lived before the great darkness. (p.75)

Again and again she refers to the beauty and happiness of that old world, that lost way of life:

I recall the summer of 1942 more vividly and in more detail than any season during the years of growing danger. I recall the warm winds that carried the fragrance of blossoms. I recall flirting with boys with intense delight in the long evenings. The dusk crept over us by such slow degrees that the darkness settled without our noticing it…Each evening, as I entered our house, I hoped that tomorrow would be as enthralling as was today.

Thirteen years ago, Baba’s husband, Andor Schwartz also published a memoir, Living Memory, and both books constitute a profound witness of the devastation that overtook the Jews of Europe in the late thirties and early forties of the 20th century. These books are there for the record, in all their vivid, detailed testimony of that great darkness that must never be forgotten. 

The wall above the eternal flame in the Hall of Remembrance of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum quotes Deuteronomy:

Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life. And you shall make them known to your children and to your children’s children. 

The Schwartzs’ survival, and the subsequent remaking of their lives in this country, has been part of the infinite enrichment brought to Australia by postwar immigration.

Baba, a huge reader, is a natural writer, with the writer’s impulse to record, to witness, to interrogate. She has always been a writer.  

As she says in the preface to The May Beetles: I write all the time – diary notes, contemplations, poetry, recipes … And most recently, this wonderful memoir. 

Baba Schwartz will be talking about her story for the first time in the session 'I'm still here: Survivors speak', alongside Frank Vajda and Marcel Weyland, moderated by Rita Nash, on Sunday August 28, 10:00am - 11:00am at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival. 

Book today at 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 

Books are just the beginning ...

We are very excited to re-launch the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival blog. We have been busy preparing a great program for 2014 and now it’s live!

Books are just the beginning at this year’s SJWF which takes place from 21-24 August and features film, theatre, television, ideas and much more. As many of our fans already know, the Festival is a chance to get up close and personal with talent from overseas and around Australia, engage with big ideas and issues, and add to your personal bookshelf.

This year’s Festival combines writers from multiple genres and types with a film producer, television critic, analysts and actors. They will be speaking about Israel, homosexuality, architecture, Holocaust memorialisation, Jewish cooking, spirituality, publishing tips and much more over three days of varied programming.

Comedian & author John Safran

The SJWF kicks off on Thursday 21 August with John Safran’s one-man live show, ‘Murder in Mississippi’, at 8.00pm at the Bondi Pavilion Theatre. Safran tells the true story of how he met a white supremacist, befriended his black killer and wrote a book. His show will include excerpts from his bestselling book of the same name and share tales of his unique escapades in the Deep South. We are very excited to be co-presenting the show with Network.

The festival continues on Saturday 23 August with a fascinating and provocative evening which will delve into different aspects of Israel.  ‘Secrets and Lies’ features Dr Yoaz Hendel, an expert on Israel-Iran relations, and Rafael Epstein, the author of Prisoner X about Australian Ben Zygier who died in an Israeli prison. This will be followed by one-woman show, ‘Four Faces of Israel’, by Israeli performer Helen Gottstein. Both entertaining and confronting, the four characters share their views on the nature of the state, Middle East history, modern Jewish identity and the complex challenges Israel faces.  (Warning: remember it’s just a show!) Some of the material is quite confronting but sit tight because the show is very thought-provoking and funny.

The program on Sunday 24 August is packed with a range of stimulating sessions including The New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum, Oscar-winning film producer Emile Sherman, best-selling author Alan Gold and prominent journalist David Leser.

The Monday Morning Cooking Club

Aspiring writers should be sure not to miss, ‘Getting published is really hard, but…’ This session will take a realistic look at the hurdles to becoming a published author and will include debut Melbourne author Eli Glasman, veteran writer Joanne Fedler who has just completed her eighth book, and Lisa Goldberg from the Monday Morning Cooking Club.

The Monday Morning Cooking Club will also be wrapping up the SJWF with a session not to be missed from 7.00–8.00pm on Sunday called ‘Taste the stories (literally)’. They will talk about the inspirational stories and recipes behind their second cookbook, The Feast Goes On, while the audience samples some of their favourite creations.

It’s going to be a fantastic Festival and we can’t wait! Until then, stay tuned to this blog because we’ll be featuring posts by some of our featured authors, which will be sure to intrigue and entice you to attend their sessions on the day!

Full program details and ticket information are available at www.sjwf.org.au or call 9381 4160. Join us on Facebook and Twitter @SJWFestival #SJWF2014

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.