by Ramona Koval
Meanwhile, I’d got in touch with Mr Lederman’s adoptive son to tell him I had written about his father, and ask what he knew about his parents’ marriage and their history together. He knew very little. When he was growing up he didn’t think it polite to probe too much. He said that Mr Lederman had indeed been a truck driver in the Red Army, but had defected during the war because he didn’t like the way the Soviets treated their underlings. Along with three others he deserted, taking the army truck and ending up behind German enemy lines. After the German defeat the Soviets found them, and his three companions were executed on the spot. Mr Lederman was set free, as his captors couldn’t believe a Jew would drive towards Nazi Germany during the war unless he’d made a dreadful mistake. Hearing this, I thought Mr Lederman might have been a bit dim for the likes of Mama. I still had not forgiven him for his cowardice towards us.
What was I left with as each of the players in my drama slowly faded off stage? That old Yiddish joke about the man who’s proud of his antecedents being like a potato: the best part of him is underground.
The 1894 translation of The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt (the name under which the adventurer, intellectual and lover Giacomo Casanova wrote) starts with ‘My Family Pedigree’, which the author can cite from the elopement of his relative Don Jacob Casanova, the illegitimate son of Don Francisco Casanova, a native of Saragosa, the capital of Aragon: ‘in the year of 1428 he carried off Dona Anna Palofax from her convent, on the day after she had taken the veil.’ He charts seven generations of his father’s family and, from his mother’s side, the story of her romance with and marriage to his father, until his own birth on 2 April 1725.
In light of Casanova’s reputation as a daring lover, the first story of the flight from the convent of the bastard with the newly minted nun is but a precursor to many of the adventures of the author himself. You soon forget about the stories that went before, as Casanova tells his own recollections and adventures so well. Apart from the family tree being a useful literary device, what does it matter to me how he arrived on the planet?
After his mother died, my husband showed me some photographs of his mother’s family sent to him by his first cousin. There was his grandfather and his great-grandmother. He looked to see if there was a resemblance; he saw a similar nose. And then he filed the pictures away.
I asked what he saw when he looked at these people. He said that he remembered some of them. There wasn’t much connection there, it seemed to me. His family ties were much looser than mine.
If I had pictures going back three or four generations, I thought, I would be entranced. But how long would that last? How entranced would I be if there was no loss to deal with, no tragedies?
I’d been looking at images of pre-World War II Polish Jews on a memorial website. They were affecting photos, because they were taken at all kinds of family events: birthdays, weddings, dinners. One showed a girl of about eleven leaning into a large chair on which sat her cousins, girl twins, all of them dressed in their best clothes. I shudder to think what happened to them. They are connected to me in ways that are sociological and cultural, although not familial. Would my shuddering be more profound if we shared blood ties?
In an interview the great Australian writer Elizabeth Harrower told me that, while she’d never had children, she thought of us as all belonging to the same family. There were very few human beings once, and now we are numerous but connected. Why should we want our ‘own’ families ahead of others?
When I first read Dovid Hofshteyn’s poem I thought it was melancholy. We spring from rocks / from rocks ground by millstones of time…Not knowing where I sprang from, I had only barren rocks with which to make a claim for my history.
Now I think of it as a poem for all life, not just for the human species. We did all spring from rocks: geological time threw up the right conditions for our species to hold sway on the planet. It wasn’t always so, and it won’t always be.
Where do I come from? Why must we ask this question?
Does coming from somewhere tell us anything about where we are and who we are? Does coming from somewhere give us more than the right to claim land, or a history, or a culture?
I know without doubt that I come from the remnant Jewish population of Poland gathered together after World War II and flung to this far region of the planet. I am from the Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox-practising population of the shtetls.
I know I am descended from a rural family near the town of Sokołów Podlaski, because my maternity is not in doubt. My access to the family stories from this branch is limited by the early death of my mother, and by her lack of inclination when alive to tell many of them. This is understandable, as she was a child survivor of the Holocaust and the only surviving member of her family. She was traumatised by her history. And I was too young to formulate a set of questions that I could ask her. So there is a significant historical gap in my knowledge.
But say I could know as much as I wanted to know: what would it mean? What does it mean to people who can trace their roots back? How much does it connect you to a person you may have directly descended from? Would it matter for four generations? Five? And then what?
I spent a weekend in the home of a friend who has pictures of her English relatives, many generations back, fixed to the wall in the hall. There are women in long crinolines, preparing for a ball or sitting next to their respectable husbands. I had a pang of longing when I saw them all set out like this.
I fantasised about having just such a set of pictures, reaching back through both the maternal and paternal lines. The bearded serious grandfathers, the Orthodox women with wigs on their heads. (Because of which, I might not be able to see if their hair was curly or reddish or black as coal.)
What traits do we get from these people? Beyond the shape of our faces or the colour of our hair, or the inheritance of money and property, what do they give us? Do they help in our understanding of the lives we lead and the choices that are available to us and the decisions we make?
My grandmother Rivka, from whom I got my Hebrew name—who, before she died in her thirties, decided in 1942 to send her only blond-haired, blue-eyed fourteen-year-old daughter away to an uncertain future, but one that was less certain to contain death than the one which she shared with her darker, brown-eyed son—made a wrenching decision that guaranteed my birth on a continent a world away. Does her story tell me anything about what I might be capable of?
And why then does it matter to me who my father was? If I knew, would I be any clearer about the contribution of his parents or their parents to the person I am, or the life that I have lived or the future stories of my grandchildren?
Why does the story of the Khazar Jews make me want to search online for a portrait of their likeness? What might a picture of a Khazar Jewish princess with curly reddish hair and blue eyes and a face shaped like mine tell me? Given the length of time involved, the chances that I’d look like my fanciful Khazar princess are probably small.
When I look at my own grandchildrens’ faces, I see how the contributions of their fathers’ families change the shapes of their eyes from mine—or my chin, or my hair. My eldest granddaughter has the almond-shaped eyes of her Filipino-Spanish mezisto grandfather, my blue eyes and curls, and elements I imagine her father may have inherited from his Indigenous Australian great-grandmother. She is just as close to me as if she were my perfect clone, and the differences that make her who she is delight me.
One day, my husband used computer software to see what the possibilities were when Max’s and Mama’s faces were combined. We had to find original photos of our subjects facing in the same direction, so it was a bit restricted, but I was convinced that my face was an approximation of theirs. It was a little spooky. I played with the software for a while, changing the percentages—less Max, more Mama; more Max, less Mama—and then I put it aside, just like my husband had done with his family photos.
They said it would take three months to arriv
e, but I was anxious when that time had almost elapsed and my Polish passport had not come. For most of the third month I checked the letterbox each day for special deliveries. I searched my calendar to see exactly when I had handed over my papers at the consulate in Sydney. It was Tuesday, 30 July 2013, and on Wednesday, 30 October 2013, three months to the day, a man from Australia Post brought the registered letter from the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland to my door.
I could even read some of the writing in it, as I had engaged a Polish teacher to give me weekly lessons. Learning Polish had ceased to be full of anxiety and had turned into a pleasurable interest for me. I thought I would never master the complex grammar, but I was learning words and phrases and was even able to decode signs in the historical footage I found on YouTube. I enthusiastically attended Polish film screenings and could understand some of the dialogue without reading the English subtitles. I was especially taken by films set in the pre-war period and postwar Soviet times, and shot in black-and-white. I was under the illusion that they brought me closer to my quarry.
My EU passport was finally before me, all present and correct and above board. I was now a legitimate citizen of the Republic of Poland. But, I reminded myself, I was already a legitimate citizen of the Commonwealth of Australia before all this started.
Over the course of this winding journey I had at least learned that I am determined. I am like a dog searching for a bone, a bloodhound, even if I am still not sure of where all my blood comes from.
With my two passports I am now a citizen of the earth. Although the past is important, the future is what excites me, and my passport to it requires me to take one breath, one step and one day at a time. One step, one day at a time. It sounds like a program for alcoholics. Was I unhealthily addicted to the story of where I came from?
I saw Wagner’s Ring Cycle and realised that I was not alone. There are great traditions, across cultures and time, of asking the same questions: Who is the father? Who is the mother? This importance of tracing the godly lines, the questions of inheritance, the confusions between princes and paupers, the ways in which human beings try to avoid their fates by taking on other identities, the wandering gods in disguise, the myths and legends: they all point to the importance of our identity. Many of Shakespeare’s plays have a disguised or mistaken identity at their heart.
I understand now that I was missing not just a collection of family photographs and a family tree showing blood ties, but the stories upon stories that they might have told and I would have loved to hear. Of how their families found their ways to this part of Poland and in which year, after which pogrom or family tragedy. Maybe one of them went off and became something unexpected—a court advisor or a famous soldier or a courtesan or a thief or a slave.
We need our stories: they are the way we learn about the world, and the way we pass on what we learn to those who come after us. We are always looking for a plausible story, one that might fit the meagre facts, as they do in courts of law—never really able to know the whole truth but finding the most likely explanation, the most convincing thread.
How do I imagine Mama’s story went?
She knew by the time they’d left Poland and spent four years in Paris, in that fourth-floor room with the treadle sewing machines and the piecework that they did late into the nights, that he was not the man for her. He cried too much. She had lost everyone, too, but she had learned not to cry. He was nearly ten years older than her, yet such a baby. She didn’t want to leave the City of Light. She had nothing much there—but it was Paris, after all.
Her second cousin who’d survived with his parents in Siberia came to Paris and convinced her that if she made the boat trip across the world to Australia, where he had a distant relative from another branch of his family, he would help her to leave her miserable marriage.
That promise came to nothing once they were all in Melbourne. Another factory. Another slum. What was the point? What was a poor, uneducated survivor of barely twenty-three years of age to do on her own in this godforsaken faraway city? She could hardly speak English, much less get a job that might support a woman on her own. It was 1950. Women didn’t do that.
And her husband blamed her for his misery. If only I had a child, he said, I would be a father and I would have something to live for. She had seen doctors in Paris and she began seeing another one, a woman, in the new city. They found nothing wrong with her. And him? They didn’t broach that subject. It had been eight years and still she couldn’t get pregnant. It was a monthly reason for an argument.
She read books. She had dreams. She watched films. In the block of flats where she and Dad lived, some neighbours had a son who was an actor, and they offered a hand of friendship. They felt sorry for her, a survivor from the ashes of Nazi Europe, and invited her to go to the theatre with them.
She worked in a series of factory jobs. Her friend Isabel told her of a position as a finisher in a factory where she worked. It was run by two brothers. The older one had come to Melbourne before the war and established himself. The younger one survived Auschwitz and came to Australia to join him. Mama went to the factory and started working there.
The younger brother was handsome and tall and strong. He was married; he had a young son. When he seemed to be interested in her, she went along with it. Why not? Who cared what happened to her? Nobody, least of all her. She went with him to the room with the low bed and the single bare light. It wasn’t romantic, but it was urgent and passionate.
She returned to her chair in the machinists’ section. She saw him walk to his office between the women bent low over their work, and she wondered if any others had been taken into the little room. She felt something like hope, like excitement. He was older even than her husband, old enough to protect her.
When she went for the appointment with her doctor she could hardly believe what she was hearing. At last! She didn’t call her husband. She didn’t call the boss. She went for a walk through the gardens between the doctor’s office and the city, and later found herself in a movie theatre. The film was Roman Holiday, with Audrey Hepburn playing a visiting European princess who escapes her guardians to explore Rome for a day on her own. She meets Gregory Peck, an American reporter, older, who shelters her.
It’s the story of a disguise, the princess pretending to be someone other than who she is. Just for a day. Mama was familiar with this kind of story, and she must have preferred the short and romantic one to the long and brutal one she had lived.
Maybe she told Max that she was carrying his child. Maybe, as Isabel said, she loved him. Maybe he loved her, too, and left his wife and son in the hope that they could be together. But he went back to his family. Maybe Max’s wife found out he was having an affair and threw him out. Maybe it was just till she had cooled down. Maybe he never intended to come to Mama.
She never went back to work at the factory. Dad was pleased: his wife was pregnant and he was going to be a father at last. Mama was a practical woman. She might have thought that living with Dad was better than the life Max could have offered. If he offered anything at all.
Her life in disguise would go on.
She resisted having another child for years, until my pleading for a sister or brother got to her. She made her arrangements again. The children would never know: no one would ever know for sure. Her secret was hinted at in her occasional comments; perhaps she sometimes wanted to tell everything, or her unconscious mind allowed the comments to bubble to the surface, only for her to close the lid smartly, under the resolute gaze of her older daughter.
I was complicit, going along with her habit of silence and privacy. And finally her secret followed her to her grave, hinted at only by the persistent collection of small pebbles that I would find on the rare occasions I visited it, telling me that someone had been to her resting place, and set down on the cold grey slab the customary sign, a gift of stones.
Robert Antelme’s The Human Race reveals how stories were life-saving for the
men in the slave-labour camps—a way to maintain their humanity, and to see the humanity in others. Antelme describes a Christmas Eve when one work detail was holed up in a church, their small bread portions eaten, and nothing more to come:
They talked about their wives and their kids. They were proper women, the wives, and they had their whims. The stories moved around the stove…They understood what each other was talking about, and they could go on like that for a long time. Everything was described: the metro line, the street leading to the house, the job, all sorts of jobs. The story didn’t wear out easily, there was always something left to tell. The hell of memory was operating at full blast… at that point each one had become a figure in a story… then the party died down, the story petered out, nothing of it was left. What remained was the warmth upon our face, the stove’s warmth, that had brought the stories forth.
The most eager to talk, those who talked the most, fell still…Somebody in the centre of the church started singing. He was trying to make the guys keep on forgetting their stomachs, to make them think of something else for a while. Nobody joined him, but he continued to sing by himself. Where was the singer? How could you recognise which one it had been? They were all lying down, buried under their blankets. All you heard was a vague murmur coming from the pallets. In each head were wife and bread and the street, all mixed up with the rest, with hunger, cold and filth.
Each a tiny source of warmth, these stories reminded Antelme and his fellow prisoners that they were still men, still human in the face of the inhuman treatment of them by their guards; the stories were evidence of their difference from other animals, their ability as human beings to use the complex grammar of their language to create a scene for themselves and for the others that would stir the emotions and engage the mind.
And here, in the warm stove of connection that I had made for myself, were the stories of Max and Mama and Dad and Mr Lederman and Isabel and Alan and the mad Queen of Songs and the unfinished marriage certificate and Hanna Krall with the death-ray eyes and Wanda Bujalska and the performers of Warsaw making counterfeit documents and the wild Khazar women on horseback meeting Levantine traders on the Silk Road and Moshe Wilner climbing the clock tower in Mława holding the town’s time in his hands and the last days of Ötzi up in the icy reaches of the Austro-Italian border five thousand years ago: all these tales and so many others were now mine to tell. And the people I had doggedly followed had become characters in my story and I had become one in theirs, even though they would never know it.
