The Magic of Music

By Ida Lichter

Have you ever wondered about the transmission between performing musicians and the audience?

This was one of the questions I discussed with classical musicians when I was exploring the function of music in society. Most of them were members of groups that played chamber music, a genre for the most intimate thoughts and feelings of some of the greatest composers.

Ida Lichter

Most performing artists are convinced that a live audience is required for maximum inspiration and communication. A creative interface exists between performer and audience, involving a reciprocal transfer of emotions where impromptu inventiveness can occur.

Occasionally, there is an exceptional moment. Referring to musicals, the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim talked of the need for many laughs and a few moments to cry, along with one hyper moment when members of the audience are aware of a certain joy and a feeling they understand why they are there.

When the interaction between performer and audience is very powerful, listeners may glimpse magnificent, even ethereal beauty. However, the emotional impact of music is idiosyncratic and often depends on the listener’s state of mind.

This magical effect defies easy explanation but the musician’s vision is an important contributing factor. 

Performers are stimulated by the power of imagination. For a singer, the mind paints the picture and the vocal mechanism responds to give the voice colour. When the sound undergoes these changes, the audience reacts.

Re-experiencing a broad range of intense emotions in a safe, controlled environment seems beneficial for listeners and could be considered a form of therapy. Emotions in the music cover the full range from exhilaration to despair. They include love, jealousy, anger, and sadness, and as suggested by research data, even melancholic music can be beneficial. 

Music can engender a sense of mastery. Beethoven in particular, may stimulate feelings of empowerment. There is a majestic, heroic strength in his music, particularly evident in the slow movements of the symphonies.

Beethoven's Piano Sonata
No. 30 in E major, Op. 109

If a performance is convincing, it should trigger many personal associations, not only during a recital, but afterwards as well, if listeners are able to reminisce about the experience.

While listening to music, pleasurable feelings are linked to a variety of physical responses, including shivers and altered heart rate and breathing, probably associated with changes in brain chemistry and the neurotransmitter dopamine. No doubt, any music, whether classical, jazz, or pop can stimulate the brain in similar ways.

The three overlapping circles of a Venn diagram help explain how the emotional transmission is effected. One circle represents the composer’s creation and intention, the second one the artist’s interpretation, and the third the participation of the audience. 

When the three combine to form the overlapping sweet spot in the middle, intense emotional transmission can be realised.

Ida Lichter will be speaking about how musicians and composers use their art to transform our everyday experiences in her session 'Music makers, music lovers' with Stuart Coupe and Michaela Kalowski, on Sunday August 28, 5:45pm - 6:45pm at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival.


Book today at www.sjwf.org.au!

Writing about others

by Lee Kofman

Soon after my memoir The Dangerous Bride came out, I received an email from a woman who had read my book. 

Her name was Anna, she was of a Russian origin and lived in Melbourne. 

There was also a Russian ‘Anna’ (pseudonym) from Melbourne in my book. The woman felt disturbed by this fact and emailed to assert that she and I had never met. 

Lee Kofman

I don’t want people to think it was me, she wrote. 

This was a puzzling concern, considering that Anna is a name as common among Russians in Australia, as Anne would be amongst people from Anglo-Saxon backgrounds. 

It was even more perplexing since ‘Anna’ in my book is a very minor, non-descript character. All that is known about her is that she is a friend of my aunt and that I briefly housesat in her beautiful home with creamy curtains and a rose-filled garden. I never imagined someone might get upset on the account of my ‘Anna’. 

I did, though, have many other anxieties during the writing of this book. It took me five years to write it and whenever I complained about that to my friends, they’d remind me kindly that at that time I was also completing a PhD, teaching, getting divorced, re-marrying and producing my first child. 

But actually none of these facts explains why it took me so long to write The Dangerous Bride. 

The truth is, I wrote slowly, because writing it terrified me. 

My memoir tells the story of my misadventures in trying out non-monogamous relationships. And of course, as most memoirs are, it is also an expose of other people involved in my story and I felt much guilt about this. 

I worried about misusing the whatever power my pen may possess. Most obvious was my guilt that I was revealing uncomfortable stuff about my former partners. 

Then there was my mother, who frequently features in my work and who – when she knows I’m working on something new - says: ‘Oy vey, Lubochka, what will you write about me now? That I drink vodka and beat up your papa?’ (For the record, she does neither of these things!).

The Dangerous Bride also describes my conversations with other people who experimented with non-monogamy and I worried I wasn’t representing them adequately, and that I’d offend them by describing them the way I saw them. I also worried that people I wrote about could be recognised, so I changed many of their personal details, then worried about the potential loss of authenticity. 

Eventually, my anxiety escalated to the point where every time I sat down to write, I felt my study was crowded, haunted by the ghosts of my characters, and they were all telling me I was completely in the wrong, that I didn’t get them, that I used them, that I was full of shit. 

And yet I had to keep going. 

Before I began this book, for several years I tried not to write it, to write something else, and as a result I got writer’s block. It felt as if the story of my non-monogamous quest was exerting a volcanic pressure upon me and the only way I could release it was to tell it. Besides, I suspected my tale might be of some interest to others too, even those disinterested in non-monogamy, because I was really writing about love, trying to understand its nature, and its relationship to sex and romance and the everyday life. 

So I clenched my teeth, literally, and kept writing.

‘There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer,‘ Graham Greene suggested in his autobiography A Sort of Life. 

Joan Didion

Joan Didion, one of my literary idols, echoed him, noting that ‘writers are always selling someone out’. Nonfiction writers and fiction writers whose work is inspired by their lives can be placed on a continuum in terms of their ethical decisions about how they represent others. 

On one end of this continuum sit the toothless books - those which cause no harm and tell no truth. Usually their authors are decent, considerate people who tend to ask their subjects’ permissions even before they start writing, then run their drafts by them, modifying them to gain approval. 

However, while gaining permission may minimise individual hurt and relationship-risk, it usually maximises writing-risk, resulting in work that reflects how other people wish to be seen rather than a writer’s thoughtful analysis of people’s actual behaviour and motives. 

As Helen Garner writes ‘writing, it seems, like bringing up of children, can’t be done without causing damage’. 

The uncomfortable truth is, the marriage between worthy literature and decency is an uneasy one, since describing humans and their relations honestly inevitably requires a measure of hard-heartedness.

On the other end of the continuum Karl Ove Knausgaard sprawls royally with his Proustian autobiographical opus My Struggle consisting of six thick volumes, where he at least appears to tell it all – slashing his own face with a razor, the resentment he often feels towards his wife, his mother-in-law’s secretive alcoholism. 

Karl Ove Knausgaard

While I definitely wouldn’t want to be related to Knausgaard, when I want to get closer to the truth of human experience, I can always turn to his work. 

Yet the price Knausgaard and people close to him pay for the wonderful artwork he produces is a heavy one. It is known, for example, that the publication of My Struggle put enormous strain on his marriage, including possibly triggering a relapse of his wife’s bipolar disorder. 

Fortunately, the ethical terrain between Knausgaard and those non-offensive, and artless, books is vast. To find my own place there, during those five years of torturous writing I managed to establish for myself some ground rules which kept me going. 

Helen Garner was instrumental in building my ethical tool kit. I particularly found useful her fabulous essay ‘I’ which discusses these dilemmas of writing about others. She writes: 

Helen Garner

The deal is this: if I’m rough on myself, it frees me to be rough on others as well. I stress the unappealing, mean, aggressive, unglamorous aspects of myself as a way of lessening my anxiety about portraying other people as they strike me.

In this spirit, I promised my former husband ‘Noah’ that I’d be much harder on myself as a character than on him, and I hope I managed to do so. 

Another strategy I used when writing about others was what I call ‘tell your story, not their secrets’. I took care to only tell those details about my characters which bore direct relevance to my own narrative. This doesn’t mean I did no harm, rather I tried to minimise it as much as I could without compromising the emotional honesty of the work.   

Unpredictably, the eight months since the book’s publication haven’t been as dire as I feared they might. No one but that mysterious Anna has contacted me to complain, and some of the people I interviewed even attended the book launch. 

My mother, to my horror, is currently reading my memoir but it seems that by now she’s so used to being a feature in my work that she no longer bothers to complain. I even get the sense that, secretly, she enjoys being one of my chief muses. 

‘Noah’ simply said he wouldn’t read the book. 

Thus, for me, at least for now, the worst consequences of telling my story played themselves out inside my mind. 

But not all writers are so lucky and sometimes people written about get seriously hurt, as Knausgaard’s case demonstrates. 

From my writer-peers I sometimes hear stories of crumbling relationships, and even attempts at revenge. Yet usually these come from people with whom they had toxic relationships to begin with. 

So yes, writing about others is not for the fainthearted and/or the perfectly decent. But when writers do take real – not tame - risks, the artwork usually shines. 

Still, I am no advocate of utterly ruthless writing and not only for ethical, but also artistic, considerations. The latter kind of writing risks becoming artless, because it may slid into the tedious territory of complaint and revenge. In my view, it is healthy to worry about people we write about not just out of empathy but also because such concern keeps us on our toes, forcing us into scrutiny of our own motives and behaviour, while putting even more effort into understanding others’ perspectives, which is what good writing should do. 

Moreover, the tension generated by such concerns usually makes the resulting works feel urgent not only for writers, but also for the readers.

From my writer-peers I sometimes hear stories of crumbling relationships, and even attempts at revenge. Yet usually these come from people with whom they had toxic relationships to begin with.

Lee Kofman will be speaking about writing about yourself and other characters in her workshop 'Writing yourself and others as characters', on Sunday August 28, 10:00am - 12:00pm at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival.

Lee will also offer a musical rendition of Yehuda Amichai's poetry with cellist Adi Sappir on Saturday August 27 at 9:00pm, and will be part of the launch of Rebellious Daughters on Sunday August 28, 2:00pm - 3:00pm.

Book today at www.sjwf.org.au!

Ideas and literature shine at Sydney Jewish Writers Festival

We are excited to be back, for the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival (SJWF) returns on 27-28 August 2016! It features a remarkable line-up of international award-winners, thought leaders, acclaimed authors, new talent, and plenty of extraordinary stories.

“We are thrilled to showcase such a fine and fascinating line-up of writers”, said Festival Director Michael Misrachi. 

“They stir us to grapple with big, global issues – war, religious extremism, refugees, end of life, and family dynamics – but also write beautifully and invite us to enjoy the poetry and music of life.”

Opening night is a case in point. It features award-winning Israeli author and journalist Matti Friedman whose new book Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story was described by Pulitzer Prize-winner Kai Bird as “destined to become a classic text on the absurdities of war” and critique of media coverage of Israel after its 2014 war with Gaza went viral on social media. He discusses Israel’s battle lines with stereotype-defying Rabbi Dov Lipman, former Member of the Knesset and campaigner against religious extremism in Israel.

The panel is followed by cellist and composer Adi Sappir and author Lee Kofman performing an uplifting, musical rendering of the work of Yehuda Amichai, modern Israel’s most beloved poet.

US-based author Dina Gold shares her
incredible search and long legal battle to reclaim a building that belonged to her German-Jewish family but was stolen by the Nazis, in the spirit of the Helen Mirren movie Woman In Gold. Precious possessions lost during the Holocaust also feature in the fiction of New Zealand author, Julie Thomas.

SJWF will host the Sydney launch of Rebellious Daughters and feature hot-off-the-press authors Steven Amsterdam, Nathan Besser and MeredithJaffe.

“We are struck every year by the wealth of Jewish literature being published”, enthused Misrachi, “There has been a flurry of excellent Jewish writing in the months leading up to the festival!”

Leading figures David Gonski and Mark Tedeschi open up about their writing, along with Mireille Juchau, whose recent masterpiece The World Without Us won the 2016 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for The Stella Prize and Australian Book Industry Award.

SJWF features prolific acclaimed author Arnold Zable, who will also talk about his work as a refugee advocate with Kooshyar Karimi, who shares his experience as a Jewish-Iranian refugee who languished in Turkey for years.

Holocaust survivor Baba Schwartz tells her story publicly for the first time, recounting the horrors of Auschwitz as well as her happy childhood in Hungary, a period often overshadowed by the subsequent tragedy. She is joined by Frank Vajda and Marcel Weyland, who were both saved by Righteous of the Nations – Raoul Wallenberg and Chiune Sugihara respectively.

SJWF offers writing workshopsfor adults with Lee Kofman and for children with word play extraordinaire Erica Bentel, in conjunction with PJ Library. There is also a special parent-child session with the mother-daughter creative genius behind Tashi, Barbara and Anna Fienberg.

SJWF will once again be hosted by Waverley Council, with events taking place at the Bondi Pavilion and Waverley Library.

For further information or to book tickets, visit www.sjwf.org.au

2015 Sydney Jewish Writers Festival highlights

By Sharon Berger

Memories of last week’s hugely successful Sydney Jewish Writers Festival may be fading but at least we still have the books to read and DVDs to watch, plus the photos on our facebook page.  Please feel free to tag yourself.

Dr Dvir Abramovich, Gideon Raff and Jennifer Teege

Emmy-award winning creator/director of Homeland and Prisoners of War, Gideon Raff, was hugely popular in his sold-out session with moderator Michaela Kalowski. Together they delved into the very different reception that prisoners of war receive in both the US and Israel. These differences lie at the core of his decision in differentiating the two series, which are both based on the idea of soldiers returning home after many years in captivity. It was a privilege to hear more about his motivation to make the series and also the Israeli public’s reaction to the Prisoners of War.

Michaela Kalowski in conversation with Gideon Raff

The 'Facing Adversity' session, with authors Martin Chimes and Greg Fisher, moderated by Shirli Kirschner, was also standing room only. Many of Martin’s family and friends made the effort to come hear more about his novel, The Lion’s Den, as well as his struggle with cancer. Kirschner adeptly weaved his struggle with that of Greg Fisher, who overcame drug addiction and eight years in jail to turn his life around. 

Booksigning with Martin Chimes, Greg Fisher and Philip Mendes

Other stand-out sessions included former Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer speaking about General John Monash as well as German-Nigerian author Jennifer Teege, who spoke about her incredible journey discovering the gruesome truth about her family in her book, My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me.

Tim Fischer

Festival-goers appreciated “the excellent homework done by all the moderators, as well as the generosity and openness of the authors.” Additional evaluation feedback included “Each one was so unique  yet powerful and moving – wonderful human stories. … Thanks for a stimulating and inspirational day! ”

Book sales, courtesy of Lindfield Bookshop, were brisk and patrons appreciated the opportunity to get up close and personal with the authors at the book signings.

Gideon Raff with fans

Everyone enjoyed the Festival's new venue, Waverley Library, which allowed for larger sessions, dining space and easy access.

Parents enjoyed the opportunity for their children to attend the PJ Library/Arty Start workshop where kids aged 6-8 were able to write and illustrate their own story. 

PJ Library art activity

There were also a number of sessions aimed at parents including 'Will the kids be alright?' with parenting experts Joanne Fedler, Dr Arne Rubinstein and teenage depression survivor Adam Schwartz. 

Will the kids be alright panel?

Until 2016...! Let us know if you have any wonderful Jewish authors you would like to see at next year’s festival, and keep in touch with Jewish writing in Sydney and around the world by liking us on Facebook.

Photos courtesy of David Sokol Photography. 

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