by Arnold Zable
PRAISE FOR ARNOLD ZABLE AND
CAFE SCHEHERAZADE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NSW PREMIERS LITERARY AWARDS 2002
AND THE TASMANIA PACIFIC REGION PRIZES2003
‘A celebration of the immigrants' resilience and creativity. In Zable's eloquent style, storytelling is heightened by pathos, tragedy and lyricism…In his journalism, Arnold Zable is distinguished by his empathy for minorities and human rights. In his longer works a strain of romantic yearning finds expression in lyrical landscapes and in reverence for the capacity of the human spirit.’
Age
‘It is the sense of wonder, not the repetition of horror, that distinguishes Zable's Holocaust stories and makes him one of the best tellers of his kind. Cafe Scheherazade…transcends the distinction between fiction and non-fiction.’
Sydney Morning Herald
‘Stories are delicate things, attached to people, mutable and ephemeral…What is it that makes fiction grounded in truth so nourishing? To continue the cafe analogy, it is the difference, perhaps, between blackforest cherry cake and the lighter fictive whippings of a cream sponge or even a hazlenut trifle.’
Australiana Review of Books
‘Zable conjures the extraordinary from within the seemingly ordinary and plain fact takes on the lustre of poetry…Alternately moving and joyful, this book celebrates the tenaciousness of the human spirit.’
Australian Way
‘A beautiful book, wonderfully written. An unforgettable experience awaits its readers.’
Australian Jewish News
Arnold Zable is a widely published writer, storyteller and educator. Formerly a lecturer at Melbourne University, he has worked in a variety of jobs in the USA, India, Papua New Guinea, Europe, South-East Asia and China. His books include Wanderers and Dreamers, the award-winning Jewels and Ashes and, most recently, The Fig Tree.
Zable performs as a storyteller, drawing on his experiences, travels and knowledge of Yiddish culture. He has worked with Aboriginal elders on educational projects. He has conducted writing workshops in universities, schools, community centres and with migrants and refugees.
Arnold Zable lives in Melbourne with his wife and son.
CAFE SCHEHERAZADE
Arnold Zable
Text Publishing Melbourne Australia
textpublishing.com.au
The Text Publishing Company
22 William St
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
Copyright © Arnold Zable 2001
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published 2001, reprinted 2001 (four times), 2002
This edition published 2003
Printed and bound by Griffin Press
Designed by Chong Weng-ho
Typeset in Stempel Garamond by J&M Typesetting
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Zable, Arnold.
Cafe Scheherazade.
ISBN 978 1 877008 09 2.
I. Title.
A823.3
The author has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
To Melbourne's first storytellers:
the Wurundjeri and Bunurong people.
And to all those who are still in search of a haven,
a place they can call home.
King Shahriyar, ruler of the ancient kingdom of Persia, having discovered the infidelity of his queen, resolved to have a fresh wife every night and have her beheaded at daybreak. This caused great consternation in the land. Fully aware of this grave situation, Scheherazade, the daughter of a senior court official, the grand vizier, contrived to become Shahriyar's wife. She so amused him with stories for a thousand and one nights that the king revoked his cruel decree. The courageous queen also gained the love and gratitude of her people and, to this day, audiences the world over are seduced by her tales.
Contents
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I
In Acland Street, St Kilda, there stands a cafe called Scheherazade. As to how it came to have such a name, therein lies a story. Many stories in fact, recounted at a table in the back room where the proprietors, Mr and Mrs Zeleznikow, Avram and Masha, sit most nights of the week and eat, hold court, greet customers, check accounts, argue and reminisce. What else is there to do on this rain-sodden Melbourne night, as pedestrians rugged in overcoats stroll on pavements glistening grey, past shops laden with slices of Black Forest cake where they pause, and hesitate, before succumbing to the temptation to buy, well, just one slice. Perhaps two. What harm can it do?
This is how it is in Acland Street, an avenue of oldworld dreams. This is how it is in Scheherazade, a cafe of old-world tales. And, of the countless stories which would not exhaust even a thousand and one nights in the telling, the most fascinating of all is how it came to pass, that in 1958 Avram and Masha decided to call their audacious venture Scheherazade.
For it was audacious to come in from the cold, with barely a penny to spare, to begin, in mid-life already, an entirely new enterprise, a cafe of all things, in a shop front where for many years had stood a milk bar called O'Shea's.
When Avram and Masha insisted on renaming it Scheherazade their friends told them this would be suicide. The business would be doomed to failure from the start. Their clients would not be able to pronounce such a name, let alone be drawn towards the Continental cuisine which, in time, began to grace the menu. ‘Call it Masha's. Or Avram's. Or Babushka's even, if you must have an exotic name. But Scheherazade? Even we have trouble pronouncing it.’
Scheherazade it remained.
‘Martin, it could not have been otherwise,’ Masha tells me, as a waitress delivers the main course of chicken schnitzel and potato latkes to the proprietors' permanent table in the back room. ‘This you will understand once you hear the full story.’
All the while our conversation is interrupted by a nod here, an aside there, a hasty conversation on the mobile phone, a snatch of gossip from an acquaintance dropping by, as Avram, and now Masha, turn to greet yet another long-time friend.
Slowly the story trickles out: between sips of borscht and wine, between main course and dessert, between cheese blintzes and cups of tea spiced with lemon. And again the next night, for I have to return night after winter's night to the table in the back room, graced with wallpaper boasting scenes of the Moulin Rouge, can-can girls in full flight, an appropriate background for an epic tale which encompasses a rendezvous in a Parisian nightclub, an apple brandy called Calvados, a nurse tending wounded sailors in the Black Sea port of Odessa, a band of partisans roaming the forests and swamps of Lithuania, perilous escapes over closely guarded borders, an ocean journey halfway across the globe, a young girl awakening in a city of minarets to the resonant echo of a muezzin's call…
Enough! Here at least is the short of it.
‘Martin, I am sorry, there can be no short of it,’ insists Avram.
‘That would be impossible,’ agrees Masha.
‘But a journalist cannot spend so much time on one story! I have columns to write! Deadlines to meet! Assignments to complete!’ I tell them when, yet again, they take me on a detour, and I will have to return the next night for more episodes in a
vast tale that appears to have no end, and not even a beginning, as we move back through the centuries to an anecdote about yet another ancestor, another hazardous journey, another legendary city.
Such as Vilna. Vilnius. The Jerusalem of Lithuania, with its renowned yeshivas and houses of prayer, crumbling castles and fortress walls, elegant boulevards, cobblestone lanes, and its attics and garrets crowded with would-be sages and talmudic scholars, obsessed rebels and pamphleteers, hell-bent on changing a world that seemed to be forever spinning out of control.
It was into this city that, in 1924, Avram Zeleznikow was born, the son of revolutionaries, devout members of the Bund, the labour movement that captured the souls of countless Eastern European Jews.
‘I was reared on Bund legends,’ says Avram in his lilting Yiddish. Each word is carefully wrought. Each sentence has its melody, each paragraph its song. And when he glides into English there is a continuity in syntax for this was the last of Avram's six languages. English is a language still in the forming, still straining for meaning, a language which eventually fails him as he falls back into the mother tongue to weave the tale of his revolutionary past.
He begins his story as a romance, nurtured in clandestine meetings and the prison cells of a dying empire. The heroine of this romance, Avram's mother, Etta Stock, was born in the Ukrainian town of Tulchin in 1881, the year that Tsar Alexander the Second was assassinated, a year of chaos, in which mobs rampaged through the Jewish quarters of Russian cities and towns. In the tens of thousands the inhabitants fled. In ragged bands, they stole across borders to ports scattered along the European coastline. In desperation they clambered onto ocean liners and freighters, on which they sailed to all corners of the globe to remake their lives.
And those who could not flee turned to thoughts of revolution and Red messiahs who would deliver them from lifetimes of fear. Others dreamt of the decaying walls of Jerusalem, and sought an end to an ancient exile. Still others clung to their God and houses of worship, their psalms and scriptures, their prayers and preachers, with increased fervour and zeal.
Among the faithful was Etta's father, Avram Stock: a fiddler. A klezmer musician who performed at weddings and bar mitzvahs; a minstrel who played for his supper at the celebrations of the Tulchin aristocracy; a pious Hasid who adhered to the 613 laws of his desert-wandering forebears; a man who punctuated his days according to the dictates of prescribed texts. And a perplexed father who could do nothing but frown upon the errant ways of his daughter, Etta, when she followed the siren call of a new god named revolution to the Black Sea port of Odessa, in the very first year of the new century.
This is a tale of many cities: each one consumed by the momentum of history. Each one recalled at a table in a cafe called Scheherazade, in a seaside suburb that sprawls upon the very ends of the earth, within a city that contains the traces of many cities.
Such as Odessa. The new Odessa is a stroll from Scheherazade. Masha alerts me to the fact. Compared to Avram, she is more firmly attuned to the present. She exudes an intense curiosity. It can be seen in the distinct lines that criss-cross her face. It can be deduced from her quick, deliberate steps. It can be seen in the neatly cut suits she wears. It can be sensed from her bearing, so upright and proud. It can be heard in her English, which is refined, if somewhat accented. And it can be inferred from her observations, her sharp retorts, the remarks she inserts into Avram's monologues.
Yes, the new Odessa is a mere stroll away, Masha tells me. Make your way into Acland Street. Turn left by the Indian takeaway into Shakespeare Grove. Walk past the gaping mouth of the moon, patron saint of Luna Park, past the screams of revellers clinging to the evening skies as they career, at breakneck speeds, on the roller-coaster ride. Cross the car-choked Esplanade to the palm trees that line the foreshore, and proceed to the beachfront, accompanied by the soothing aroma of sea breezes.
It is here that they congregate, the Russian emigres of the 1990s, the latest wave of wanderers in search of a haven from a troubled past. They lie on the soft sands of their new world, and remember old Odessa, its dockyards and palaces, its courtyards filled with washing flapping on makeshift lines, its noise-ridden workshops and cafes, and the melody of tenement children at play.
They stroll the St Kilda foreshore and pier, and recall the Odessa waterfront, its run-down eating houses, its rickety warehouses and loading ramps, its wharves and marinas, crowded with ferries that once conveyed them into the Black Sea on weekend cruises. They glance at the bay, and are reminded of the turquoise waters of their receding pasts. And when night descends they stroll to Scheherazade for a bowl of apple compote, a bite of almond torte, and recall bands performing in park rotundas, evenings at state theatres which resembled Turkish castles, and nights at the Odessa Opera where orchestras accompanied the singers of a dying empire.
And, just as nostalgia threatens to overwhelm them, they recali the one-room apartments in which they perspired on summer nights, the slow-moving queues for rationed supplies, and the sub-zero winters during which they stumbled out into damp courtyards smelling of urine and sweat, to relieve themselves in communal latrines choked with the waste of many families.
So their Odessa may not have been very different from the city in which Etta Stock arrived in the year 1900. Tartars strolled in black fezzes alongside Turks in tight-bound turbans. Jews en route to the Holy Land and Muslims on their once in a lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca prayed in its synagogues and mosques. Gypsies and troubadours performed in its wine cellars and bars. From its boulevards ships could be seen emerging from the fog, bearing merchandise from distant lands; while at night, drunken sailors, mumbling in disparate tongues, stalked the alleys in search of brothels and gaming dens, and conspirators gathered in concealed meeting places to plot the overthrow of the Tsar.
In Odessa, Etta studied nursing. To pay for her studies she worked in a factory where she was drawn into a cell of the Russian socialist movement. She became obsessed with saving the world. She marched in demonstrations under the cold gaze of gendarmes. She distributed illicit pamphlets and newspapers, and travelled to neighbouring villages on covert missions. She sat on committees that argued over strategy until the dawn light sponged the skies. And she worked in an underground printing press in the city of Kishinev alongside the young Joseph Stalin.
At least, this is what Avram claims. It is a family legend which he loves to recount, one of the many anecdotes which inflate his pride.
‘You see? My family is part of history!’ he exclaims. ‘You see? My mother was a rebel, a daring fighter, a woman of the world!’
Another night has flown. The neon sign over the entrance blinks Scheherazade in rounds of lilac, blue and rose. Proprietors are drawing the shutters over their stores. The last customers are stumbling out through Scheherazade's doors.
‘Martin, I warned you,’ says Masha. ‘This is a story without end.’
But by now I am entranced. I may have been drawn here as a journalist in search of an intriguing tale, but this is far greater than a column, a life story at a glance. There are moments when I no longer know where I am. Time extends beyond time and I return the next night as if lured by a recurring dream.
Scheherazade is crowded with theatregoers and lonely men sipping tea. Two powdered streetwalkers eat toasted cheese on rye. A medical student reads Gray's Anatomy over a bowl of chicken soup. Waitresses run from the kitchen balancing trays laden with steaming meals.
So take your time. Sit down at our table. Break bread. Share our bottle of red. Observe the white-haired storyteller Avram, his hands in motion, his voice straining to maintain its vigour, his ample eyebrows darting up and down as he proclaims that the century truly began in 1905, with frenzied young men and women careering through the streets of Tsarist Russia screaming: ‘Daloi Nikolai! Daloi Nikolai! Down with Tsar Nicholas! Down with Tsar Nicholas!’
Avram is precise in his knowledge of historical details and dates, but whenever I am in doubt I retreat to libraries to fill i
n the gaps. I have been drawn into the hunt. I am engaged in reconstructing other times, other worlds.
On 9 January, in an incident that was to become known as Bloody Sunday, a procession of workers converged upon the winter palace in St Petersburg. They marched, two hundred thousand strong, bearing icons and portraits of the Tsar. They trudged through the snow, in search of an audience with their Batyushka, their revered Father, the emperor of all the Russias. They surged into the palace square, unarmed, singing anthems, led by a rebellious priest.
A cordon of troops barred their way. Horses strained at the bit. A sudden hail of bullets rent the crisp winter air. In their thousands the marchers ran, from the frenzied charge of cavalry. In panic they fled, from the batons and bayonets of militiamen. In their hundreds they fell, under the hooves of crazed horses, in a tangle of chaos and fear. The bloodstained corpses of men, women and children lay in the snow. Bullet-riddled images of the Tsar were scattered over the square. The social fabric was in tatters, countless lives torn to shreds. And never again would those who marched trust their Batyushka.
The spirit of rebellion spread. A year of revolution engulfed the land. In February, Grand Duke Sergei, the Tsar's Moscow envoy, was assassinated in his carriage, as he drove through the Kremlin gates. Peasants turned on their masters and seized their estates. Industrial workers closed down factories and surged out on a general strike. Soldiers mutinied in Vladivostok and Tashkent. And in June, whilst on manoeuvres in the Black Sea, the crew of the battleship Potemkin turned upon their officers.
The admiral in charge of the ship ordered the rebels to be shot. The firing squad refused to obey. The crew seized the squad's weapons, rushed their officers, threw some overboard, and locked the remainder in their cells. The Potemkin sailed into Odessa harbour flying the red flag. And on the morrow, Etta Stock, now a trained nurse, was sent on board to tend the crew, while rioting workers fought Street battles, and the city was engulfed in flames.
