Bookblog #42: Jewish Studies
Hilary Rubinstein,
Chosen: The Jews in
Australia (Allen & Unwin
1987)
Primo Levi, If This is a Man • The Truce (1958, 1963, translated by Stuart Woolf, Abacus 1987)
Wibke Bruhns, My Father's Country: Story of a German Family (2004, translation by Shaun Whiteside, William Heinemann 2008)
When a friend recently rubbed my nose in my ignorance of Australian Jewish history I decided to take it as a challenge and went on a crash course on matters Jewish, starting with an Australian history and then letting one thing lead onto another.
Hilary Rubinstein wrote
Chosen
in part to give high school students an overview of Jewish history in Australia,
so it came close to being the ideal for my purposes (close rather than spot on
because it was published in 1987, so I'm left with a 21 year gap). Especially in
the first half, it's rich in snippets of interesting information. Did you know,
for instance, that there were between eight and 14 Jewish convicts on the First
Fleet, that Australia's first native born Governor
General was a Jew, that in the mid nineteenth century there was a
thriving Jewish community in Ballarat, that Nathan F. Spielvogel wrote lively short stories
about that community, that the leader of the Australian armed forces in the
First World War and effective founder of Anzac Day was a Jew, that the rumours
that Governor Arthur Phillip had a Jewish mother are
without foundation? OK, I knew some of those, but it was great to read a
narrative tying them together. And there are plenty of memorable anecdotes and
flashes of historic wit. A parliamentary opponent of Isaac Isaacs, in his pre-GG
days, once said of him, 'The honourable member looks as if he would like to eat
me,' to which he replied, 'The honourable member has forgotten my
religion.'
Jews have made up between .4 and .5 of a percent of Australia's population pretty much ever since 1788. Roughly speaking, Chosen (as in the people chosen by God, but also the land chosen by immigrants) divides the history into three periods. In the colonial period, Jews were on more or less equal footing with other settlers. They were overwhelmingly British or anglicised in origin, from all classes and walks of life, including a reasonable number of felons, convicted and otherwise. From the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of the first world war, they took an active part in the affairs of the general community (parliamentarians, merchants, artists, farmers, labourers, you name it), and though there was some assimilation, largely because the chronic shortage of Jewish women resulted in a lot of 'marrying out', there were increasingly organised populations of Jews in every colony. There was antisemitism in the form of vicious stereotypes -- read just about any respected Australian writer of the period, from Marcus Clark (especially him) to Henry Lawson, and you will find nasty stuff -- but mostly it was peripheral, kept in the wings as is customary to be unleashed when things get rough and a scapegoat is needed for whatever calamity has befallen. In the 1990s in response to rumours that huge numbers of poor Jews from Eastern Europe were to be brought to Australia, anti-Jewish rhetoric flared up with frightening intensity in the newspapers and public meetings, particularly in the labour movement. Even though it was obvious that the real issue was working people's fear of losing their jobs to cheaper imported labour, the ease with which that fear could be diverted into antisemitism was a rude shock to Australia's Jewish communities. Hilary Rubinstein's second period, then, the first half of the 20th century, was marked by what she calls a 'cult of inconspicuousness': if Jews could only make themselves a small enough target, they would avoid fanning the embers of antisemitism. The communal leaders, still of British stock or culture, presented the Jewish identity as little more than a religion, some even referring to it as a 'denomination' as if on a par with Anglicanism or Catholicism. This strategy came very close to endorsing assimilation, and it may well have led to the distinctive Jewish culture and identity being diluted to the point of non-existence, except that from about the 1920s, when Eastern European Jews began to arrive in Australia in larger numbers, escaping horrific pogroms in which 100 000 men, women and children were. These new arrivals were mostly not inclined to inconspicuousness, and not all of them were observant. Up until that time Judaism had been virtually the only organising force in the communities. In the 1940s, Jewish Boards of Deputies, by various names and with members representing many sectors of an increasingly diverse community, were established in all states. And after the second world war, with the huge increase in immigration, especially of Holocaust survivors (more to Australia than any other country apart from Israel), and then the dramatic reduction of Australia's isolation, the third, modern period was ushered in.
The parallels with Australian Catholic history are fascinating to me: Catholics had much bigger numbers right from the start, and as far as I know never tried to be inconspicuous -- but even though the sectarian oppression of Catholics was pretty nasty we were never as vulnerable, and even given the potato famine (most Australian Catholics were Irish for a long time) we never had the threat of pogroms hanging over us. The voice of Daniel Mannix was booming out in opposition to conscription at a time when Rabbi Danglow was concerned to demonstrate his patriotic attachment to the British Empire. On the other hand we had no equivalent of the Bundists or other non-religious gropings, because while Catholicism is a culture as well as a religion, the culture has no institutions to sustain it apart from the religion. I find myself mournfully identifying with the 'proud, assertive' Jewish leaders in the nineteenth century who saw all their grandchildren raised as Christians.
There's a tenuous logical step from
Chosen
to If This is a
Man: the revivification of Jewish communal
life in Australia, grimly, owed a lot to the monstrous events of the Holocaust,
to which Primo Levi bears witness in this book. Another link, come to think of
it, is the similarity of attitude between the British patriotism of Australia's
Anglo-Jewish leadership and many bourgeois Jews in pre-Hitler Germany. Levi's
book has been beside my bed for years, so the time seemed right to read it at
last. Paradoxically, I think I'd been put off by Philip Roth's front-cover
blurb: 'One of the century's truly necessary books.'
Necessary
sits awfully close to
worthy
on my brain's adjective shelf, and
worthy
sits close to
dull.
But this book -- really, two books, as this volume includes not only
If This Is a
Man, Levi's account of his time in Auschwitz
(indeed, it was published in the US with the hand-holding title
Survival in
Auschwitz), but also
The Truce
(retitled by US publishers with the similarly
hamfisted The
Reawakening), in which he and more than a
thousand other prisoners endure the arduous journey home to Italy -- is anything
but dull. It sends sparks of light flying in all directions, and at times it's
even funny. It's one of the best and most quotable books I've ever read. One of
its big surprises for me is the way Levi writes as a Jew, yes, unambivalently,
but also as an Italian, and
profoundly
as a human being. It's Dante rather than the Torah that sustains him. He insists
on the importance of reason. A serious engagement with religion is evident, all
the same. As night falls, for example, in the hut after a particularly horrific
selection (that is, a process in which a certain number of prisoners are marked,
more or less arbitrarily, to go to the gas chambers), he sees and hears another
prisoner, Kuhn, praying aloud in the dark, 'swaying backwards and forwards
violently'. He goes
on:
I was part way through this book when I heard that Jacob G Rosenberg, whose memoirs, East of Time and Sunrise West, and poetry also bear wirness to Auschwitz, though from a greater distance, had died. He was a sweet, gentle man, whom I once saw being bullied (courteously) by a barista at a writers' festival where he was an honoured guest. Such a huge event in human history, such a heroic task to bear witness to it, taken on by such luminous souls!
Primo Levi's book has a kind of FAQ at the end written in 1979, where he appears to argue against the idea of trying to understand the perpetrators:
That was written before Gitta Sereny produced her extraordinary Albert Speer: His Struggle with Truth, but even she, as far as I know, didn't get anywhere near 'understanding' Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels or Eichmann. In my current short-term reading project, I moved on to another book on my TBR pile that promised to look at someone from the perpetrator side of the equation.
In My Father's
Country Wibke Bruhns combs through the copious
documents -- letters, diaries, 'children's diaries -- produced by her bourgeois
German family during almost a century leading up to her father's execution for
his part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. (That plot is soon to be the
subject of a Major Hollywood Film Starring Tom Cruise. On the
strength of existing Hollywood forays into history, I'd recommend reading this
book before seeing the movie.)
This is probably the first book I've read that treats the two world wars (which probably should be known as The Great War Parts 1 and 2) from a German point of view. Reading it, as I just have, with the intention of deepening my awareness, if not understanding, of the Holocaust, I was struck by the way the 'Jewish question' was close to peripheral to the family's concerns, and seems to have played no part at all in the motivation of the conspirators: they were aristocratic or wannabe-aristocratic officers in the German armed forces, who despised the crude brutality of the SS and toed the Nazi line, if not reluctantly, at least with distaste. There's a moment when HG (Hans Georg Klamroth, Wibke Bruhn's father and the book's central character) sees Brownshirts and Communists battling in the street below his window and quotes Horace in his diary, 'Odi profanum vulgus et arceo', which translates loosely as, 'Nobody with a decent education, which of course includes the Latin poets, would get involved in such activities.' When an old friend comes to stay the night and brings three Brownshirts with him (the only ones to ever sign the family's guest book with 'Heil Hitler'), HG spends several hours the next day drinking and chatting with a Jewish doctor, friend of the family -- although neither his diary nor Wibke's narrative makes it explicit, the suggestion hangs in the air that he is trying to cleanse himself of contamination. But contaminated he was. Eighteen months after that visit, he wrote in his diary: 'Evening, employers' association re. poss. expulsion of Jew Jacobsohn -- sign of the times.' That last phrase almost certainly indicates the presence regret, but if so there wasn't enough of it to stop him from voting for the motion to expel.
I didn't hear an explicitly anti-Jewish remark from a friend until I was in my mid 20s, and was shocked and unbelieving. It's often said, and it's probably true that anti-semitism is a peripheral phenomenon in Australia. It was peripheral to decent educated affluent Germans in the 1920s too. I guess that's how it works: it stays on the edges, bubbling away noisomely (is the League of Rights defunct? who does those swastika graffiti that pop up every now and then?). And then when it's convenient to have someone to blame for the ills of society, it's allowed by some mechanism to command the centre stage. Did you see that Saturday Night Live skit where the current economic crisis is explained as resulting from the greed of one very clever Jew? Of course no one would take that seriously. But then, no one would vote for a political leader who supports torture or denies the science of climate change ... would they? (Excuse the soapbox, but these books bring it out in me.)
Primo Levi, If This is a Man • The Truce (1958, 1963, translated by Stuart Woolf, Abacus 1987)
Wibke Bruhns, My Father's Country: Story of a German Family (2004, translation by Shaun Whiteside, William Heinemann 2008)
When a friend recently rubbed my nose in my ignorance of Australian Jewish history I decided to take it as a challenge and went on a crash course on matters Jewish, starting with an Australian history and then letting one thing lead onto another.
Hilary Rubinstein wrote
Chosen
in part to give high school students an overview of Jewish history in Australia,
so it came close to being the ideal for my purposes (close rather than spot on
because it was published in 1987, so I'm left with a 21 year gap). Especially in
the first half, it's rich in snippets of interesting information. Did you know,
for instance, that there were between eight and 14 Jewish convicts on the First
Fleet, that Australia's first native born Governor
General was a Jew, that in the mid nineteenth century there was a
thriving Jewish community in Ballarat, that Nathan F. Spielvogel wrote lively short stories
about that community, that the leader of the Australian armed forces in the
First World War and effective founder of Anzac Day was a Jew, that the rumours
that Governor Arthur Phillip had a Jewish mother are
without foundation? OK, I knew some of those, but it was great to read a
narrative tying them together. And there are plenty of memorable anecdotes and
flashes of historic wit. A parliamentary opponent of Isaac Isaacs, in his pre-GG
days, once said of him, 'The honourable member looks as if he would like to eat
me,' to which he replied, 'The honourable member has forgotten my
religion.'Jews have made up between .4 and .5 of a percent of Australia's population pretty much ever since 1788. Roughly speaking, Chosen (as in the people chosen by God, but also the land chosen by immigrants) divides the history into three periods. In the colonial period, Jews were on more or less equal footing with other settlers. They were overwhelmingly British or anglicised in origin, from all classes and walks of life, including a reasonable number of felons, convicted and otherwise. From the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of the first world war, they took an active part in the affairs of the general community (parliamentarians, merchants, artists, farmers, labourers, you name it), and though there was some assimilation, largely because the chronic shortage of Jewish women resulted in a lot of 'marrying out', there were increasingly organised populations of Jews in every colony. There was antisemitism in the form of vicious stereotypes -- read just about any respected Australian writer of the period, from Marcus Clark (especially him) to Henry Lawson, and you will find nasty stuff -- but mostly it was peripheral, kept in the wings as is customary to be unleashed when things get rough and a scapegoat is needed for whatever calamity has befallen. In the 1990s in response to rumours that huge numbers of poor Jews from Eastern Europe were to be brought to Australia, anti-Jewish rhetoric flared up with frightening intensity in the newspapers and public meetings, particularly in the labour movement. Even though it was obvious that the real issue was working people's fear of losing their jobs to cheaper imported labour, the ease with which that fear could be diverted into antisemitism was a rude shock to Australia's Jewish communities. Hilary Rubinstein's second period, then, the first half of the 20th century, was marked by what she calls a 'cult of inconspicuousness': if Jews could only make themselves a small enough target, they would avoid fanning the embers of antisemitism. The communal leaders, still of British stock or culture, presented the Jewish identity as little more than a religion, some even referring to it as a 'denomination' as if on a par with Anglicanism or Catholicism. This strategy came very close to endorsing assimilation, and it may well have led to the distinctive Jewish culture and identity being diluted to the point of non-existence, except that from about the 1920s, when Eastern European Jews began to arrive in Australia in larger numbers, escaping horrific pogroms in which 100 000 men, women and children were. These new arrivals were mostly not inclined to inconspicuousness, and not all of them were observant. Up until that time Judaism had been virtually the only organising force in the communities. In the 1940s, Jewish Boards of Deputies, by various names and with members representing many sectors of an increasingly diverse community, were established in all states. And after the second world war, with the huge increase in immigration, especially of Holocaust survivors (more to Australia than any other country apart from Israel), and then the dramatic reduction of Australia's isolation, the third, modern period was ushered in.
The parallels with Australian Catholic history are fascinating to me: Catholics had much bigger numbers right from the start, and as far as I know never tried to be inconspicuous -- but even though the sectarian oppression of Catholics was pretty nasty we were never as vulnerable, and even given the potato famine (most Australian Catholics were Irish for a long time) we never had the threat of pogroms hanging over us. The voice of Daniel Mannix was booming out in opposition to conscription at a time when Rabbi Danglow was concerned to demonstrate his patriotic attachment to the British Empire. On the other hand we had no equivalent of the Bundists or other non-religious gropings, because while Catholicism is a culture as well as a religion, the culture has no institutions to sustain it apart from the religion. I find myself mournfully identifying with the 'proud, assertive' Jewish leaders in the nineteenth century who saw all their grandchildren raised as Christians.
There's a tenuous logical step from
Chosen
to If This is a
Man: the revivification of Jewish communal
life in Australia, grimly, owed a lot to the monstrous events of the Holocaust,
to which Primo Levi bears witness in this book. Another link, come to think of
it, is the similarity of attitude between the British patriotism of Australia's
Anglo-Jewish leadership and many bourgeois Jews in pre-Hitler Germany. Levi's
book has been beside my bed for years, so the time seemed right to read it at
last. Paradoxically, I think I'd been put off by Philip Roth's front-cover
blurb: 'One of the century's truly necessary books.'
Necessary
sits awfully close to
worthy
on my brain's adjective shelf, and
worthy
sits close to
dull.
But this book -- really, two books, as this volume includes not only
If This Is a
Man, Levi's account of his time in Auschwitz
(indeed, it was published in the US with the hand-holding title
Survival in
Auschwitz), but also
The Truce
(retitled by US publishers with the similarly
hamfisted The
Reawakening), in which he and more than a
thousand other prisoners endure the arduous journey home to Italy -- is anything
but dull. It sends sparks of light flying in all directions, and at times it's
even funny. It's one of the best and most quotable books I've ever read. One of
its big surprises for me is the way Levi writes as a Jew, yes, unambivalently,
but also as an Italian, and
profoundly
as a human being. It's Dante rather than the Torah that sustains him. He insists
on the importance of reason. A serious engagement with religion is evident, all
the same. As night falls, for example, in the hut after a particularly horrific
selection (that is, a process in which a certain number of prisoners are marked,
more or less arbitrarily, to go to the gas chambers), he sees and hears another
prisoner, Kuhn, praying aloud in the dark, 'swaying backwards and forwards
violently'. He goes
on:Kuhn is out of his senses . Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? ... Does Kuhn not realise that what happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again?
If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn's prayer.
I was part way through this book when I heard that Jacob G Rosenberg, whose memoirs, East of Time and Sunrise West, and poetry also bear wirness to Auschwitz, though from a greater distance, had died. He was a sweet, gentle man, whom I once saw being bullied (courteously) by a barista at a writers' festival where he was an honoured guest. Such a huge event in human history, such a heroic task to bear witness to it, taken on by such luminous souls!
Primo Levi's book has a kind of FAQ at the end written in 1979, where he appears to argue against the idea of trying to understand the perpetrators:
Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify. Let me explain: 'understanding' a proposal or human behaviour means to 'contain' it, contain its author put oneself in his place, identify with him.
That was written before Gitta Sereny produced her extraordinary Albert Speer: His Struggle with Truth, but even she, as far as I know, didn't get anywhere near 'understanding' Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels or Eichmann. In my current short-term reading project, I moved on to another book on my TBR pile that promised to look at someone from the perpetrator side of the equation.
In My Father's
Country Wibke Bruhns combs through the copious
documents -- letters, diaries, 'children's diaries -- produced by her bourgeois
German family during almost a century leading up to her father's execution for
his part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. (That plot is soon to be the
subject of a Major Hollywood Film Starring Tom Cruise. On the
strength of existing Hollywood forays into history, I'd recommend reading this
book before seeing the movie.)This is probably the first book I've read that treats the two world wars (which probably should be known as The Great War Parts 1 and 2) from a German point of view. Reading it, as I just have, with the intention of deepening my awareness, if not understanding, of the Holocaust, I was struck by the way the 'Jewish question' was close to peripheral to the family's concerns, and seems to have played no part at all in the motivation of the conspirators: they were aristocratic or wannabe-aristocratic officers in the German armed forces, who despised the crude brutality of the SS and toed the Nazi line, if not reluctantly, at least with distaste. There's a moment when HG (Hans Georg Klamroth, Wibke Bruhn's father and the book's central character) sees Brownshirts and Communists battling in the street below his window and quotes Horace in his diary, 'Odi profanum vulgus et arceo', which translates loosely as, 'Nobody with a decent education, which of course includes the Latin poets, would get involved in such activities.' When an old friend comes to stay the night and brings three Brownshirts with him (the only ones to ever sign the family's guest book with 'Heil Hitler'), HG spends several hours the next day drinking and chatting with a Jewish doctor, friend of the family -- although neither his diary nor Wibke's narrative makes it explicit, the suggestion hangs in the air that he is trying to cleanse himself of contamination. But contaminated he was. Eighteen months after that visit, he wrote in his diary: 'Evening, employers' association re. poss. expulsion of Jew Jacobsohn -- sign of the times.' That last phrase almost certainly indicates the presence regret, but if so there wasn't enough of it to stop him from voting for the motion to expel.
I didn't hear an explicitly anti-Jewish remark from a friend until I was in my mid 20s, and was shocked and unbelieving. It's often said, and it's probably true that anti-semitism is a peripheral phenomenon in Australia. It was peripheral to decent educated affluent Germans in the 1920s too. I guess that's how it works: it stays on the edges, bubbling away noisomely (is the League of Rights defunct? who does those swastika graffiti that pop up every now and then?). And then when it's convenient to have someone to blame for the ills of society, it's allowed by some mechanism to command the centre stage. Did you see that Saturday Night Live skit where the current economic crisis is explained as resulting from the greed of one very clever Jew? Of course no one would take that seriously. But then, no one would vote for a political leader who supports torture or denies the science of climate change ... would they? (Excuse the soapbox, but these books bring it out in me.)
Posted: Tue - November 11, 2008 at 02:00 PM |
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This started out as a patchy journal about family life with my mother-in-law, Mollie, who has Alzheimers and was then living with us. Mollie has moved, first into a "low-care facility" then, in July 2004, into a nursing home. As these and other events have overtaken us, the blog has moved on ...
A note on comments: You can read comments on the same page as the entry rather than in a pop-up window, by clicking on the category button ("Mollie" etc) at the end of the entry and then on the "Read more" button.
A note on comments: You can read comments on the same page as the entry rather than in a pop-up window, by clicking on the category button ("Mollie" etc) at the end of the entry and then on the "Read more" button.
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