by Yvonne Fein
Wyborova vodka (the
good Polish stuff)
Every painter
is born somewhere. Marc Chagall said it.
Every writer
must have an address. Isaac Bashevis Singer said it.
Ironic, isn’t it? Both were wanderers, fantasists of images and
words, surviving the Thousand Year Reich. Both were whisked from home, out of
Europe, just in time. They roamed America, birthplace and address
extinguished.
I have often wondered what my fate would have been had one or
both my parents been able to paint or write. Perhaps Auschwitz might not have
been their destination. In which case they would never have met and I would
never have been born. Anywhere.
***
It has been a strange few weeks. Last night I dreamt my mother
was still here, helping me choose an outfit for some elegant occasion. She
prized all things beautiful, easily sidestepping the gaudy or ostentatious. With
unerring sensibility she would find the garment best suited to me, a lifetime
in the rag-trade having given her an infallible eye for le vêtement
juste.
In her eighties, memories plagued her. Parkinson’s and Bipolar
ruined her. In the camps she found some water, trickling it through her cousin’s
lips but still the girl died. Where she lay there was no mercy for Jew, Roma, or
Gay. Now, in her last moments, my mother cried out, reached out, for the hand of
my sister, my only sibling: Vivienne — the one she named after her own mother,
the one she thought was her mother when the disorder was rampant.
Vivienne hated her namesake. She could not forgive the
grandmother she had never met for risking the lives of her children for a myth,
for a God, the curse of the Jews. In the grandmother’s pre-war household the
non-Jewish servant had begged her mistress to come to her farmhouse, distant
from Budapest, to hide herself and her children there.
I will look after you. They won’t ever find you. I won’t let
them. Please, you have always been so good to me.
But the grandmother refused the offer, afraid of the food in the
servant’s house: it would not be kosher. So she died. The child she would not
relinquish died with her. My mother survived and for much of her life relived
the anguish of that separation.
After the funeral Vivienne went back home. Three days later she
rang but I had lost my words. All I could do was cry.
Come up and stay awhile.
When I disembarked it was to a different world. The Sydney sun
was mild with none of those 42-degree infernos punishing me as they had in
Melbourne.
We walked down, up and over the cliffs from Bronte to Bondi,
reaching the Icebergs Pool, emptied out and pumped full of the crisp, clean
ocean once a week. The pool lies against the rocks of Bondi Beach and at high
tide, the spray and water can throw itself over the pool walls in a rush of
gleaming white and blue. Even if you’re swimming in the lane furthest from the
edge, the force of the waves can buffet you. It renders the chlorinated
experience of Melbourne pools lacklustre, colourless.
My sister led me to the beach at Tamarama. We plunged into its
cobalt, wave-flung waters. When we dived, it was to come up gasping. We looked
at each other in delight and dived in again. If only it were possible to
preserve the exhilaration of tingling scalp penetrating right through to our
brains, cleansing them of sorrow.
Another day I followed her to Clovelly beach. We wandered
through the old, old Waverly cemetery where Henry Lawson — such fine, fierce
stories — is buried. We walked down to a channel 100 metres long and perhaps 35
metres wide which had been built from the sea to the beach. On either side of
the channel were wide concrete aprons where people spread their towels and
waited for the biting heat to force them back into the water. No easy task to
reach the darkly chilled waves, it was necessary to negotiate slippery rocks and
waving seaweed before taking the almighty plunge.
Bright coral and brighter fish — scarlet, turquoise, gold,
purple, silver — flickered against the screens of our goggles. Underwater TV.
Vivienne is older than I am by only two years but she was always
protective. Now, wherever we went, she carried the backpack with all the gear,
never letting me take it. She insisted I wear enough sunscreen, asked me to
remember my sun hat and, when the water was rough, wanted to guard me by
swimming close by.
We are both strong, confident swimmers, but when I realised she
was forgoing the pleasures of swimming in the rougher waters just so she could
keep an eye on me, I began to laugh for the first time in awhile, laughter
replete with love
As children in the vastness of the Burwood campus of Mount
Scopus College, she looked after me until she was sure I had found my own
friends to play with. She would buy me ice-creams from the tuckshop and I,
thoughtless infant, distracted by a ball-game or some other diversion, would run
off, only to bump into her at the end of the recess, cupping that melted
confection in both her hands. It was mine. She had not taken a lick of
it
So there we were, motherless in our fifties, playing again in
the water and sand. It was one of those times outside time, where the present
lost its power and the past rose to greet us in memories suffused with
enchantment.
We remembered skiing in Mount Buffalo and Thredbo as teenagers,
falling in love with the handsome Austrian ski-instructor. We recalled a trip
overseas which had ended in Hawaii with our father smashing a coconut against a
sharp rock to break it and show his glamorous, bikini-clad wife and two young
daughters the mysteries of clear milk and sweet white flesh contained within its
rough casing.
One cloudy day, Vivienne and I made our way to the New South
Wales Art Gallery to view a Sidney Nolan exhibition. We were struck by the boy
from St Kilda painting scenes so familiar to us: Luna Park, a fire at the Palais
de Dance. For two hours we wondered around rooms brimming with his genius. The
Ned Kelly paintings, seen not in a catalogue but up close, made us look and look
again.
Going home was hard. On the way to the airport Vivienne told me
she was not well. I had discovered long ago that screaming into the universe’s
void solved nothing so I held her awhile at goodbye and all the way home thought
of us playing — a long time ago and yesterday — on beaches whose hot white sands
scorched the soles of our feet, making us dance towards the reprieve of the
water.
She died at fifty-eight, before our father. Where is she? he
would ask but I never said. The truth would set no one free. He would only sob,
broken, and a moment later forget, to sob and break the next time I answered.
Vivienne had eyes green as the scattered light of oceans.
Gentle, temperate, yet mind ablaze with the flame of science, the percussion of
numbers. I recall her alive inside the havoc of the sunlit Bondi waves she
loved, her arms thrusting, steady. Those same arms that had always held me when
I was afraid.
***
But when all is said and done, I know my survivor parents and my
sister ripped untimely would still and always have believed that it is better to
be born and live than never to have been born at all.
So whatever the painters say, and the writers, it is far less
about where you lived and far more about how.
About the author
Yvonne Fein has 3 novels
published and a collection of short stories — Choose Somebody Else —
(Wild Dingo Press, 2018). Awards for screenwriting: Best Action Adventure —
Gotham Screenplay Competition (NY); runner up — Rhode Island Film Festival.
Drama: two plays for theatre, editing: two literary journals and award-winning
Holocaust memoirs. Essays and stories published internationally. She conducted
creative-writing workshops for people suffering mental illness and, advocating
for those with disability, performs stand-up comedy to raise public
awareness.
First, do no harm -
Galen
I would like to
acknowledge the Wurundjeri people, the traditional custodians of this land where
I learn and work, and to pay respect to the Elders, both past and present, of
the Kulin nation.
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