Cafe Scheherazade

PRAISE FOR ARNOLD ZABLE AND
CAFE SCHEHERAZADE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NSW PREMIERS LITERARY AWARDS
2002
AND THE TASMANIA PACIFIC REGION PRIZES
2003

‘A celebration of the immigrants' resilience and creativity. In Zable's eloquent style, storytelling is heightened by pathos, tragedy and lyricism…In his journalism, Arnold Zable is distinguished by his empathy for minorities and human rights. In his longer works a strain of romantic yearning finds expression in lyrical landscapes and in reverence for the capacity of the human spirit.'
Age

‘It is the sense of wonder, not the repetition of horror, that distinguishes Zable's Holocaust stories and makes him one of the best tellers of his kind.
Cafe Scheherazade
…transcends the distinction between fiction and non-fiction.'
Sydney Morning Herald

‘Stories are delicate things, attached to people, mutable and ephemeral…What is it that makes fiction grounded in truth so nourishing? To continue the cafe analogy, it is the difference, perhaps, between blackforest cherry cake and the lighter fictive whippings of a cream sponge or even a hazlenut trifle.'
Australiana Review of Books

‘Zable conjures the extraordinary from within the seemingly ordinary and plain fact takes on the lustre of poetry…Alternately moving and joyful, this book celebrates the tenaciousness of the human spirit.'
Australian Way

‘A beautiful book, wonderfully written. An unforgettable experience awaits its readers.'
Australian Jewish News

Arnold Zable is a widely published writer, storyteller and educator. Formerly a lecturer at Melbourne University, he has worked in a variety of jobs in the USA, India, Papua New Guinea, Europe, South-East Asia and China. His books include
Wanderers and Dreamers
, the award-winning
Jewels and Ashes
and, most recently,
The Fig Tree
.

Zable performs as a storyteller, drawing on his experiences, travels and knowledge of Yiddish culture. He has worked with Aboriginal elders on educational projects. He has conducted writing workshops in universities, schools, community centres and with migrants and refugees.

Arnold Zable lives in Melbourne with his wife and son.

CAFE SCHEHERAZADE

Arnold Zable

Text Publishing Melbourne Australia

textpublishing.com.au

The Text Publishing Company
22 William St
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia

Copyright © Arnold Zable 2001

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published 2001, reprinted 2001 (four times), 2002
This edition published 2003

Printed and bound by Griffin Press
Designed by Chong Weng-ho
Typeset in Stempel Garamond by J&M Typesetting

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Zable, Arnold.

Cafe Scheherazade.

ISBN 978 1 877008 09 2.

I. Title.

A823.3

The author has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

To Melbourne's first storytellers:
the Wurundjeri and Bunurong people.
And to all those who are still in search of a haven,
a place they can call home.

K
ing Shahriyar, ruler of the ancient kingdom of Persia, having discovered the infidelity of his queen, resolved to have a fresh wife every night and have her beheaded at daybreak. This caused great consternation in the land. Fully aware of this grave situation, Scheherazade, the daughter of a senior court official, the grand vizier, contrived to become Shahriyar's wife. She so amused him with stories for a thousand and one nights that the king revoked his cruel decree. The courageous queen also gained the love and gratitude of her people and, to this day, audiences the world over are seduced by her tales.

Contents

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I

I
n Acland Street, St Kilda, there stands a cafe called Scheherazade. As to how it came to have such a name, therein lies a story. Many stories in fact, recounted at a table in the back room where the proprietors, Mr and Mrs Zeleznikow, Avram and Masha, sit most nights of the week and eat, hold court, greet customers, check accounts, argue and reminisce. What else is there to do on this rain-sodden Melbourne night, as pedestrians rugged in overcoats stroll on pavements glistening grey, past shops laden with slices of Black Forest cake where they pause, and hesitate, before succumbing to the temptation to buy, well, just one slice. Perhaps two. What harm can it do?

This is how it is in Acland Street, an avenue of oldworld dreams. This is how it is in Scheherazade, a cafe of old-world tales. And, of the countless stories which would not exhaust even a thousand and one nights in the telling, the most fascinating of all is how it came to pass, that in 1958 Avram and Masha decided to call their audacious venture Scheherazade.

For it was audacious to come in from the cold, with barely a penny to spare, to begin, in mid-life already, an entirely new enterprise, a cafe of all things, in a shop front where for many years had stood a milk bar called O'Shea's.

When Avram and Masha insisted on renaming it Scheherazade their friends told them this would be suicide. The business would be doomed to failure from the start. Their clients would not be able to pronounce such a name, let alone be drawn towards the Continental cuisine which, in time, began to grace the menu. ‘Call it Masha's. Or Avram's. Or Babushka's even, if you must have an exotic name. But Scheherazade? Even we have trouble pronouncing it.'

Scheherazade it remained.

‘Martin, it could not have been otherwise,' Masha tells me, as a waitress delivers the main course of chicken schnitzel and potato latkes to the proprietors' permanent table in the back room. ‘This you will understand once you hear the full story.'

All the while our conversation is interrupted by a nod here, an aside there, a hasty conversation on the mobile phone, a snatch of gossip from an acquaintance dropping by, as Avram, and now Masha, turn to greet yet another long-time friend.

Slowly the story trickles out: between sips of borscht and wine, between main course and dessert, between cheese blintzes and cups of tea spiced with lemon. And again the next night, for I have to return night after winter's night to the table in the back room, graced with wallpaper boasting scenes of the Moulin Rouge, can-can girls in full flight, an appropriate background for an epic tale which encompasses a rendezvous in a Parisian nightclub, an apple brandy called Calvados, a nurse tending wounded sailors in the Black Sea port of Odessa, a band of partisans roaming the forests and swamps of Lithuania, perilous escapes over closely guarded borders, an ocean journey halfway across the globe, a young girl awakening in a city of minarets to the resonant echo of a muezzin's call…

Enough! Here at least is the short of it.

‘Martin, I am sorry, there can be no short of it,' insists Avram.

‘That would be impossible,' agrees Masha.

‘But a journalist cannot spend so much time on one story! I have columns to write! Deadlines to meet! Assignments to complete!' I tell them when, yet again, they take me on a detour, and I will have to return the next night for more episodes in a vast tale that appears to have no end, and not even a beginning, as we move back through the centuries to an anecdote about yet another ancestor, another hazardous journey, another legendary city.

Such as Vilna. Vilnius. The Jerusalem of Lithuania, with its renowned yeshivas and houses of prayer, crumbling castles and fortress walls, elegant boulevards, cobblestone lanes, and its attics and garrets crowded with would-be sages and talmudic scholars, obsessed rebels and pamphleteers, hell-bent on changing a world that seemed to be forever spinning out of control.

It was into this city that, in 1924, Avram Zeleznikow was born, the son of revolutionaries, devout members of the Bund, the labour movement that captured the souls of countless Eastern European Jews.

‘I was reared on Bund legends,' says Avram in his lilting Yiddish. Each word is carefully wrought. Each sentence has its melody, each paragraph its song. And when he glides into English there is a continuity in syntax for this was the last of Avram's six languages. English is a language still in the forming, still straining for meaning, a language which eventually fails him as he falls back into the mother tongue to weave the tale of his revolutionary past.

He begins his story as a romance, nurtured in clandestine meetings and the prison cells of a dying empire. The heroine of this romance, Avram's mother, Etta Stock, was born in the Ukrainian town of Tulchin in 1881, the year that Tsar Alexander the Second was assassinated, a year of chaos, in which mobs rampaged through the Jewish quarters of Russian cities and towns. In the tens of thousands the inhabitants fled. In ragged bands, they stole across borders to ports scattered along the European coastline. In desperation they clambered onto ocean liners and freighters, on which they sailed to all corners of the globe to remake their lives.

And those who could not flee turned to thoughts of revolution and Red messiahs who would deliver them from lifetimes of fear. Others dreamt of the decaying walls of Jerusalem, and sought an end to an ancient exile. Still others clung to their God and houses of worship, their psalms and scriptures, their prayers and preachers, with increased fervour and zeal.

Among the faithful was Etta's father, Avram Stock: a fiddler. A klezmer musician who performed at weddings and bar mitzvahs; a minstrel who played for his supper at the celebrations of the Tulchin aristocracy; a pious Hasid who adhered to the 613 laws of his desert-wandering forebears; a man who punctuated his days according to the dictates of prescribed texts. And a perplexed father who could do nothing but frown upon the errant ways of his daughter, Etta, when she followed the siren call of a new god named revolution to the Black Sea port of Odessa, in the very first year of the new century.