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!

Whispers from the past and miraculous discoveries

by Shelley Davidow

When I first began to write Whisperings in the Blood I planned on writing it as a novel. It was going to be called 'The Immigrant'. 

Shelley Davidow

I wanted to tell a story of generations of immigrants based on my gran Bertha’s life, because her life was kind of cool and interesting. I only knew a few things: that when my gran was 10 and living in Indiana, USA, her mother died, and she and her brother were sent to the Jewish Orphan Home in Ohio. I knew that my gran, at age 22, went out to Africa to marry a man she’d never met. 

Then, in 2012 I told my dad in South Africa what I wanted to write, and he said there was this box of letters he’d been holding onto and would I like them?

Every letter written to my gran from 1937 until her death lay in this box, including the love-letters from my grandfather Phil, asking her to come to Africa and marry him after just seeing her photograph. Once I’d read everything, I was stunned. The novel had to become a biography. Then my uncle in Israel said, ‘well, Shell, you know I have Bertha’s diaries. Should I scan them for you?’

A picture of Bertha on her 21st birthday 
that she sent to Phil before they had met.

I couldn’t believe it. Finding Bertha’s own voice,  I discovered miraculous parallels between my gran and myself. The book became then, a biographical memoir! I was blown away to discover that so many of my decisions, my fears, my illnesses, my longings, already existed in the generations that came before me. I uncovered what I can only call, a ‘whispering in the blood’ … a series of motifs and themes that have run through my family for over a hundred years. 

For all that time my Jewish family on my father’s side has been on the move, making immigrant journeys in a restless trans-generational search for home. Great-grandfather Jacob escaped the Pogroms in Eastern Europe and fled to America. His daughter Bertha escaped the Great Depression in the USA to go to Africa and marry someone she’d never met. I grew up during Apartheid and left to escape rampant violence… and then left America to escape health issues, and I thought all my decisions were simply contextual. 

I know that recent research at Emory University in the USA shows that trans-generational trauma can be quite literally passed down through our DNA, but in my book Whisperings in the Blood, I’m aiming to transcend even that… going deeper, into the realm of metaphor, into ‘soul dispositions’ that are more than genetically encoded responses to the world. I see our lives connecting to those of our forebears in a profound, intricate way, and in honouring the immigrants, the refugees of past world events, I want to shed light on our current issues: every non-indigenous person in Australia is an immigrant of one kind or another; we are uninvited ‘guests’ on Aboriginal land. 

I want to acknowledge that, as well as the trauma that flows through every Aboriginal person’s veins as a result of the decimation they’ve suffered over the last 200 years. And when I think of the Jewish refugees in my family since the early 1900’s, and refugees from Syria now, there is no ‘them’ and ‘us’! We have all been people running from dangerous places searching for a safe haven. 

Perhaps Whisperings in the Blood might help dissolve the idea of the ‘other’. Through reading other people’s lives we become them; we’re less likely to then be xenophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, sexist bigots. We become more empathetic, less fearful, less ignorant.

Shelley Davidow 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 Alexandra Joel, 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!

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