Category Archives: Work by Others

A Friend Wrote a Poem

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He called it Outback Dreaming. The poet recalled a visit he made to the remote outback community of Wadeye, where I was working. The visit happened in 2012.

The poet is an escaped rabbi (escaped in the sense that he has escaped the bullpit of the pulpit and now works in community welfare). His name is Ralph Genende.

Every year Glen Eira libraries conduct the My Brother Jack awards. My friend’s poem won First Prize in poetry. Rabbi Ralph previously won this prize ten years ago, the year of his visit to Wadeye. He says ‘this poem…born in the harshness…of an Aboriginal community is about the despair and the consolation of hope.’

Moving into the interior the tall grasses

wave me to a river

and there suddenly silently I awaken to a waterfall 

small and gentle it hovers in the drifting sunlight there are moments

when peace petals into our troubled lives

leaving little blossoms

in our slumbering selves tiny messengers

from the outback

memories of a distant star reminders of a faraway birth.

Ralph writes, ‘I believe in the power of poetry to refine our lives, to bring a different lens to our wounded world.’

Twice upon a Time

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Once upon a time, an old man travelled by train from the goldfields to the great city. The old man took his seat and looked around. Seated at a remove in a row parallel to his sat a younger man with a bony face, his features stony and set hard. His limbs were a living art gallery of tattoos; unlike all others aboard the train he wore no mask and, when asked to show his rail pass to the conductor, he did not speak, did not move, but showed no ticket. The old man felt a sense of implicit menace, not only on account of the younger man’s scowl, but in his very silence, and somehow in his unseasonable short pants and t-shirt, as if he declared he was tougher than others,  rugged up against the cold of the day.

 

Nobody challenged the Man of Silent Menace.

 

 

About twenty minutes into the journey the old man smelled smoke. It wafted his way from the parallel seats. He stood and looked for signs of fire. He found none. No-one else seemed perturbed. The old man hoisted his backpack and walked out of that carriage and into the next. He left behind him the smell of smoke and the Man of Menace, and we too leave them now, as they play no further part in our story. The old man walked out and into a different story.

 

 

In the next carriage the old man found an empty corner where he sat down and started to read. He heard a voice and, wondering, he looked up. He didn’t catch the words for he was an old man, but he thought he heard ‘looking stylish’.

He turned in the direction of the voice, which was feminine in register, and he found himself facing a young woman who had, indeed, addressed him. The young woman was slightly built, her hair was red and she had freckles dotting her face and arms. Her face was covered, as the man’s was, by a mask. An open laptop computer sat on her knees.

 

 

The old man, surprised, because few over his long lifetime had remarked favourably on his ‘style’, asked the woman: Did you speak to me? I’m afraid I didn’t hear clearly.

I said you look stylish.

Golly, thought the man.

Thank you, said the man.

Yes, the cool jacket, the beret. Especially the beret.

 

The man thanked her again, and asked, (because he was interested in such things), What are you writing?

A story, she replied. I hope it will become a novel. Would you like me to read you some?

The old man said yes, I would. Thank you.

 

 

The old man thought, What a fearless young person!

The young woman now picked up her computer, her pink tote bag, her backpack and a fluffy jacket and removed from her corner diagonally opposite the man’s, and sitting herself down opposite him, almost knee to knee, started to read.

 

 

The young woman read musically and expressively. Her story told of a father and his young daughter. The father, a magician, delighted his daughter with the magic he practised. He created a world where her mind dwelled in fantasy. The father commanded his daughter never, never to open the trunk which contained his magician’s materials. His tone was tender but firm. The man departed, leaving the trunk in the care of his daughter.

 

 

The daughter felt tempted. She too wished to work magic, for she knew that despite the doubts of many, magic was real, its actions were everywhere to be seen, if only one had eyes to see.

 

 

The temptation was stronger than the daughter’s resistance. In truth she did not try to resist; she wanted to do what her father did, she wanted to know what he knew.

The girl opened the trunk.

 

 

At this point the storyteller closed her laptop and looked up at the old man with a question in her gaze. For his part, the old man had fully entered the world of the story and was sorry that it had stopped. He felt surprised at himself for, being a prosaic old man, he held no belief or interest in the world of magic. He said, I like your story. I liked the atmosphere you created and I’m interested in your characters and in how their relationship will play out. If I had been reading this story I would want to read on. I’d want to learn what happened next. There will be consequences of the child’s action, and I imagine, of the father’s trust or  his trial of the child.

 

 

The young woman smiled with pleasure. 

 

 

The old man ventured: I’ve published a few books.
Wow! Where can I find them?

You can check out my blog.

Your blog! Wow!

 

 

The old man asked if she was a student. She said I’m doing a degree in Creative Writing and Film, at uni. The man asked the author where she had boarded the train. She named an exquisite mountain village in the vicinity. She went on to describe the farmlet where she and her fearless brother were raised and still live. She spoke of the animals, all of which bore names, she spoke of her creative parents – musicians – who passed on the gifts of music to their children. She said, Dad mowed a maze into the acres and acres of grass behind the house. We grew up in enchantment and imagination. As she spoke she glowed with recall of a childhood of wonder.

 

 

The old man thought the woman’s lived idyll somehow echoed the idyll she created in her story. He asked, do you make music too? Oh yes, we all do, we play and sing. I’m in a band. We’re going to cut an album. I write my own songs. Would you like to hear one?

Yes. Choose a sad one.

 

 

In asking her to sing to an audience of only one, the man was testing the limits of the young person’s boldness. But she gave voice, sweetly, to the story of an intimate friendship which ebbed and flowed in pain and closeness and ended in estrangement. I hate you/ I love you – she sang. The old man found the song and the singing unexpectedly pleasant. He anticipated the usual tuneless jingle and the usual trite lyrics, but this was bright and sweet and heartfelt, without becoming mawkish. He said as much.

 

 

The young woman was greatly pleased. She confided in him about her current girlfriend, throwing in, as if to assure the old man or herself – but I’ve had a boyfriend before her. We were together for four years. I realised I’m not binary.

 

 

The old man asked, Would you like to hear a poem? It’s a poem about a weeping man, he said. Probably a sad man, like the person in your song. Yes, please, she replied.

 

 

The old man read to her Les Murray’s poem, An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow. The young woman listened without moving, stunned by the music of the lines and the breadth of the poet’s understanding.

 

 

Wintry sunshine lit up the little freckles on the woman’s arm. The old man recalled with love his freckled sister as a little girl and the lines their mother used to quote: Glory be to God for dappled things…

 

 

The train pulled into the platform. The passengers disembarked. The old man said, Make sure you tell me when your book is published, then he turned left. Taking up her pink carry bag, flinging her pack onto her back and draping herself in her fluffy jacket, the young woman turned right.

 

 

In the half-light of dusk in the cavernous space of the railhead the old man set out for the long escalator which  rose up and up and brought him to an elevated level. He exited the building, looked about him, realised he was lost and returned to the roofed space. Here he took a downbound escalator (this is really a ‘descalator’, he thought to himself) and rode to the platform level. Still lost, he looked about him, wondering.

 

 

Before him stood a young woman. The woman was slightly built with fine freckles and reddish hair. The two exchanged surprised smiles.

The old man thought, this is twice upon a time. The man asked, Which way is Spencer Street?

That way, she said, extending an arm.

Thanking her, he turned to go.

Behind him a voice asked: Would you hug?

Would I hug, he wondered.

She opened her arms wide. The man felt diffident, unusually awkward. Uncertain of today’s etiquette, too-conscious of how others might see him, he held her by her bony shoulder blades while she held him firmly for a time.

Goodbye, they said in unison.

Book launch invitation

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dear all
this coming sunday evening i’ll be participating in a virtual book launch
i’m writing to inform you of the event and to invite you to attend
my invitation comes without a hint of obligation or expectation but with my commendation of a really worthy book that tells a remarkable story
i read it and i was moved
it speaks to us in times that challenge human decency and threaten our liberty
it’s story to remember
i found it inspiring
come along

Click HERE to register


sincerely

howard

Early Spring

By Posted in Childhood, friendship, Life, Love, Work by Others, writing Tagged , , , , , Leave a comment

The date comes up on his screen, September five. Instantly he sees a round face, lightly freckled. Her wavy hair is light brown.

He’s known her two brothers for years and her two elder sisters, both of them young ladies in their late teens. But this is the first summer  he and she have noticed each other: she’s 11 years old and he’s fourteen. While the slow afternoons make everyone else drowsy, the two go for walks to nowhere in particular. They talk comfortably about their mums and dads  and their brothers and sisters. They both come from large families and there’s lots to tell. Last week it was his birthday. Hers is in spring. One afternoon they find themselves at the far end of the island. There in the long grass they sit. Something tells him to move closer. He kisses her. Soon after they walk back to their families on their neighbouring boats.

 

The next afternoon he looks for her, but she and her mum have gone shopping in town on the further shore.

He doesn’t find her the next day either.

On the third day her elder sister says she went back to Geelong with Dad to buy her schoolbooks. He confesses to the elder sister he’s missing her. Her response surprises him:  Sometimes a young girl can feel confused if she has feelings she’s never felt before. It can scare her.

 

Summer ends and they don’t meet again. Most years he thinks of her on September five.

 

He’s about sixty when he buys a book by John Marsden. Its title is ‘This I Believe’. In it he reads the credos of one hundred eminent Australians. One essay is written by a woman shortly before she dies, too young, of breast cancer. A companion essay is written by her eminent daughter. He doesn’t recognise the surnames of the two women. The essays move him. He notes the dates of birth and death of the  mother. She has been dead now for some years.

 

Every year, on September five, he thinks of her.

Hope

By Posted in Faith, Family, Life, Medical, Poetry, Travel, Work by Others Tagged , , , , , , , 8 Comments

The Unexpected Uses of Yeats

 

 

Annette and I set out on our travels in the northern spring of the year 2019 without any thought of deep time. This was to be a pleasure trip, to celebrate an event that took place in 1949. Annette was to have a big birthday and for some time I had pressed her to name a place she’d never been and which she’d dreamed of visiting. Greek Islands was her eventual answer.

 

 

 

 

We found a cruise that would begin and end in Rome, visiting Greek Isles and numerous Italian ports. So we signed up. Before the cruise we celebrated Passover, the Festival of Spring, in Israel. After the festival we set out on our cruise full of thoughts of geography and its delights, not the moral swamps of history. But History jumped out and ambushed us. History chooses often to show a face that’s beautiful or graceful. But behind the handsome face History is no more moral than the humans who make it.

 

 

 

So much, so general. To understand my particular timorousness, my constitutional alertness to risk, to possible harm, I need to insert a lengthy parenthesis: I’ve spent a lifetime in health; I grew up in a doctor’s house. In childhood I’d open to a knocking at our front door and before me I’d find the milkman holding his bleeding fingers (his horse had bit him!) or the man with his forearm in a tourniquet (a snake had bit him). From earliest days I knew the reality of savage misadventure. From earliest days I feared harm coming to me or to my loved ones. In time I went into Medicine in my own right and ever since I’ve walked those fearful paths of human hazard. All that has changed over the decades has been the measure of breadth and depth. I care more broadly and I care more deeply.

 

 

 

 

In the late seventies when my children were still small I knocked on the door of an old farmhouse that stood distinctive among the modern houses surrounding it. The area had been covered in orchards only a generation earlier. I asked the owner if he’d sell me his house.

It’s not for sale, he said, smiling in surprise. But as you’re here I’ll show you around.

The house was everything I imagined – high ceilings, large rooms, shady verandahs, grounds overgrown with fruit trees and vines. And there, lying beneath a cast iron trapdoor the owner showed me a cavernous cellar, its walls lined with bottles of wine.

Would you consider selling it? – I persisted.

Not likely. Why do you want it?

I like everything. Most of all, the cellar.

Are you a wine enthusiast?

Not really. Thanks for showing me around.

 

 

 

I left him my phone number against the day he might change his mind and we parted. I drove past that house every morning on my way to work and again every evening when I returned. And every time I passed I thought of that wine cellar and how it might keep my children safe in the event of a nuclear war.

 

 

 

 

Forty years on I still search for a shelter, but now it must be large enough to protect not just my children, but their children and their spouses, as well as our extended families, and everyone I know. And everyone I don’t know. All, I find, are my children.

 

 

 

So it is I find myself vulnerable when I contemplate History’s reality. T S Eliot suggests I’m not alone: Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

As the years pass, as my loved little ones enter a world that can be hard, as I see them multiply and grow, as I see them stumble; as I look upon those suffering adults (who in reality are still children), who come to doctors who cannot cure their loneliness, their confusion, their fears; as our planet heats up and I see how fellow species perish; at all these trembling times I look about me for salve. I listen for the still, small voice, I watch, I search for acts of kindness or courage.

 

 

 

 

I need to preserve belief. I look for signs that we humans are good. In the course of refereeing the endless, internal moral wrestling match conducted in my mind between human goodness and badness, I’ve been surprised by the use I’ve found in the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The poet had struggles of his own. In much of his poetry the older Yeats struggles with the arbitrary hardness of experience. He yearns for life’s lovely fullness, he’s baffled by disappointing reality: 


Some think it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance

 

 

Yeats concludes that old men are alive to this reality and it can drive them mad:

 

Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell,
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.

 

 

 

 

And so it came to pass that Annette and I stopped at Santorini and at Mykonos, then in Athens. In all these places we kept a fraternal eye open for Jews, alive or dead. The dead predominated. The Lonely Planet mentioned an ancient synagogue in Santorini but gave no details.  We never found it.

In Mykonos, no sign, but no matter: the beauty, the sunblissed radiance was all, and it sufficed.

 

 

 

 

We phoned the synagogue in Athens. No you can’t just visit, said the voice on the telephone. You need to send us an image of your passport and your email and we’ll let you know. We did all that and the voice said we could come. Be here at eleven, said the voice. Time was short, the bus line we needed ran both ways and we had no idea which was the correct one. Passers by offered confident, clear and contradictory directions, so we took a cab.

 

 

 

 

 

Sinagoga? – said the driver. I take you close, but to Sinagoga I cannot arrive. It is closed.

The driver dropped us and pointed somewhere indistinct. We looked around, sighted a narrow street whose entry was obstructed by barriers and bollards, and we made our way. Standing in the cobbled roadway we could make out two sinagoga. On our left a contemporary-looking structure declared itself Beth Shalom, the House of Peace. On our right stood a modest, older structure, seeming to shrink from our gaze. This was EtzChaim, the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life would remain closed to us. The House of Peace would open to us, carefully, ever so carefully, under armed guard.

 

 

 

 

From a booth stepped a fit-looking, youngish man wearing a handgun at his hip. A colleague, also young, also armed, eyed us closely from the booth. We stated our names and business, showed passports and won a smile. Yes, we expect you. But do not go in now. After thirty minutes you enter. Please now walk to the gardens at the end of the street, the Holocaust memorial gardens.

 

 

 

We walked fifty metres and found ourselves in a small area of scrubby shrubbery. High on a skinny pole a notice read, The Holocaust Memorial in Athens. Low to the ground a piece of creamy rock said nothing, but next to it burned a Yahrzeit (memorial) Candle. Close by, on a bronze panel were lines in Hebrew I recognised from Lamentations:

 

Righteous is He, our Lord:

Hear, now, all peoples

And see my pain –

My maidens, my young men

Have gone into captivity

 

 

 

Tucked behind another shrub, closer to the footpaths and plainer to the sight of passing Athenians, we found a steel plaque attached to a block of marble. It read:

 

Pause a while as you pass by,

Close your eyes and remember.

Remember the time when here or near here,

Men, women, children – our own fellow creatures –

Congregated in peace and trust, only to be arrested, humiliated, deported and murdered in Camps that shall forever shame our civilization.

Because they were Jewish, six million people

were denied the right to be free, happy, to hope,

to smile, to pray and finally, the right to live.

Remember them, their anguish and their death.

Do not recoil at such horror; do not descend into despair at man’s inhumanity to man.

Just remember. For by remembering we honourtheir deaths, and we save them from dying again – in oblivion.

 

 

Elie Wiesel

 

For the Holocaust Memorial in Athens, May 2016.

 

 

 

(2016! – was Wiesel still living? We checked; he died two months after the stone was set. Were these words the dying testimony of Elie Wiesel – he who embodied for my generation the anguish, the loss, the surviving remnant?) Standing in this broader street, bathed in Mediterranean sunshine, with heads bowed, we sighed and sighed again.

 

 

 

 

The guards said we could go in now. Entering Beth Shalom we found we were not the only visitors. A rabbi addressed a group of thirty young people. He showed them the Ark, the Torah scrolls, the various ritual implements. These were university students, enrolled in a subject of a vaguely cultural nature. This would be a surface encounter only, a fleeting crossing of intersecting orbits. Unless the students were, whether by chance or by design, to follow the cobbled path and to pause in the shrubbery and to absorb the words of Ecclesiastes and Wiesel. Or will the students gravitate perhaps to a neofascist group named Golden Dawn which already commands seven percent of the popular vote in Greece?

 

 

 

 

Hidden away in a narrow street elsewhere in Athens we found the Jewish Museum of Greece. Behind gates of steel, guarded by cameras and electronics, up a narrow flight of steps, a watchful person examined our passports and our faces before admitting us. Inside, poignant relics told their stories of Jews who found shelter from vengeful Christendom in these formerly Ottoman places. In time the tides of history turned, and turned again; the Turk retreated, independent Greece arose, Italian Fascists invaded, succeeded by genocidal Nazis. The War against the Allies might well be lost, but the War against the Jews must still be prosecuted. With feverish haste, even as the Nazis retreated from the Allies, they hunted out local Jews for deportation. Communities of great antiquity, some of them older than Christianity, faced their end. Before the War Greece’s Jews numbered around 80,000, with the greatest population in Thessaloniki. By the end of the War about 10,000 remained alive. Why did these thousands survive, how did they survive? The Museum held answers to these questions, answers that surprised and cheered us.

 

 

 

 

Well before the War, Greek Orthodox clergy and orthodox Jewish Rabbis were befriending each other. When the Nazis arrived, late in 1943, the cross-faith ties held strong. Across the Greek Church, priests, known as Metropolitans, acted to protect and save entire Jewish communities. Upon the eve of deportations from Thessaloniki, the supreme cleric Archbishop Damaskinos was about to undergo throat surgery. Putting off his operation, he wrote to the German commanders, begging clemency for the Jews in the name of Christian mercy. He rushed to the puppet Prime Minister of Greece bearing open letters from priests, from the Bar Association, from the Academy and the University of Athens, and from the Actors’ Guild, all in support of Greece’s Jews. 

 

 

 

 

In all, twenty-eight institutions of civil society in  Greece pressed the PM to act. In the face of this pressure he did intercede, albeit without success.

 

 

 

 

All over Greece Nazi commanders ordered local priests and mayors immediately to create lists of all local Jews in preparation for imminent deportation. In town after town, in island after island, priests resisted, delayed and deceived the Nazis, while urging Jews to hide or flee, to change their names, to affect Christianity, or to join the partisans.  Delay by even a single day saved many. Priests urged their parishioners to hide Jews, to keep safe their treasures, to pass Jews on to the Free Greek Army.

 

 

 

 

In this way the Resistance spirited Chief Rabbi Barzilai into a succession of mountain villages of increasing remoteness and inaccessibility. The Nazis were desperate to find Barzilai, but he was kept safe.

 

 

 

 

On the island of Zakynthos the Germans arrived and demanded of the Mayor and the Priest the usual complete list of all the three hundred or so Jews, all their possessions, all their addresses. The list was to be handed in, complete, within twenty-four hours. The two officials handed in a list with but two names – those of the priest and the mayor. All of Zakynthos’ Jews were saved. And what of Luth, the German Commander? He never pursued the matter. For his pains Luth was replaced by the Nazis, arrested and detained.

 

 

 

 

I read all these testimonies, affirmed by rescuers and confirmed by the rescued, and a great swelling of thankfulness rose within me. I felt grateful to the brave Metropolitans of Athens, of Volos, of Zakynthos, of Arta, of Dimitriada, of Didimoteicho, of Thessaloniki, of Thiva and Livadia. Also of Ioannina, of Corfu and Paxi, of Corinth and of Halkida, Xirohori and the Northern Sporades.

 

 

 

 

Were all Jews saved? Clearly ninety percent perished. But he who saves but a single life, saves a whole world. In the case of this tearful visitor to a tiny museum, those Christians had saved my whole world.

 

 

 

 

Some days later our ship stopped briefly at Chania, a pretty port city on the island of Crete. We had read how the Nazis had captured the entire Cretan Jewish population of nearly 2000, and herded them aboard a ship bound for the mainland. A British warship, recognizing the vessel as German, torpedoed and sank it, with the loss of all who were aboard. After two thousand years of stubborn survival had Jewish life on Crete been snuffed out? Almost, but not entirely: we had read of a small synagogue that had been found in Chania and restored by American Jewish donors. Trip Advisor spoke of poignant services conducted by the tiny numbers of local Jews (returning descendants of Cretan Jews who’d been absent from the island at the precise time of the deportation) as well as the odd Shabbat visitor.

 

 

 

 

Annette and I resolved to find the synagogue. Once again the taxi driver said: To the sinagoga I cannot arrive. I drive and then you walk. It is close. It is down there – an airy wave – and then more down, leftwards. We went down there, and more down, we turned leftwards, and we followed a winding little cobbled street of shops and cafes and B and B’s. Time flew, embarkation hour neared and our faint hopes flickered.

 

 

 

 

 

Abruptly Hebrew lettering among the stones announced our arrival at the Etz Chaim Synagogue.

Since its restoration Etz Chaim has suffered two separate terrorist attacks. Expecting high securitywe fished for our passports and crossed the threshold hesitantly. Seated in a sunny little garden courtyard a cheerful man with a cheerful rubicund face waved away our documents and waved us in. Welcome, come in, please look around – through there is the synagogue, beyond it the mikve, and in the rooms, many documents and records.  

 

 

 

 

We had twenty minutes for twenty centuries. Unforgettable minutes they were. Unforgotten the two thousand who drowned, unforgotten the two thousand years. As we left we bought a cookery book of old Jewish Greek recipes from the young woman attendant. Her English was precise, her accent not Greek. We asked her, Where do you come from?

Austria.

You are Jewish?

Christian. A smile.

Why are you here?

Because my nation, my people have never acknowledged, never repented. Austria today chooses to be a victim of the Nazis.

What are you doing here?

I research, I document the Jewish life here. From our small church young graduates travel to many small communities, where each of us spends one year.

 

 

 

 

One whole year! One year of the twenty or so of a bright young life. Humbling, inspiring, a salve.

 

 

 

I must have arrived in ‘the Ancient World’ with a nasty case of Weltenschmerz. I had not realized its severity. I had not anticipated relief.

 

 

 

 

I have been writing these recollections in the remote northern town of Broome where my grandfather and his three brothers came to dive for pearls. Here, unexpectedly, they found other Jews who came together at Festivals to express their remnant Jewishness.

 

 

 

 

When I am free of work duties at the hospital I run along the endless miles of Cable Beach. In my ears recorded poetry plays. Yeats reminds me I am not alone, not the only old man that the world might make mad.

 

 

 

 

Back at the hospital a young nurse asks me where I’m from. Where am I from? I’m from Melbourne, I’m from Leeton, I’m from Broome, from England and France – and before that from Poland and Russia. And in the end, which is the beginning, I’m from Israel. In return the young woman says, my family comes from Holland. My grandmother was five when the Germans came. Her parents took in a Jewish family and hid them. Oma was only five but she never said a word. Nazis moved in and out while the Jewish guests stayed safe in the attic.  

 

 

 

 

“Nature, bad, base and blind,

Dearly thou canst be kind,

There, dearly then, dearly

I’ll cry thou canst be kind.”

 

(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

 

The Erratic Reader – II

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Bloody newspapers! Having settled into my summer of crime I had little patience for newspapers or the news. The Weekend ‘Australian’ felled a forest in my palm. I looked sourly at the ‘paper’s unrelenting jaundice, directed uniformly in denunciation of the new mob who will steal government from the present mob. In this mood the ‘Australian’ deplores democracy. Deploring busily myself, I turned to the non-news. This is to be found in ‘Review’, the newspaper’s excellent weekly look at books and pictures and movies and dance and music and television shows.  In short, the arts.

 

 

Looking cursorily I leafed through the pages. As I did so I felt cursory; the accursed ‘Review’ was full of attractive material. I came to poems. Poems are hard, like algebra. Unlike algebra the trick is not to try to solve a poem, first listen to the music. Here (‘Review’, page 22) was Barry Hill, himself guilty of poetry, reviewing a book by another poet, Paul Kane. No, I hadn’t heard of him either. Kane’s book, ‘A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina’, is a lament for the poet’s wife, Tina, who died a few years ago. Barry Hill likes the book; I loved Hill’s review. I want to give you a taste of Hill on Kane on Tina, but what to choose? Better, what to omit? Not a word is dispensible. Here, at random:

 

It comes in the form of ghazals, the ancient lyric common to the Sufi poets writing in classic Persian (or Arabic, Turkish or Urdu), whose lines fell down the page in couplets that came to rest with a fresh mention of the beloved or the Beloved (sometimes called Master).

In any case, the Sufi exalted the visible as a song to the invisible.

 

 

Hill’s language is pregnant, heavy with knowledge and understandings, gravid with a scholarship I can only envy. Hill chooses the following lines by Kane:

 

“He never meant to write this, it simply took shape and wouldn’t let him go until it was over. But it will never be over for him, his heart inscribed with the name of the beloved, Tina”

 

and:

 

“At night I lie awake and call to you,

but you don’t reply, except in silence.

The night bird is not silent but sings

A simple single note. His mate does not sing back.

I do not understand this silence, as if God

Has departed and taken you with Him.

I have no words to form a prayer

That could reach you or Him.

Two wine glasses sit on the counter top –

One is full then only half full.

Without emptiness the glass could not exist.

If you should speak, Tina, the glass would shatter.

 

And back to Hill:

 

…Meanwhile, the ghazals, their pace and suspension, create a sense of time stretched to some mysterious limit, or of language floating on the waters of emptiness. “What words are these that well up like tears not shed?”

 

 

It took me quite some time before I could go back to Peter Temple’s ‘Dead Point”, my first Jack Irish novel. My first, definitely not my last. And now I’m on to Jane Harper’s ‘The Dry.’ Bloody crime writers writing literature. It’s enough to drive a man to Algebra.

 

Paul’s Passing

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An attentive reader of this blog will recognise the name Paul Jarrett. Paul was my friend. He died last week aged ninety-nine years and eleven months. We had known each other by email for ten years. By the time we met in the flesh Paul was ninety-four. We were together in the flesh but thrice, and spent but five days in each other’s company. Yet his friendship enriched me. So long as my mind knows the truth Paul Jarrett will be with me.

 

 

 

Every day Paul sent out numerous emails to his friends and family, who numbered about eighty souls. I became one of those fourscore followers. By the time we became

e-friends Paul had retired from Surgery, he’d ceased piloting aircraft, he was living alone with his memories and his collection of ragged stray cats. The TV news fed his active mind, which would turn often to past world events. He’d recall those as well as people from his private life, teachers, relatives, colleagues, friends, and most keenly of all, his deceased wife Beverley. Paul would send emails, four or five or six in number. I read them all.

 

 

 

 

I came to know a man who believed in God, who attended his Methodist church every Sunday, who voted Republican, who supported gun ownership, who disliked Obama and who loathed Hilary Clinton and who loved cats. Paul described himself as a conservative. He said, I’m to the right of Barry Goldwater and he showed me a photograph of the two, taken around the time of Goldwater’s run for the Presidency. Goldwater was far to the right of any US president of my lifetime  (with the exception of the present incumbent, whose position can only be the fruit of daily conjecture and of analysis of the tea leaves of his Twitter account). Characteristically Paul never mentioned to me that Goldwater intended to appoint him to his Cabinet as national chief of Health.

 

 

 

 

I was none of those things that Paul was, yet a friendship grew. Paul and I both entertained a veneration of our late fathers and mothers that bordered on ancestor worship, we both loved Medicine, we cherished old friendships, we preferred the burnished past to the distasteful present, and we could smile at human error and laugh at ourselves. I’d read Paul’s emails and I’d enter a different world; I learned about earlier eras, I met remarkable people, I was challenged with novel viewpoints (frequently opposed to my own), I relearned Medicine I’d long forgotten. I knew I stood in Paul’s shadow but he saw me in my own light. I’m sure I felt flattered that such a man would treat me as his equal.

 

 

 

Paul and I shared a real friendship. I’d challenge him when his politics got up my nose and, unoffended, he’d defend his position. Paul’s penultimate year was spent grieving for the America he loved. He detested the Democrat candidate and felt offended by the Republican. He knew duty would call him to cast his vote. In his distress Paul’s agony was spiritual in its intensity. He would not shirk his duty. He must serve his country. Patriotism, that quality that cynics dismiss as the refuge of the scoundrel, burned brightly in my friend and he suffered for it. 

 

 

Let me share with you some of Paul’s very many letters. 

 

 August 2, 2015

My mind returns to the days when I would, by my mood and demeanor, sour a bowl of honey.

Beverley, who was acutely attuned to my moods would pinch my cheek, give me a pixyish

smile and say, “Be Happy”!

At first this would annoy me, then I realized that she never acted like I did, so there must be some choice in presenting a foul mood.

Some of us pull an ill disposition around us like a protective blanket.

Not Bev.  She was as careful about her demeanor as she was about her appearance.

 

August 11, 2015

I am not sure where the admonition to, “Feed My Sheep” ends and Backshish begins.

Never have I seen such a drive and competition for charitable funds nor such a constant demand for our attention so that we can be hit-up.  By phone, by mail, by door to door solicitation, through the Media and other advertising.  The sheer volume makes one suspicious that such an army of petitioners can not contain only those with charity in their hearts.

And all of this attention is not devoted toward appeal for charitable donations.  The phone just rang.  It was a canned message.  It said, “How are you?  Good.  Can you hear me all right?  Good.  (I had not said a word.)  Congratulations are in order, you have just won a vacation trip with two guests, all expenses paid, all you can eat—“  At this point I hung up.  That automatic dialer will call me back tomorrow.  Hopefully my automatic answering machine will converse with their automatic dialing machine and transcription.

Saturday I received 5 pieces of regular mail, 4 of which were appeals for money and one an advertisement for a Mexican Restaurant. 

I will admit that I could be a more cheerful giver, but in addition to wanting to hang on to my money, I am beginning to question whether or not I am getting my money’s worth?

We are living in times that can only be described as “Devious”.

 

 

 

“Now the Day is over, Night is drawing nigh.  Shadows of the Evening steal across the sky”.

And what a day it was.  The temperature hit 117 in the shade, and to add to the disasters brought in by August, Beverley’s Grandmother clock jammed the chain on the weight that powers the clock itself when it ran down.  My vision is not sufficient to fix it any more.  It has happened before and I have been able to get it going again, but my vision is no longer capable of accomplishing this.  Her clock was amazingly accurate, and I enjoyed hearing it chime the hours and quarter hours, during the day and through the night.

I have eaten a frozen dinner prepared for me by Ann, and am about to settle down in front of the television and nap before time to go to bed.  This is the daily routine.

A gracious good evening to all of you.

G’nite!

 

 August 16, 2015

It promises to hit 117 again this afternoon.

The poor cats do not have refrigeration, but they have cool spots under the shacks

and have thrived in this heat for many years. Sylvester as spokesman for the Etudiants,

scolds me for not permitting them to come inside where it is cool, but this falls on deaf ears when I consider the life of Riley they lead, and the amount of fur they leave behind.

I try and keep the bed outside the Breakfast Nook moist when it comes into the shade in the afternoon, which is the only air conditioning they are going to get.

When you stop and think about it, it takes some temerity to lecture me about the weather, and Sylvester may be spending some time in attitude modification in the near future.  He has lost a lower right canine tooth (if cats can have canine teeth), but I have observed no loss of appetite.  They are eating me out of house and home.

I worry about them though when I am called to my reward (whatever that may be).

 

 

 

 

 August 29, 2015

I was thinking about some unusual surgical cases I found myself involved with without adequate training or experience.  A surprise after opening the patient.

Having no other source of help in the urgency of the moment I prayed urgently and silently.

That ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things with God’s help, I can affirm.

 

 

 

October 11, 2015

I received a call from Bob and Dianne at the Cabin with Nikki this week-end.

Bob has the knowledge and ability to provide Satellite telephone service up there, and it works well.

They have had a lot of rain, the Pack Rat problem appears to be under control and the weather is nice with Fall in the offing.  Bob reports that the road up to the Cabin is in need of repair from rain damage, and he will be able to do that with his new tractor.  I think they return tomorrow.  There are some apples that are ripening and they will bring some for me.

Those Western Delicious yellow apples from Stark’s Nurseries are the best I have ever tasted, although late freezes make them available about once in ten years.

It is warm here, although comfortable.  We have what my Mother would call a “Buttermilk Sky”.  Little sun, a slight breeze and a great day to sit on the Patio and smoke a cigar.

It looks as if I may be around another Christmas, and I am making plans to prepare envelopes for my Family to insure their delivery.

The cats have made me a present of the head of a Roof Rat which they laid out on the Patio door mat.  I discarded it because I have no recipe for Roof Rat heads, although I appreciate the gesture.

 

 

 

Paul Jarrett has died. America has lost one of its big men, a patriot, a man of substance and integrity. Medicine has seen the passing of the last of his kind. A congregation has lost a faithful worshipper. We who were Paul’s friends have lost a wise man, a sort of prophet. Phoenix has lost an ornament. But whatever his greatness in the wide world, it was in the little corners of life where I saw Paul Jarrett’s meaning writ clear. It might be seen in his solicitude for the unpromising cats he succoured, in the empathy and in the respect he extended to those battered living things. Born into an era where males were born to rule, Paul esteemed women higher. 

 

 

 

Paul was the son who honoured his father and his mother; of two brothers Paul treasured and measured the greatness of the one, and cherished the second in his deformity. Paul was the husband who never ceased to love and to sing the praise of the wife he outlived for so many lonely years. Paul was the father proud of those stalwart sons, adoring of that dandled daughter; Paul was the grandfather who inspired grandson Benjamin to follow him into the guild and bond of medicine; Paul was the Methodist whose whole heart could celebrate his great-grandson’s bris. The measure of the man, Paul Jarrett, was the honour he paid to those he loved.  

 

 

 

More than once Paul wrote, “Great was the celebration in Heaven when Beverley arrived.” Such was the simplicity of Paul’s faith. Mine differs. But it gives me pleasure to imagine how great might be the celebration for that good and faithful man. 

Reds Under the Beds

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Michael Benjamin Komesaroff was a conspicuous proletarian classmate of mine during our later years at Scopus (1963). He had a lived political ideology, like other Komesaroffs before him, an indivisible loyalty to Jewishness and to his country of citizenship. I recall his vernacular speech deafening us classmates in his espousal of Labor politics. We called him Kommo; he was a social democrat before most of us knew the term. Those same politics marked the generation of his immediate ancestors, and brought them to the attention of ASIO. At the time Lenin was preaching international revolution, a doctrine that unsettled Australia’s conservatives. Here were the Komesaroffs, newly arrived from that revolutionary hotbed. Where did their loyalties lie? ASIO became very interested in them, and now their descendant, with a career in international journalism behind him, investigates the investigators in a new book. “Reds Under the Beds” is the result.

“Reds Under the Beds” describes the abiding interest of Australia’s intelligence community in a family who had immigrated in the early decades of the Twentieth Century.  The author’s love and respect for those ancestors match his feelings for Australia. His meticulous research informs this account of a group whose hallmark was loyalty. The Komesaroffs were loyal Jews who became loyal citizens of Australia. Jewish loyalty mandated their love of Zion and their opposition to fascism, while loyalty to the country of adoption saw them acknowledged as exemplary citizens. Somehow ASIO became all too interested in the Jewish concerns of the Komesaroffs and quite blind to their lives as citizens.

Michael Komesaroff writes his family’s story dispassionately, in clear and clean prose. His analysis of the political tides and times is  revelation, as is his understanding of the contest for middle Australia between Social Democrats and Conservatives. With a calm that is unusual he identifies prevailing anti-semitic attitudes without inflating it beyond its true dimensions. Most topically, Komesaroff shows us how Australians of the most ordinary loyalty can come under pervading suspicion and investigation by Intelligence organisations. In our times, when mistrust of the citizenry is translated into something of a growth industry, a poised and intelligent balance is needed between the community’s needs of security and of community. In the case of these ‘Reds under the Beds’, ASIO emerges, showing limited intelligence.

“Reds Under the Beds” is published by Hybrid Publishers and is available from most booksellers and Amazon. Further details of the book are contained on the Amazon website (here).

As outlined in the flyer, I have the pleasure of launching the book at 4:00 pm on Sunday 15 July at Glen Huntly Park Function Room, Glen Huntly Park, corner of Neerim and Booran Roads.

The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

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Every so seldom I come upon a book to treasure. Every day I read. I inhabit a forest of books,

I sleep between towers of books, some read, some half-read, most unread. No day goes unbooked.

Some in my world of books inform or advise or enlighten. Others – not enough of them – delight or tickle me. Some inspire, some shock, others outrage and a few disgust me. Plenty bore me. But every so rarely comes a story that calls for that overused word, love. Robert Hillman’s ‘Bookshop of the Broken Hearted’ is a book to love.

What do I mean here by love? In two separate surveys carried out a decade or so ago, respondents were asked to name their most-beloved Australian novel. I saw listed many books I’d enjoyed, by authors I admire. Before reading the results I made my own nomination – Tim Winton’s ‘Cloudstreet’. I read the rankings, and there, topping both surveys, was Cloudstreet.’Just so: Winton’s characters, their stories, their rich and variegated humanness, are given to us in their fulness, given us to love. ‘Cloudstreet’ stays with the reader and is recalled with love. ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is another such.

Ripe for adding to that list is Hillman’s ‘Bookshop’. It broke my heart and it healed it. I laughed (my guffaws this morning alarmed a tramful of screen-trapped commuters) and I ached for the child. And for the adults who saw this child and that child torn from them I felt a distress that has visited me only once outside of a book, when the (false) report arrived that my child had a fatal malignancy.

‘Bookshop’ left me hopeful but not complacent. I will cherish the simple farmer who is the protagonist and I will tremble for him so long as memory abides.

I invite you come to Readings Bookshop in Carlton, to hear Robert Hillman in conversation with this happy blogger at 6.30 pm next Monday, May 7th.

Running from Office

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The following verse followed me from the city and found me where I am working in remoter parts:

I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better

Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the ‘bidgee, years ago,

He was doctoring when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,

Just `on spec’, addressed as follows, `Goldie, Doctor of The Overflown’.

And an answer came directed in a writing not unexpected,

(And for sure the same was written with that horrible doctors’ scrawl)

‘Twas his running mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:

`Goldie’s gone to Queensland doctoring, and we don’t know where he are.’

In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Goldie

Gone a-doctoring `down the Cooper’ where the Western doctors go;

As his flock are slowly sitting, Goldie runs past them singing,

For the bush doctor’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him

In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,

And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,

And at night the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars.

I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a not so stingy

Ray of sunlight struggles not so much between the buildings tall,

And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city

Through the air con floating, spreads its foulness over all

And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle

Of the tramways and the ‘buses making hurry down the street,

And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,

Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.

And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me

As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,

With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,

For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.

And I somehow rather fancy that I’d like to change with Goldie,

Like to take a turn at doctoring where the seasons come and go,

While he faced the round eternal of the drafting and advising —

But I doubt he’d suit the office, Goldie, ‘Doctor of The Overflown’.

Nicholas Miller, legal practitioner and versifier, has doctored Paterson’s ‘Clancy ‘