Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Trevor Kerr is a long-time Webdiarist who has recently started writing contributions. His first piece was A Desalination Plant at Wonthaggi? Trevor writes of this thought-provoking (and, in my opinion, moving) new piece, an exploration of language and citizenship, "This is a long and weird patchwork of thoughts and extracts. I hope, at the end, it will make sense, even if only for a moment."

The Chaser crew pulled off a beaut stunt (broadcast on September 26th) when Julian Morrow took over the public address microphone in a supermarket to call for a minute's silence (watch the Open Mic segment in the video highlights). Imagine if the remembrance had been for the indigenous people who were wiped out in the Fighting Hills massacre of 1840. Or if Julian had been in the Melbourne suburb of Preston, where there are many Turkish families, and had called for silence to remember the Armenians sent out into the desert to die in 1915.

The religious establishment of Greece raised an outcry over the choice of words in a history textbook:

The Church of Greece, a powerful institution in the mainly Orthodox Christian country, was the book's most fierce critic, demanding its immediate withdrawal months ago. It had objected to a reference to a 1922 attack on the city of Smyrna - modern-day Izmir - by Turkish forces to drive out the occupying Greek army that forced tens of thousands of Greeks to flee. The book described an event that left thousands dead, a large part of the city burnt and many more Greeks ending up refugees as "a congestion at the Izmir port".

Language and music give expression to the spirit of humanity, as well as individuals' emotions. Pink's I got money now is a pretty powerful example of the latter. Investigators are finding evidence that the learning of music, especially in ensemble, aids development of verbal skills. Both language and music can be the wind beneath the wings, or they can be marshalled to accompany profoundly evil intentions.

Labor's Shadow Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Urban Development & Consumer Affairs, Laurie Ferguson, spoke on the diversity of language in his speech to the Victorian Modern Language Association:

The strength of English is a major threat to other cultures. Few if any Australian politician would have as much sustained contact with NESB background communities in this country. I constantly hear discussions in other languages which have to include English words. Advertising, the global reach of CNN, Fox etc, popular music and film, the internet, globalisation in general exacerbate the dominance of English. I feel that there is a subconscious confidence by Australians that they are comfortable players in the expanding domain of English, that it will overpower all other languages and that therefore there is no need to have other tongues.

Despite Laurie's expressions of inclusiveness, a fleeting and wicked thought popped up: if he had a choice, would he prefer to fly in a 747 whose pilot is a native speaker of Icelandic, or of Tagalog?

The members of a language group resist rationalisation or modernisation of their mother's tongue. When Ataturk unified the Turkish people under the new (Romanised) script, the Kurdish speakers resented the loss of some consonants. I believe many of the Jewish refugees from Europe, speakers of Yiddish, were disappointed with the adoption of Hebrew as one of the official languages of Israel.

Arnold Zable's family memoir, The Fig Tree, is prefaced

I have a child called Alexander. I heard his first cry, cut the umbilical cord and washed the aftermath of the placenta from his body. Hours later, as I walked in the park outside the hospital, I was elated. I experienced the curious sensation that everything around me - the flowerbeds, the budding trees, the people strolling by - was both ancient and new. And since he was born, it has become more urgent for me to know the births that came before him, the missing links in the ancestral chain, the three grandparents he was fated never to know, and the fourth who would die before he turned one.

It is this sense of loss, and wonder, that fuels The Fig Tree. Because of this, I dedicate the book to Alexander, and my wife, Dora, to the four grandparents: Lily, Athanassios, Hadassah and Meier. And to the woman who gave birth on 19 October 2001, on a sinking boat off the coast off Java. Her dream was to find refuge, a place for a new home. The boat was headed for Australia. Along with 350 fellow asylum seekers, she, and her newborn child, did not make it.

In the chapter Ballad of Mauthausen, pages 127-31, Zable wrote:

This is the tale of a song, the man who wrote it and the object found in hell that inspired it. I first heard the song in Melbourne in the mid-1960s, on a record I received as a gift from a close friend. She was born in Greece; I am of Polish Jewish origin. We were classmates at a high school in Carlton. We were close -drawn to each other, perhaps, by our common status as children of immigrants.I attended parties in her house; parties that flowed late into the night with dance and drink, and food cooked by her mother, a village woman; parties that revolved around the kitchen table with conversation and argument, a sense of kinship and warmth. But the friendship between the two of us was contained within boundaries. It was clandestine. Anything more would have met with disapproval from her family. And from mine. That is the way it was back then.

As for the song, I was drawn to it from the moment I heard the opening bars, the deep-toned voice of the singer, Maria Farantouri, and the depth of feeling with which she sang. Over the years I have heard it many times, and I have always been impressed by its perfect marriage of melody and lyrics, and the sense of longing that permeates it. The details I gleaned from the cover notes were scant. The `Mauthausen Cantata' was written by the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, the lyrics were penned by one Iakovos Kambanellis. The first of the four pieces that make up the cantata, `The Song of Songs', depicts the love of a Greek inmate of the Mauthausen concentration camp for a Jewish woman, `beautiful in her plain dress and with a fine comb in her hair'. The poet searches for any news of her, for the merest hint of her presence:

Girls of Auschwitz. Dachau girls
Has anybody seen my love?
His searching renders a fleeting glimpse:
We saw her in a chilly square
With a number on her white arm
and a yellow star on her heart.

The poet imagines her journey,

`beyond the bleak and frozen square':
Oh come tell me what became of love
it journeyed past the land of no returning
where no one could imagine or endure
and where love begged of God to sleep no more.

In the final song of the cantata, `When the War Is Over', she appears again, as `the girl with the fearful eyes' and the girl `with the frozen hands'. He yearns for the moment when love can flourish at `noon tide', in the fullness of day, and he dreams of a time when `We could embrace with abandon, in open streets and in the town square'. It was during Theodorakis's Australian tour in 1995 that - I first saw, in the program notes, the full text of the songs, and learned a little of the man who wrote them. By that time I was aware of the extent to which the Annihilation had torn apart my own family. I had journeyed to my ancestral villages in Poland, driven by an impulse to confront an irretrievable past. I had retraced my forebears' final footsteps into a clearing in a forest, and through a brick archway known as the gate of death: ghosts of Treblinka and Auschwitz, have you seen my loved ones? This was the question that had fuelled my obsessive quest. From the program notes I learned that Iakovos Kambanellis had been an inmate of Mauthausen, a concentration camp in Austria, from the summer of 1943 until the end of the war. In 1965 he published his book-length memoir of that time, Mauthausen. Kambanellis also wrote four poems on the theme which his friend Mikis Theodorakis set to music. Both the book and the cantata were launched in December 1965 at a concert in the Gloria Theatre in Athens, with the sixteen-year-old Maria Farantouri as the singer. The program notes reawoke my curiosity. I wanted to know more about Kambanellis. I searched through anthologies of Greek poetry for his name. It was nowhere to be found. Then, in December 1997, during a stay in Athens, and through a series of chance encounters, I found myself sitting face to face with the writer in a coffee shop in central Athens, five We had arranged to meet in Cafe Zonar, the haunt of bohemians and activists who had played various roles in Greece's turbulent postwar past. The decor had remained frozen in time. The interior was of wrought iron and wood, burgundies and leather browns. We sat at mahogany tables, on upholstered chairs, in a cavernous room cooled by ceiling fans. Waiters in green blazers and bow ties hovered about us. Ageing revolu­tionaries lounged beside armchair travellers. Caffeine stirred up an ebbing past. Iakovos Kambanellis was seventy-five years old, small in; stature, receding into himself. He seemed frail, but strong in spirit. His words burst from his hands as he struggled, in English, to find the phrases that could give shape to the intensity of his thoughts. He was not a poet, but one of the leading playwrights of postwar Greece, the author of over thirty plays and film scripts. Kambanellis never intended to be a writer. His forebears were seamen from the island of Chios, wedded to the waters that encircled them. Tragedy lurks close at hand whenever one recounts ancestral tales in contemporary Greece. In 1822, 25,000 Chios civilians were massacred by their Ottoman overlords. Among those who fled by boat and made good their escape was the one surviving member of the Kambanellis family, a fifteen-year-old boy. He made his way to the island of Naxos where the family took root and flourished anew.

From Daniel Mendelsohn's family memoir The Lost: a search for six of six million, pages 90-3:

ON A MONDAY in January 1939, Shmiel Jager, who was then a forty-three-year-old businessman with a wife and four children, sat down to write the first of those letters. It is true that nearly every aspect of my grandfather's relationship with his oldest brother must be a matter of conjecture, since Shmiel's mind long ago became the molecules and atoms in the air above the little town of Belzec, while the matter that made my grandfather who he was has long since crumbled and gone back into the earth of that small portion of Mount Judah Cemetery in Queens that is reserved for the Jews who came from Bolechow. But there are certain aspects of this letter, concrete things, things the letter actually says and which, therefore, I do not have to surmise, that force me to think about family quarrels, about proximity and distance and "closeness" that are not temporal or spatial but emotional.

The letter begins with a date, which Shmiel has written as follows: 16/ 1 1939. January 16, 1939. I know that the sixteenth of January fell on a Monday in 1939. Naturally this fact is verifiable in all sorts of ways, since there are now Web sites that, within tenths of a second, are able to provide the most casual researcher with endless amounts of calendrical, geographical, topographical, and other kinds of data. For instance, there are a number of sites that tell you on what date in any year in the past century the ritual reading of a given parashah, or weekly Torah portion, took place, or can tell you in fractions of a second which haftarah, the selection from the Prophets, was read on which date. In this context it seems worth noting that one explanation for the practice of reading the haftarah portion in addition to the Torah portion each week is that it evolved during a period of Greek oppression of the Jews during the second century B. C. as a kind of rabbinic subterfuge, since the Jews' Greek overlords at the time had banned the reading of the Torah. ...

... (Six centuries later, France was still uneasy about its Jews. On October 15, 1894 - a Monday - a Jewish officer of the French army, Alfred Dreyfus, was arrested on fabricated charges of betraying secrets to the Germans; the ensuing trial, to say nothing of subsequent revelations of a high-level governmental cover-up intended to protect anti-Semitic officials, was one of the most explosively divisive scandals of French and indeed European modern history, its confrontational and internecine mood summed up in the famous two-word challenge - J'accuse!, "I Accuse! "- offered by the novelist Emile Zola to the president of the Republic on the front page of a literary newspaper called L'Aurore in its issue of January 13, 1898, which was a Thursday. Newspaper coverage of the affair was, in fact, extensive throughout Europe, a fact perhaps worth mentioning here because among the foreign reporters covering the trial was a young Austrian journalist called Theodor Herzl, who went on to become the founder of the modern Zionist movement and who indeed later claimed that it was his experience of the Dreyfus case, his exposure to the official anti-Semitism that was made evident in the proceedings, that had galvanized his conviction that the only solution to the problem of European anti-Semitism was for the Jews to have a homeland of their own - a place, that is to say, from which they could not be expelled.)

Still (to return to the fourteenth century), there were other places to go, and it is entirely possible that some of the Jews who were expelled first by the English and then by the French decided to make their way across the Pyrenees to, say, Spain. And it is entirely possible that they would have flourished there, although it must be said that this respite did not last, and indeed there are two more dates of interest in this regard, which is to say March 30 and July 30, 1492, the former being the Friday on which the edict of expulsion signed by Ferdinand and Isabella, well known to American schoolchildren as the patrons of Columbus but less well known, I suspect, as the authors of this particular legal document, was issued, the latter being the Monday on which it took effect, thereby condemning some two hundred thousand Jews to exile - although it should be said that tens of thousands were murdered as they tried to leave, some by greedy Spanish ship captains who threw them overboard after collecting exorbitant sums for safe passage, others by greedy Spaniards who, having heard that the Jews had swallowed gold and jewels, murdered the Jews on the road. Still, we know that many of the fleeing Spanish Jews eventually fared well, having been invited by the canny and tolerant Ottoman sultan, Bajazet, to enhance his kingdom. (How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king, this same Ferdinand who impoverished his own land and enriched ours? he is reported to have said.) And indeed, many of those who stopped short of Istanbul fared just as well. Yet one must note that nearly all of the descendants of the fleeing Sephardim who eventually settled in Thessalonica, the great Byzantine and later Ottoman city in what is now northern Greece - nearly all of the sixty thousand who were the direct descendants of those particular Jewish refugees, and who were alive at the beginning of the 1940s - perished, inevitably, as the direct result of the entry of the German armed columns into that city on April 9, 1941, a Wednesday. (The first transport of about twenty-five hundred, which was a fairly modest number as these things went, left the railway sidings in Salonica on the morning of March 14, 1943. A Sunday.) And my friend can tell you that the twenty-ninth of October in that same deadly year of 1941, which, as we would learn after we went to Bolechow, was the date on which was killed one of the Jagers who, at least in part because of Shmiel's desire to be a big fish in a small pond, were still living in Bolechow after the Second World War began, was a Wednesday.

So it is remarkable how certain human memories will be fallible, while others seem as reliable as machines.

From E.L.Doctorow's novel City of God, pages 134-8:

You asked about this and asked and asked all through the years of your growing up, and I never wanted to tell you, first because you were too young, and I always wanted you to have your own life, and for it not to be a haunted life, however foolish that father's desire might have been ... and, second, in recent years for an entirely different reason, which is that I wanted to reclaim the diary, Mr. Barbanel's archive, I wanted to find it and let it speak for me.

But plans give way to life. And here I am saying what I can, after all.... There came a time when nothing in particular had changed but our spirits had inexplicably darkened and a foreboding of total disaster drifted through our ghetto. A weariness had come over us, a weakening of our belief that we would survive. Our creed - to outlast, to prevail - seemed somehow less tenable. The suspense of the Germans' impas­sive treachery was more acute, because they were now on their way to losing their war. I know that sounds paradoxical. But the eastern front was collapsing, moving back in our direction, and they no longer had license to do their murdering with impunity. Work details had been assigned to the fort. We were not supposed to know what was going on, but we learned that the graves were being dug up and the remains were being burned. Sometimes when the wind came from the west, I thought I could smell what was happening. And of course the workers assigned to the fort were never seen again.

The freedom we had been living for, surviving for, now itself seemed a dangerous prospect. If the dead were evidence of their criminality, were not the living?
Then, one night, we received a clandestine visit from a del­egation of Jewish partisans. The meeting took place in a cabin used to store paint supplies, sand bins, carpentry tools, and so on. It was not even one block from the perimeter. Somehow I had learned of the meeting, and Barbanel thought it would be safer if I was present, as a way of using the solemnity of the occasion to seal my lips. We sat and waited and then finally in the stillness of early morning, after I had nodded off several times, there came the signal, the soft taps, once, and then again. A desk was moved, and from a trapdoor underneath they rose into the room, bringing the cold and the darkness they had come from: three of them, two men and a woman. It was like birth, I had seen a baby born some weeks before and it was like that, first the head, then the shoulders. But then the rifle.

They waved off any assistance, by turns hoisting themselves into sitting position on the floor and then standing and facing us. Their faces and hands were blackened with dirt. Their rifles were like the ones the guards on the bridge carried, and this was thrilling to me, because I knew each rifle had to have been taken from a German. At the same time, I was fright­ened. These were the people who looked for help from no one, who prayed to no one. Every gesture was disdainful. Their eyes were cold, impatient, even the woman's.

They were children, the partisans. If I could perceive that at all at my age, then possibly I saw our connection insofar as - the woman was such a slight, slim creature, with eyes past all grief. When she caught sight of me, I read in her face the compas­sion of an older sister, a momentary betrayal of her hardened mien, perhaps the unwitting disclosure of worry for a child, in this place, under the direction of old men. For it was a gener­ational matter after all, the two men with her couldn't have been more than twenty or twenty-one, adults in my eyes, men with height and strength and dark beards, though of the scraggly young man's type, and thick black hair, and the one, the leader, with round-rimmed glasses that gave him, incon­gruously, a yeshiva bocher's appearance, and the other with a broad Slavic face and wide shoulders, the sort of oaf I would have stayed away from in the old days at school.

Without precisely knowing why from my impression of them, they were not as I had expected, they were not like my, parents, their spirit was of a different order, and as I watched and listened, I understood what I of course had always known, that my mother and father had never been among them.
Nobody knew these three except Dr. Koenig, whose prac­tice before the war had taken him everywhere in the district. Possibly he had delivered at least one of them, the young man who spoke for them, Benno, on whose eyeglasses the candles shone when he averted his head and allowed the doctor to grasp his shoulders in greeting. `Look, how strong!' Dr. Koenig whispered, in the first and last of the amenities of the evening.

The other two had taken up positions by the windows, where they peeked through the drawn sack curtains before turning to face the room. The one called Benno sat on a table and, holding his rifle loosely across his knees, he addressed us in a hushed, fluent Yiddish, a sound to me like a brook running over rocks. The Russian army was within a hundred twenty miles. As the front moves west, he said, your ghetto will be dismantled and you with it, he said. You will dig the graves you will lie in. It is just a matter of time.

Perhaps that is so. But already they are trying to destroy evidence of their murders, Dr. Koenig said. They are frightened of criminal prosecution after the war.
You are deluding yourself. If they don't slaughter you here, they will move you somewhere else and slaughter you.

The partisans were proposing to take people out - as many who wanted to come. They could move thirty or forty a night, Benno said. Three partisan units, one Jewish, two Russian, held militarily secure areas behind German lines. His group consisted of a hundred and fifty armed Jewish men and women and another two hundred people whom they took care of.

The third council member who was present was Rabbi Pomeranz, a very thin, slight, middle-aged man who wore an old battered homburg and whose beard had turned white. He sat in a chair against the wall and held a siddur closed on his lap, but with his finger keeping the place. And he was silently davening while attending to the matters at hand, his head nodding and his lips moving as he uttered to himself the prayers he knew without the book, but his eyes on the partisan who spoke.
The rabbi said: Perhaps the partisans didn't know the German policy regarding escape - people were executed who were caught trying.

Well, Rabbi, Benno said, look at me, we're here talking to you, aren't we? Do you suppose we just might know what we're doing?

Benno's partisans camped in the forests. For food, they requisitioned livestock and produce from the farms. In the villages with German garrisons, they attacked and destroyed them and then paid the tradesmen for sugar, flour, and other necessities from the German cashboxes. They could move about freely in the countryside because of their reputation, which they had earned by taking revenge on those people who reported them to the Germans, coming back and executing them and burning down their homes and barns; so that now that didn't happen anymore. Their attack squads performed acts of sabotage, blowing up railroad tracks, cut­ting phone lines. They ambushed the military who came out to undo the damage.

All well and good and may God grant that your work continue, the rabbi said. But the winter was coming. Could older people stand that life, under such hardship, living in the open? If they can't, they will at least die free, Benno said.

Dr. Koenig said he was concerned about what would happen to those who chose to remain - once the Germans began to miss their workers they would retaliate, in their fashion, by taking hostages and executing them.

Benno answered that they would do that anyway as the Jewish resistance moved closer to the city and the garrison here began to feel its sting.
This is not an easy decision, Koenig told them. Many of these people are from the city. They would not know what to do out there with you. Here they get their few calories and survive another day.

You think we're just giving you problems, don't you, Benno said. You've lived as slaves so long you don't know any­thing else.

Barbanel, who had not said a word before this, jumped up and grabbed the young man by the collar. That is contemptible, he said. Show some respect. We have fought as hard as you. You don't know shit about us.

Benno shook off his hand and signaled the others. Their message had been delivered. They prepared to leave. Regardless of what you think, the young woman said to Barbanel, you have the moral duty to inform people that we will lead them out. You cannot choose for them. Even this boy here. We have children with us now who are capable of firing weapons. People must choose for themselves. But if you impose your authority in this matter, you are as bad as the Nazis.

Oh my Sarah, I remember these words as if they were uttered yesterday. They opened the trapdoor. The thickset one who had said nothing and the woman descended and disappeared. Before following them, Benno took Dr. Koenig aside and, I assume, instructed him on how to make further contact. And before lowering himself through the trapdoor he addressed Rabbi Pomeranz: Since your prayers are so effective and have already done so much good, you, I expect, will choose to remain and pray to the Lord your God to save your people.

When he had gone and the desk was back in place, the rabbi stood and set his battered homburg firmly on his head as he prepared to go out. That's not why I pray to the Lord, blessed be His name, he said to no one in particular. I pray to bring Him into being.

Now switch over to Youtube again, listen to Paul Kelly sing God told me and spare a thought for the victims of religious delusions.

In The Age, September 30th, 2007, Alice Pung writes about A sacrifice shouldered, a loyalty pledged beyond words:

It was always lonely for my mother. When she was 40, she took up English classes. But having only a primary education in Cambodia, and being isolated in the shed all those years, she was too shy to speak to anyone. She felt alienated from us because we could read The Age and understand the bicameral parliamentary system, but she couldn't even read street signs or have a conversation in English.

Genocidal actions and ethnic cleansing have a long and established record in the last 5000 years of the story of humankind. We could surmise that some of the peers of Alice Pung's mother may want to exclude another ethnic or cultural group from being granted equal rights to citizenship in Australia. But, while minorities have a valid right to express views, they should not be allowed to set rules for the majority. Therein lies the pathway to fascism.

The whole of Australian society must give space and time for the many remnants of dispossessed, the constant streams of refugees, to express and retain the memories of their pasts. The succeeding generations are mostly made up of people, like Alice Pung, who want to move on as swiftly as their minds and hands can carry them. But if we try to suppress or exclude the small, silent treasures borne in the hearts of their parents, we do so at the peril of our own entitlements to citizenship.