Ruffling some feathers - and ripping out others!

One of the greatest challenges about writing biographical and autobiographical material is the feeling that you are, in a sense, mining in your own backyard.

Writing 'Rachel's Chance', the story of how my parents fled Nazi Germany and spent the war years in Shanghai, before they came to Australia via Israel, presented me with a mixed range of feelings.

At various times, I felt like a proud family ambassador, a communicator extraordinaire who would finally shed light on little known family events and perhaps not-so-well known world events.

At other times, I felt a bit like an exploiter - the miner in his own backyard, dredging up ores that were perhaps meant to be left underground, that provided the bedrock of one's own life and that of one's family.

Not because there was any innate sense of shame or controversy about what I was presenting but because of a sense of privacy that pervades some family exchanges, an innate sense that some family intimacies sound more appropriate over a Friday night dinner table or when poring over a family album, than in Caxton bold 12 point.

I didn't set out to tear away this sense of privacy from around my parents - and to their credit, they were very co-operative in helping me write. They offered to the best of their knowledge and memory all the answers they could to my many questions.

Perhaps it was that sense of co-operation that made me feel it was incumbent on me not to ruffle feathers more than I had to. Still, I'm sure I ruffled them.

Let me give two examples - one very deep and serious, the other more whimsical and comical.

It was emotionally difficult for me - and for them - to write out the sequence of events that led to my mother losing her first-born child, a daughter, in Israel in 1949. It was an exercise in ruffling feathers, but in the end it was also very cathartic for all three of us, my mother, my father and me.

At the comical end of the spectrum, in one scene of 'Rachel's Chance', I found myself writing about my parents engaging in sex. It was a necessary scene because it underscored the absolute lack of personal space they had in a crowded room where they lived in Shanghai, a room they shared with my mother's mother and that by day served as my father's barber shop.

At least a couple of friends have commented on what they saw as the peculiarity of describing one's parents having sex. And, yes, it was a difficult scene to write. But in the end, I don't think I ruffled my parents' feathers unduly.

There were added complexities - because what I've done with both my published novels, 'Rachel's Chance' and 'View From A Sandcastle', (which is another book in which I mined the family ores for nuggets of literary worth) -- what I've done is to write novels, not memoirs or the textual equivalent of a family album.

That means that I applied the time-honoured art of literary licence to my work. I added bits here and there, shaped and smoothed characters, combined characters into composites where it helped the flow of the plot.

Yet in the years since the books were launched, my overwhelming impression is that they've been received as family albums, as memoirs.

People often ask me how much of the work is true - how much of it actually happened - and I struggle to find the right answer. If I gave a percentage, it would be something in the order of 85 or 90 percent, but that makes me feel like a chartered accountant, so I shirk from doing that.

My answer then is that the contents of both books are overwhelmingly a re-telling of actual events, that the plot and energy of both works are essentially driven by their re-telling and not by the embellishments.

Of course, that makes the embellishments sometimes - and quite irrationally - feel like a form of dishonesty, like sticking a fancy postcard in among your family snaps in the photo album and passing it off as your own.

Perhaps in my mind, I want it both ways - I want the two novels to be family albums of a sort and at the same time I want them to be received as novels in which there was the freedom to embellish and make certain points.

Perhaps to a degree - they are both.

Fate of my sister

In giving an address to a Jewish community group not long after 'Rachel's Chance' was published, I believe I ruffled some feathers when the facts of my novel came up hard against the cherished notions that some members of this audience held about life in Israel.

The sequence of events in which my mother lost her small child to disease in Israel are tragic because they're not merely accidental. They're bound up in a mish mash of bureaucratic red tape, unforgivable delays, and most devastatingly, in the strictures of a missapplied halachah.

The events took place in a tent city, a transitional camp, where new arrivals were housed prior to being released into Israel's towns and cities.

A transit camp near Haifa in the heat and the dust of the summer of 1949 was no place for little children. Days after my sister Esther (her name in 'Rachel's Chance' is Ruth) was diagnosed with dysentery, she was still being kept in the clinic at the camp, rather than be transferred to a local hospital.

In the end, the doctor at the clinic decided that she really ought to be transferred to a hospital but by then it was erev Shabbat and my parents were told that no ambulance was available until after sunset the following night.

When they protested that the halachic proscription against motor travel on Shabbat could be broken at any time to save a life, they were not given an honest and direct answer. Instead, this desperate couple was just told again that they would have to wait until after Shabbat.

Esther was taken out of the camp on that first ambulance after Shabbat, with my father accompanying her - but it was too late. My mother found out the results of the camp's folly when my father returned to her and stood in front of her with a torn shirt - he had returned from Esther's funeral.

Now when I described these events to this audience, made up of some very pro-Israel and pro-Zionist people - and let me just add that I also count myself in that category - there were some anxious and almost hostile responses.

People could not - would not - believe that these events had occurred. They didn't fit in with their preconceptions about life in Israel in that time.

Having explained to them that my book was an overwhelmingly true record of events, with some enhancements added, they wanted to know if this perhaps had been one of the enhancements. When I told them that the events relating to the death of my sister were absolutely as described in the book, it didn't please them.

Theatre critic

Apart from writing novels, I've also been a stage reviewer for the Australian Jewish News on and off for some years. I'll never forget the time I ruffled some theatrical feathers very hard, in fact, the amateur theatre company involved would probably say I ripped their feathers out.

Let me say at the outset - and for the record -- that this little anecdote has nothing whatsoever to do with a recent controversy involving one of our panelists.

It was a play about the Holocaust - and I think there's a tendency in the Melbourne Jewish community, with its preponderance of Holocaust survivors, to view any artistic undertaking about the Holocaust, so long as its heart is in the right place, with a sense of heightened affection.

As an amateur production, it also had a certain claim on our indulgence - that is, the indulgence of the reviewers and of the audience, that no matter what was presented, the intention was good and we should show a degree of forbearance.

So my sin was that I gave the play a bad review. To me, it was boring, badly written and clumsily directed. The grimness of the Holocaust added its own weight to this mix of artistic concrete - and made for an uninspiring evening.

After my review appeared in the Jewish News, I was contacted by the producers - and they were in fine form!

How dare I say what I had said? Did I have any idea how difficult it was to put on a play, especially for an amateur production company, especially about a theme as heavy as the Holocaust? In other words, my sin was that I was not the producer of the play, so I had no right in passing judgment on it.

Did I know what damage I'd done to the prospects of this group ever staging another production? In other words, I'd failed to examine the market impact on their product before commenting on it.

I felt I was right in what I thought about the play - and in writing honestly about it. But I did feel mortified at the devastation I was supposed to have caused this theatre group who hoped to draw most of their support from the readers of the paper in which my devastating review had appeared.

Some of their guilt-mongering stuck to me. Was I the impulsive critic, the detached outsider with no stake in the hard work that had gone into this project, the idle scribbler who had egotistically, wilfully written them off?

So I asked a colleague, a veteran reviewer in Melbourne, on his thoughts - and he was adamant. His advice to me was: always be honest. Your only responsibility is to your readers. It's your role to advise them before they part with their money for a ticket. There are no other considerations.

Perhaps this experience, despite my colleague's advice, has changed my thinking. I've never since offered to review a Jewish community production on a Holocaust or on any other theme. Perhaps it was wrong to ruffle so many feathers that were still getting used to flight? I haven't figured out the real answer yet.