Ferryman: The Life and Deathwork of Ephraim Finch

Profoundly moving portrait of the living and the dead             Book review by Dr Anne Sarzin

Katia Ariel, the author of Ferryman: The Life and Deathwork of Ephraim Finch, has patience, sensitivity and empathy in abundance. Allied to these qualities, she is gifted with considerable listening, writing and interpretive skills, enabling her to craft a memoir that illuminates major themes of mortality and immortality; and brings to vibrant life a character that deserves to be recognised and celebrated.

The rupture that death inflicts on the precious union of body and soul is at the heart of Ariel’s book. She delineates with clarity and compassion the many ways individuals and their community confront their new realities. She reveals the poetry and passion of those dedicated practitioners, exemplified in the life and times of Ephraim Finch, who guide the bereaved through the funerary rites and healing mourning practices associated with the Jewish faith.

Ariel’s canvas is as broad and all-encompassing as life itself. But she also focuses on the mystery of faith contending with the reality of death, that dissolution of a precious life that ripples outward beyond the family into the supportive embrace of a caring community. Nobody exemplifies this tender partnership more than Ariel’s remarkable subject, Ephraim Finch, who has spent 30 years of his life as Director of the Melbourne Chevra Kadisha, heading and shaping and also enlarging the world view of the city’s ‘holy society’. It is a position defined by millennia of tradition and, perhaps, somewhat constrained by ancient rituals viewed as sacrosanct. Surely it would be simpler to ferry the deceased and mourners along these time-honoured pathways defined by biblical precepts. Supervising and enacting these rituals is an honourable task that in itself earns respect and gratitude. And, undoubtedly, over the decades, Ephraim fulfilled all these prescribed requirements competently and scrupulously. But he did so much more.

Ephraim discharged these funerary tasks with reverence for the ethics and principles they enshrined. Nonetheless, as Ariel demonstrates so conclusively, he was also a courageous innovator, extending boundaries of accepted practice to accommodate unexpected challenges and complications, which he always confronted and resolved with characteristic humanity, warmth, compassion and understanding. In his leadership position in the community, he innovated in ways that strengthened those to whom he ministered in their hours of need. He listened patiently to their stories, documented their religious and cultural histories, noted the geography of their wanderings and migrations, and decoded the successive name changes that obscured their origins. Above all, he was cognisant of individual needs and circumstances, always responding to their pain and sorrow with all the resources at his command.

Ariel has recognised the modesty and self-effacement at the heart of Ephraim Finch and has filled in the biographical lacunae of her protagonist. She has fleshed out his story, tracing the narrative arc of his and his wife Cas’s conversion to Judaism. Ariel brings to life Ephraim’s rich scholarship, his reverence for and sense of connection with the inspirational Elie Wiesel; his pilgrimage with his family through the landscapes of Eastern European Jewry, their seminal visit to Auschwitz and places of Jewish history and suffering.

But this is not only Epraim’s story. Ariel also inserts herself into and throughout the narrative, doing so judiciously, carefully preserving the delicate balance as she interrogates Ephraim’s life and work. The overall result—a fusion of biography and autobiography—is a consistently and delicately achieved equilibrium between subject and author. With passion for her task and with a finely tuned poetic imagination and a flair for original metaphors, Ariel succeeds in crafting a poignant and heartfelt evaluation of the spaces between life and death, the enigmas of faith, one man’s love of learning, his remarkable humanity, and the commitment of a life lived in the service of others.

 

Ferryman: The life and deathwork of Ephraim Finch

Katia Ariel

Wild Dingo Press 2025