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.

Ideas and books abuzz at Sydney Jewish Writers Festival

Bondi was abuzz this weekend as hundreds of people gathered for the 2016 Sydney Jewish Writers Festival.

The festival opened at the Bondi Pavilion with a fascinating and hopeful discussion between award-winning Israeli journalist Matti Friedman and stereotype-defying Rabbi Dov Lipman about fractures in Israel and the quiet, slow progress being made to overcome some of them.

“Israel is such a dynamic and complex place, it is always wonderful to hear different perspectives on issues,” said Festival Director Michael Misrachi. “Friedman and Lipman offered analysis, reflection and vision, which are as essential as ever.”

(L-R) Festival Director Michael Misrachi, Rabbi Dov Lipman, moderator Debbie Whitmont, author and journalist Matti Friedman and Waverley Councillor Leon Goltsman.

Audiences were then serenaded by Lee Kofman and Adi Sappir, who performed the poetry of celebrated Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai.

Orli Wargon, David Gonski, Kathy Shand & Michaela Kalowksi 

The program continued on Sunday at Waverley Library with sessions on refugees, music, true crime, and both fictional and real-life stories of Holocaust survival. Audiences were inspired by philanthropist and businessman David Gonski, and moved by authors Shelley Davidow and Alexandra Joel, who explored how one passes on a family legacy without transmitting difficult and traumatic aspects. Matti Friedman spoke to a capacity crowd about his books, The Aleppo Codex and Pumpkinflowers, which promptly sold out at the bookshop.

Davidow, who appears at the Brisbane Writers Festival in the coming weeks, enthused that the program was so topical: “It explored issues facing the country, the world, and people’s lives.”

Dina Gold’s riveting story of reclaiming a family building stolen by the Nazis, the book launch of Rebellious Daughters, and the session on death – which featured authors Leah Kaminsky and Steven Amsterdam along with Rabbi David Freedman and SMH Literary Editor Susan Wyndham – also drew particularly large crowds.

“Audiences flocked to engage with the issue of the end of life, which touches us all but remains highly emotive and still largely taboo,” Misrachi said. “It was thought-provoking and poignant to confront issues like suicide and euthanasia, as well as the panellists’ personal experiences with death.”

Kids enjoyed getting to meet the mother-daughter team of Barbara and Anna Fienberg, authors of Tashi. 

Children were also highly engaged at the festival through three sessions run in conjunction with PJ Library. Kids played with words and language with Erica Bental, author of Has a Book Got a Spine, and intensely quizzed Anna and Barbara Fienberg about how they wrote the beloved series Tashi.

For photos from the Festival please go to our facebook page.

Stay tuned to www.sjwf.org.au for podcasts from the 2016 Sydney Jewish Writers Festival. 

Looking forward to next year!

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!

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.