Jewish Studies

In one of the most haunting phrases contained in Inside Outside (1992), the Australian Jewish autobiographer Andrew Riemer comments on the persistent sense of loss that still shapes him, many years after his entry to Australia as a child immigrant. He writes, ‘exile seals your eyes, allowing you to see only what your longings and your sense of loss will permit’. Earlier, Riemer reflects on his longing for a vanished world, ‘a country of the mind, fashioned from powerful longings and fantasies’. With the undercutting of his own position, so characteristic of his writing, he writes: ‘Perhaps I am merely describing the human condition. I have come to learn that this sense of displacement, of not belonging ... is shared by many …’ And yet, he adds, the experience of migration ‘brings that predicament into sharper focus than might otherwise be the case’.

The story is told of how Theodor Herzl and Sigmund Freud once lived, unbeknown to each other, on the same street in Vienna. Thus did the lives of the father of modern political Zionism and the father of psychoanalysis, for one tantalising moment, almost intersect ... Herzl, a man of action in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, who sought to transport Jews from the dangers of Diasporan life to the safety of a state all their own; and Freud, a thinker whose intellectual achievements were born of the Diasporan experience and who resolutely rejected the overtures of the Zionists to join them in Palestine. Herzl, who famously and passionately declared, ‘If you will, it is no dream’ – a motto adopted by the early Zionist movement – and Freud, who even more famously devised the tools for coolly interpreting dreams. This story, recounted in The Divided Self (and attributed to an Israeli ambassador to London in the 1980s), encapsulates the main purpose of David Goldberg’s spirited survey of the Jewish condition: namely, to defend the superiority of Diasporan Jewish life over its Zionist alternative.

This significant anthology consists of thirty-three articles by Jewish Australian scholars, lawyers, writers, educators, rabbis, journalists and other high achievers, prefaced by a thoughtful and wide-ranging introduction by the editors. Many of the contributors are distinguished in their fields and prominent in public life. The editors have cast the volume from a ‘perspective of commitment and belonging’, with the conviction that ‘challenge and critique when offered by committed members rather than hostile outsiders is often the most useful form of reckoning with ourselves’. The disjunction is troubling (I think I may be a hostile insider), but its effect does not diminish the interest of the collection. The book’s focus is narrower than its subtitle suggests: these are not just passing reflections by some Jewish Australians: each contribution is centrally about some aspect of the religion, politics and culture of Jewish Australians. As such, it provides a useful and authoritative synopsis of the progress, state and thoughts of many Australian Jews today. No single essay sparkles brilliantly, and a few are alarmingly deficient in serious thought; nevertheless, this is a big, rich, diverse collection deserving of wide public attention.

It is one of the ironies of Jewish life in Australia that it is at once thriving and dying. The Jewish community drew its contemporary renaissance from the influx of postwar Jews from major centres in Eastern Europe, which were annihilated by the Nazis and their collaborators. Mostly victims of anti-Semitic persecution, the immigrants of the 1930s to 1950s brought a deep awareness and love of their culture and religious practice to an agreeable Australia, bolstering a Jewish community which to that time was predominantly British in origin and largely assimilationist. As Suzanne Rutland points out, in what is essentially a book of record, the immigration from Eastern Europe revitalised Jewish life in Australia.

This intensely vivid and moving book makes a fine contribution to the burgeoning literature of Australian Jewish autobiography. There are currently about 200 such titles. They vary enormously in standard and kind – from small print run, self-published chronicles written for authors’ families, to the work of high-profile professional writers such as Lily Brett, Morris Lurie and Arnold Zable. These narratives spring from all manner of Jewish backgrounds, including ‘Anglo-Jews’, whose families had been long settled in Australia prior to the Holocaust, and central and eastern European Jews, who lived through the annihilation - in camps, in hiding, in disguise - and settled here after World War II. The majority of life writing by Australian Jews can loosely be classified as Holocaust memoir (‘loosely’ because many survivors resent being seen as merely that, and write in detail about various phases of their lives). The most sophisticated ‘literary’ examples of this sub-genre generally come from second-generation writers, who have had more sustained secular educations than their parents, closer acquaintance with the English language, and more time to write and reflect than was available to the older, refugee generation.

Holocaust denial comes in many guises. One is the comfortable belief that European nationals were ignorant of the slaughter of their fellow Jewish citizens, and would have been appalled had they known. Daniel Goldhagen’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust has been the most controversial challenge to this so far, but it is not alone. Abraham Biderman, survivor of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, whose memoir The World of My Past had difficulty finding a publisher here but went on to win awards, is reluctant to exaggerate about the Poles. Nevertheless he writes, ‘With hindsight, however, it seems to me that the majority of them were happy to see the Jews destroyed.’