Books

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REVIEWS

Book Review: Home without a Homeland

“Home without a Homeland”, Nora Huppert’s enthralling memoir of her five migrations, will be launched at Sydney Jewish Museum by Litzi Lemberg, President of the Sydney Child Survivors Group.

The book tells how her family’s comfortable life in Berlin was disrupted by the rise of the Nazis. Seeing what was coming, they fled to Prague, from where Nora was offered a place on the first Kindertransport to England. Her father, a radical journalist, had already escaped to London. They both spent the War years in England, Nora with a generous upper class family in the country. Meanwhile her mother and brother were marooned in Europe, waiting for the papers that never came.

Sources used in the book include letters, diaries, contemporary pictures, articles, books and films and previously unpublished family memoirs. A harrowing series of letters from the woman who sheltered Nora’s mother and brother during their final months describes their daily struggle to avoid the tightening net.

Her vivid account of those years, of working in post-War London, meeting her Austrian doctor husband, Peter, living with him all over the country as he worked his way up the medical hierarchy, then migrating to Tasmania, as far as possible from Cold War Europe, is an enthralling story. As her daughters grew up, resourceful and resilient Nora built herself an Australian career in the new field of social welfare, marriage and family counselling.

The cities of Europe between the Wars, Britain during the Blitz, post-War London and Switzerland, and Australia as experienced by a middle class migrant family are all vividly evoked in the book. Nora’s father’s and husband’s internment as ‘enemy aliens’ and their subsequent release into useful Allied War work; the tightening of the Nazi net around those like her mother and brother, marooned in Prague; the dispersal to camps and exile of family and friends from the great European cities; the rise and fall of Communism, all key into the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. Nora’s own story shows the importance of courage, endurance and a clear-eyed sense of purpose.

In the final chapters of the book, she travels back with her husband and daughter to the scenes of her childhood and youth: Prague, London and the English countryside, Berlin, Vienna and New York, and Lithuania where her maternal grandparents owned substantial properties. She makes contact with the scattered survivors of her family and shares these reunions with her daughter and with readers. In the final chapter, Nicholas Winton’s Children, she meets the benefactor who arranged the Kindertransport which gave her the gift of life. In its affectionate detail and generous understanding of its characters, and in the way it moves confidently through changing worlds, Nora’s story will intrigue and move all those who read it.

You are warmly invited to attend what promises to be another pleasant celebration of the successful Community Stories initiative at the Museum on Feb-19 at 3pm.

About the author:

While in Tasmania raising her family, Nora joined the Country Women’s Association and spent two years as local President. She was then recommended for training for the newly-established Marriage Guidance Council. When the family moved to Sydney in 1965, she became a volunteer counsellor and attended overseas workshops and training in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. In 1990 she started a private  practice, as well as continuing with her MGC work. She then joined the family counselling and mediation services of Unifam. She has served on the executives of professional associations and contributed to journals. In addition, she has volunteered to help new migrants through the Jewish welfare organisation, the B’nai B’rith, and is actively involved in the anti-racist initiative, Courage to Care.

Book Review: LaKol Z’man

Katja Grynberg reviews LaKol Z’man   – A Time For Everything by Yossi Huttler. This tiny book of tiny poems takes the reader through the year, month by month, on a journey of changing emotions and spirituality.
Words reflect anxieties and prayers, joy and hope, with gem-like simplicity. It is a religious young man’s journey, through the Jewish calendar; also a mosaic of the time he dealt with cancer. His words meditate on differently lived months. They celebrate Jewish holydays and observance. Some poems written earlier, have been added to more recent ones. They are condensed into a year’s thoughts, beginning with the first Jewish month, Nissan and the poem, Bedikas Chametz where he ‘trains a light on those places he’d been wanting not to know.’ Each month reflects textures of that time year; earlier times are revisited, re-expressed. The poems reflect changing perspectives; reality shifts over time.  Religious festivities, part of a predictable continuum, celebrate life and perhaps make it easier dealing with unpredictability. He hopes his words will inspire and allow others to appreciate and explore a Jewish life – ‘bring good tidings, exhortations to self-defence… extinguish all my enemies with but one breath.’

King of the Quill

Any self-respecting journalist dreams of becoming a famous novelist. However, they rarely turn out to be the Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway or Martha Gelhorn of their time. Freed from the restrictions of a newspaper many journalists create boring door stoppers, evoking James Joyce’s “Ulysses” – not necessarily because of the power of their language but rather from their heaviness and length of their tome. Not so the Sydney Morning Herald’s columnist Mark Dapin in his first book of fiction “King Of The Cross”: He wrote 308 racy pages of quirky humour, innuendo and wry comments on life, love and licentiousness.

That Dapin’s book turned out to be an entertaining read, though, is due to the fact that he didn’t write a novel to begin with. Instead he created a docu-drama, depicting the history of Sydney’s sleazy red light district King’s Cross – and its personnel – over several decades. His faux-“Underbelly” is in fact a thinly veiled biography of the Jewish career criminal Abe Saffron, who invented the Australian version of organized crime, amassing a huge fortune, using lawyers and accountants to set up businesses that fronted an illegal gambling, sex and liquor kingdom.

To protect this empire Saffron corrupted anyone he needed including the disgraced NSW Premier Sir Robert Askin, judges, and that infamous constant of organised crime in NSW, the Police Force, starting with its commissioner. Those whom he could not corrupt were blackmailed or, as rumour has it, killed. Apart from tax evasion the NSW Police were unable to secure any convictions against Saffron over a period of almost 40 years, which did not help to reinforce the public’s trust in the state police and government officials – maybe Saffron’s longest lasting legacy.

The story of this charismatic crook and his tale of greed, sex and betrayal is retold through the eyes of an English immigrant who’s not too bothered by law and order himself. “Slick” might ring a chord with the many Brits who came to Australia to reinvent themselves, an Australia where he more or less accidentally meets Jake Mendoza during an attempt to score a job in media.

The young man cannot help but admire the brains of his elegant elder who used to be Sydney’s “Mr. Big” but who is now a lonely old criminal who has betrayed – and has been betrayed by – his women, associates and friends. Mendoza feels isolated and misunderstood and hires Slick to ghost-write his biography and to set his legacy straight.

So Dapin, alias Slick, retells Mendoza’s life, turning a tale that corruption investigators would dismiss as vile into an account of a street-wise womanizer who always remained a step ahead of his enemies, knew how to take care of business, turn the profits of the underworld into real estate and to maintain a thin gloss of respectability and his sense of humour.

The author peels back the layers of two different metaphorical onions, those of Mendoza’s character and Slick’s various skins and professions, while different gangs try to wrestle power from Mendoza at the Cross. Dapin’s tale sticks pretty much to Abe Saffron’s life, changing just enough names and backgrounds to avoid disgruntled heirs from pursuing lawsuits. He plays around with aliases for the protagonists; a biker is are called “Rabbit”, journalists like breakfast items “Ham” and “Eggs” or “Spiegeleier”, which is German for fried eggs. Why Dapin though, an avowedly Jewish journalist (he wears his heart on his sleeve in the SMH on that one) creates a wannabe-journalist as main character only pretending to be a Jew – to the point of turning up at a funeral in a little skullcap to make up the numbers for a proper Kaddish ruining it that way – remains his private joke.

Dapin manages to marry both worlds: he is journalist enough to research his story well and artist enough to fill in the gaps where the exact facts remain a mystery. Dapin’s Mendonza is probable more convincing as King of the Cross than Saffron ever was. And Dapin was never funnier, sadder and more world-weary than as Slick Nick. But there is a product warning, too: Dapin choses wild sexual and violent overtones to recount his story. Little old ladies: please beware!

Mark Dapin: King Of The Cross, Pan Macmillan Australia, 2010.