A Life To Live...

by Israel Kipen

  A Life to Live …

  An autobiography

  ISRAEL KIPEN

  Published by Hybrid Publishers

  Melbourne Victoria Australia

  © Israel Kipen 1989, 2014

  This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to the Publisher, Hybrid Publishers, PO Box 52, Ormond, Victoria 3204, Australia.

  www.hybridpublishers.com.au

  First published 1989

  Second edition 2014

  ISBN 9781742983301

  A life to live is not a field to cross.

  – Russian saying

  In the art of living, man is both the artist and the object of his art; he is the sculptor and the marble, the physician and the patient …

  – Erich Fromm, Man for Himself

  Acknowledgements

  I wish to thank Dr John Foster from the Department of History, University of Melbourne, for reading the manuscript and for encouraging its publication.

  I wish to thank Dr Serge Liberman for editing the text and for his special involvement and advice.

  I wish to thank Itiel Berenson for reading the text and for his encouragement to have it published.

  Finally, I wish to thank my wife Laura for her help and critical opinion throughout the process of writing and revising.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Preface

  Bialystok

  Home

  Family and Education

  Living in the 1930s

  Vilna

  Russia and Japan

  Shanghai

  Australia: 1946-1960

  Australian Society

  Jews in Australia

  Mount Scopus College

  Zionism in Australia

  First Trip Abroad from Australia

  Victorian Zionist Organization

  Bialik College

  1961-1986

  In Retrospect

  Dr Kipen’s Address after Receiving Honorary Doctorate

  Introduction to e-book version of A life to Live

  By the time you come to read this e-book introduction to my autobiography A Life to Live you might have already read my original introduction, as well as the literary assessments printed on the inside flaps of its dust jacket. They would have given you the opportunity to form a first impression of me as the author of the content. Even if this is a first encounter with my story, the only thing that has changed is that 25 years have passed since its initial publication and mercifully I am able to add this second introduction.

  The e-book is identical to the printed version in that I have not updated it by adding further content covering those 25 years. Why has it taken so long to e-publish? At age 94, my first encounters with the internet have been very recent. About 6 months ago my academic work Ahad Ha-am: The Zionism of the Future was published as an e-book and I was overwhelmed by the universal response to it. That convinced me of the merits of e-book publishing and confirmed the opinion of many who encouraged me, that my biography is also an invaluable historical document in its own right.

  The new readership is very different from the original one. Those more familiar than I with this new form of sharing books, the generations who have grown up with the digital world, understand the technicalities, which I do not. I don’t own a computer. My copy of the book remains on the shelf in my study. For those who now read it electronically, it is up to you, dear reader, to form your own view of the life I have lived.

  Israel Kipen

  Melbourne

  March 2014

  Note

  If you would like to communicate with the author about this book, please email: dvir@unimelb.edu.au

  Preface

  The date was the last Friday of 1984. My wife Laura and I had returned a week earlier from the United States where we had been visiting our daughter Aviva and her family, and we had just arrived at Mount Martha for our summer holidays.

  At midday, a friend, Eva Faine, came by to greet us and invited us to her home for supper that evening. There, whilst recounting some of our experiences abroad, I happened also to refer to different wartime events and happenings in which I had been involved. In the course of the conversation, my hostess turned to me and, like so many others before her, asked outright, “Why don’t you write down all these experiences?”

  Over the years, I had grown somewhat immune to such promptings. True, in early 1984, I had partly succumbed to urgings imposed upon me. But in the process of outlining an autobiography, I discovered that my memory was no longer as reliable as I would have wished it to be. What was particularly hazy in my mind was the historical dimension of my recollections in that while many events were still clearly vivid, their actual chronological sequence proved more elusive, and the realisation of this shortcoming unsettled me to the extent that I put my notes aside unfinished.

  Having answered my hostess to this effect, her husband, Solly Faine, countered my reluctance by saying that my reservations did not matter. I should not look upon my recounting of events as a thesis, but simply as a record of my experiences to the best of my ability, even if I was on occasions uncertain about that third element, time.

  Nonetheless, I still found myself in two minds.

  It was one thing haphazardly to recall isolated experiences in the course of a casual conversation, but something quite different to commit them to paper. With the benefit of hindsight, I came to regret not having kept a diary, particularly during my years of wandering, for, being by nature always mindful of the correctness of what I said, by recording my past, I risked transgressing this very basic precept.

  On the other hand, I had long been under pressure, most particularly from my wife, to write my story. Further, on reflection, I became more clearly aware that my life spanned a period in human history that had seen both the most cruel and terrible aberrations known to man and the most promising achievements in human affairs. As a Jew, too, I had lived through the most tragic events ever to befall my people in its long and tortured history, yet had been privileged also to witness its most remarkable rebirth as an independent nation in nearly two thousand years. These considerations alone worked to persuade me to take up again the challenge. But one last argument decided me upon my course. Because, in the aftermath of the brutal wartime upheaval that had come to bear, so few of Europe’s Jews had survived, I, as one such survivor, became conscious of the added obligation to bear witness to that which had taken place.

  In the end, these latter considerations won out. My offering here is seen as but a humble, modest contribution to that which has already been written about the past fifty years of my people’s history; but if, in however small a way, it helps succeeding generations to understand the nature of the events described and aids some future historian to unravel yet another strand of the reality as I have known it, then, my apprehensions notwithstanding, the writing of this account may yet prove justified.

  1

  Bialystok

  The town of Bialystok, where I was born in 1919 and lived until the age of twenty, lies in the north-eastern part of Poland which, at the time of my birth, had just been reconstituted as an independent nation by the Treaty of Versailles. It is situated midway between the Polish capital Warsaw and the capital of Lithuania, Vilnius, known as Vilna when under Polish rule.

  Historically, not only Vilna, but also Bialystok belonged to Lithuania, which had been a large and powerful political entity during a goodly part of the second millennium. Bialystok was first established as a village around 1320 by the Lithuanian grand duke Gediminas on a part of his exten
sive land holdings. In 1514, King Zygmunt of Poland offered the village to another Pole, the overlord Raczkowicz. In 1749, Bialystok received town rights and the heads of the Jewish community were permitted to take part in its municipal elections. At the time of the Third Partition of Poland between Prussia, Austria and Russia in 1795, with Bialystok passing to Prussia, the town comprised 459 dwellings and 3,370 inhabitants, and had become an important administrative centre with a public service, judiciary, military garrison, and other facilities. With the eastward advance of the Napoleonic armies, the Prussians hastily departed, and Bialystok passed to Russia under the Treaty of Tilsit signed on 7th July 1807. A year later, Tsar Alexander I proclaimed the town a regional capital (oblast), endowed with a governor’s seat. According to the Polish historian Bobrowski, there were 6,000 inhabitants in Bialystok in that year, of whom two-thirds were Jews and the rest Poles, Russian Unitarians and Germans.

  After a brief interlude of French occupation, Russia regained the town in 1812 and retained it for over a century until after the end of the First World War. During this time, the town expanded. In 1857, its inhabitants numbered 13,787, of whom 9,547, or 70%, were Jews. In 1913, its population was 89,000, of whom 61,500 were Jews, 11,000 White Russians, 6,000 Poles, 5,500 Germans, 4,000 Russians, 1,500 Lithuanians, and 200 Tartars. In 1932, Bialystok numbered 91,207 souls, of whom 51.6% were Jews, 38.6% were Catholics, 6.2% Eastern Orthodox, 3.2% Evangelists, and 0.4% others. (The data is taken from Pinkas Bialystok by the local historian A. S. Herszberg.) The seeming fall in the proportion of the Jewish population from 1913 to 1932 is less real than being the result of an “adjustment” of figures for political reasons. Certainly nothing happened between those years to reduce the absolute numbers of Jews living in the town. Rather, in order to reduce the proportion of Jews living there, the populations of some fifteen outlying agricultural settlements were brought within the borders of Bialystok, thereby swelling the total number of inhabitants recorded with other surrounding peoples. At the outbreak of World War II, Bialystok had a population of approximately 100,000, of whom about 70,000 were Jews.

  As a town numbering 100,000 inhabitants, Bialystok was held to be a sizeable place. It represented the administrative centre of the Bialystok Province (or wojewodztwo), whose gubernatorial seat was situated in the magnificent palace of the wealthy Branicki family, erected in the eighteenth century and known as the Podlassie Versailles. Opposite the palace stood the only hotel of international standard, the Ritz, with its circular facade overlooking the palace and the beautiful city gardens which offered its citizens acres of lawns and benches, not commonly to be had in a city renowned more for its industries than for its public amenities. Though, withal, a provincial city, Bialystok commanded international renown. Among its own illustrious sons was Ludwik Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, whose home, a green-painted house, served as a Mecca for congresses and pilgrimages of Esperanto societies the world over.

  It was as a textile manufacturing centre that Bialystok was best known. It specialised particularly in the production and export of woven cloth, fabric most suited to overcoats, military uniforms and blankets. In contrast to worsted cloth which uses fresh wool clips as its raw material, woven cloth relies on woollen wastes as a base for its manufacture. The Bialystok textile industry was a major consumer of such material, the greater part of which had to be imported from abroad. Accordingly, it established firm commercial contacts with the outer Western world. Through extensive export of its finished product, as far as the cities of Harbin and Tientsin, it extended its contacts also with the East. The Jewish firm of Stein handled a major part of the trade, and its reputation with foreign trading firms as a transport and warehousing enterprise was of such standing that letters of credit established with it were honoured. The largest textile enterprise, meanwhile, was that of Sokol and Zylberfenig who together ran a chain of spinning and weaving mills and gave out work to other smaller concerns besides. Both principals, Abraham Sokol and Yudel (Selwyn) Zylberfenig, were in time to survive the war and independently to find their way to Melbourne.

  My father was among the many engaged in the textile industry. In the years just prior to World War II, he was involved with the production of artificial fur – known as Watoline – an industry allied to the main textile activity of the town, using some of the same raw materials. At the time, I had already gone into the family business and received a consignment of Dutch second-hand men’s woollen socks, bought as waste for further manufacture. When the customs authorities opened the bales for inspection, they found the merchandise to be of such excellent and still-usable quality that they ordered it to be chopped up and mangled to prevent it from being re-sold as socks to the locals. It occurred to me then how superior the living standards must have been in the West if people there could so discard such perfectly good items of clothing – something that living standards in Poland could in no wise have permitted.

  While, in the service of the textile industry, spinning mills and weaving shops abounded, such industries as tanneries, lumber mills and dye-works, among others, were not excluded. The fact that most of these were in Jewish hands provided the town’s community with a sound economic base, this in turn, facilitating entrepreneurial opportunity, rendering Bialystok’s Jews economically self-sufficient, and promoting an independent and forward-tending social structure and outlook.

  As a consequence of the economic soundness of Bialystok’s industrial base, Jewish co-operative banks came into being and provided added thrust to the economy, the basis of which was credit. Being predominantly an agricultural nation with a large indigent peasantry, particularly in its eastern reaches, Poland’s overall wealth was meagre, its buying power poor, and its commercial activity sluggish. People, on the whole, did not possess private bank accounts and ready money was scant. Accordingly, payment was made on the strength of promissory notes extending credit from sixty to 180 days, which meant that some source of cash was needed to keep the economy moving. It was here that the co-operative Jewish banks came into their own. There were a number of such institutions, each designed to serve different sectors of the economy. The major activity of the banks was to discount promissory notes in order to enable entrepreneurs to pay their wages and meet their other outlays, to sustain the more widespread cottage industries and, at times, to support even the self-employed who had to accept promissory notes to subsist. With the passage of time, the involvement of Bialystok’s Jews in the town’s economic life assured them of a sound and solid place within its society.

  Polish Jews had for some considerable time enjoyed self-government. This was granted by law by the Polish parliament. The law was less the result of any altruistic liberalism that might have motivated the government than a way of meeting the administrative difficulties caused by the country’s unique socio-demographic structure. Of the 33 million citizens who comprised the newly-formed Polish state, after the First World War, only some 20 million of them were Poles. The rest belonged to other nationalities living in concentrated enclaves in different parts of the country. Thus, millions of White Russian peasants lived in the north and central parts of eastern Poland; millions of Ukrainians lived in the southeast; there were, further, numerous Lithuanians in the north, Volks-Deutschen in the south, and Germans in the north-west and bordering the western rim of the state. In addition to these, there were a further three million Jews spread right across the country, concentrated from the capital down to the smallest hamlets. The combined voting power of the representatives of all these very substantial minorities compelled the Polish government to enact measures that would not compromise Polish dominance over its territories. It did this by permitting some degree of self-government to each of the ethnic minorities within its jurisdiction, combined with the freedom given to each to preserve and maintain its own distinctive language and culture.

  In the case of the Jews, such a precedent was already in existence. Internal self-management had long before been implemented through the Va’ad Arb
a Ha’Aratzot, the Council of the Four Lands, a recognised legal instrumentality instituted by Napoleonic law which, acting as a democratically-elected miniature parliament, on the one hand possessed the right to levy taxes on the Jewish population to administer its many and diverse internal institutions and, on the other, represented the political, economic and cultural interests of the people to the central authorities.

  The most extensive and effective aspects of the Kehilla’s work were in the field of social welfare. One needs to remember that prior to World War II, such measures of relief as unemployment benefits were not available. When Winston Churchill as England’s Chancellor of the Exchequer introduced the first Bill committing the British government to paying threepence per week to the country’s unemployed, he thought he might have undertaken a responsibility beyond the capacity of the Treasury to cope with, and entertained doubts about the very viability of the scheme long after he had relinquished the Treasury portfolio. In the newly-reconstituted Poland of the post-World War I era, such programmes of welfare could in no wise be entertained, not least because the majority of its population would then quite justifiably have been entitled to be beneficiaries of any such government largesse. The government was already hard put to raise sufficient taxes for its administrative needs, and it was not unknown for tax-defaulters to be stripped of their last sticks of furniture or their last cow in lieu of payment.

  Within the Jewish communities, the responsibility of supporting the poor fell upon the Council, or, as it was also known, the Kehilla. The need for individual aid was considerable, and always exceeded the meagre resources that its institutions alone could muster. Some of these needs were of a cyclical nature, corresponding often to the Jewish calendar. Before each festival, most particularly before Passover, measures were taken to ensure that the needy were provided, for instance, with matzoth. At the onset of the long and severe winters, supplies of wood and coal were ensured. Individuals struck by hardship or tragedy were forever appearing at the doors of the representatives of the Kehilla which did its best to disburse funds according to its constituents’ needs.