Inside Outside (20 page)

The women were often the driving forces behind their husbands' financial affairs. They were able to strike harder bargains, were generally ruthless and unflinching in their determination to succeed in their business ventures—usually in the rag trade, though frequently branching out into more sophisticated forms of speculation, especially in real estate: blocks of flats, groups of shops for rental, and occasionally development projects of a more ambitious sort. Their husbands gave, on the whole, a gentler, more flabby impression. They favoured suits made of soft, light-grey material, often worn with white shoes at a time when no public significance was attached to such footwear. They would spend hours sitting on those spindly-legged chairs, tieless, their shirts unbuttoned at the top to reveal tufts of greying fur, their jackets slung casually over their shoulders.

In their own eyes they were men of affairs; they boasted about their many successes, their cleverness in outwitting rivals and competitors; they claimed to be utterly contemptuous of anyone who failed to succeed in a dog-eat-dog world. But their wives—keeping alive the pretence of a woman's proper role in life, talking of clothes and scandals, of their children's startling achievements at school, university or in their professions—knew better. They hid behind the mask of Central European femininity, yet their determination to succeed yielded to none. They courted success with a steely-eyed dedication; they realised, as I think their husbands did not, that the accumulation of wealth—the more substantial the better—was the only avenue of satisfaction open to them in a world where they would always be isolated by barriers of language, social habits and race.

The urge to succeed, to gain and to preserve wealth—all that they valued in life—prompted many of them to embark on very questionable courses of action. Some attempted to continue several common practices of their former way of life, not realising that the world had changed, that they were now living in a very different social climate. Seated around the laminex-topped tables of their favourite cafes, they indulged in the age-old sport of matchmaking, arranging irresistibly suitable marriages for their sons and daughters, for their nieces and nephews, or indeed for any other young people they happened to know. In my twenties I fell victim to one of these campaigns with embarrassing results.

One day an acquaintance of my parents telephoned, asking me to make up a table for bridge. The invitation surprised me. I did not know these people very well and did not care for them in the least, but they were so insistent that I accepted, probably with bad grace. The evening, which I had been dreading throughout the week, proved interminable. I was trapped in an overfurnished living room, constantly urged to taste all manner of costly delicacies, while several groups of middle-aged Hungarians argued vociferously over the best way of making three-no-trumps. Weeks later, after I had mentioned to my parents (probably for the hundredth time) what a crashingly boring evening it had been, the truth came out. That roomful of bridge players was to contain three special guests: an elderly couple and their daughter, who was (unbeknown to my hosts) the sister of one of my good friends from university days. When my parents had pointed out—after a number of coy hints had been dropped—the folly of this attempt at matchmaking, the unfortunate young woman and her parents were quickly warned off, to be replaced by three obliging bridge players culled from the society of the espresso-bars. For many weeks after that disastrous evening, my hostess kept on reminding my mother what a golden opportunity I (a poorly-paid academic without prospects) had thrown away.

A few of the people who began to congregate in these espresso-bars in the late fifties were to achieve spectacular successes which brought them, at times, notoriety well beyond their restricted circle, thereby doing much harm to the esteem in which Australian society held this group. Some, like my parents, were to reel from crisis to financial crisis, always contriving to keep their heads above water, but never finding the security they longed for. By far the greatest number, however, became people of considerable substance—not the fabulous wealth amassed by their notorious compatriots, whom they criticised vehemently while secretly respecting them, yet much greater wealth than many of them had ever known. They had large incomes and a surplus of means that could be spent on luxuries and indulgences. Collectively and individually they formed a not-insignificant force within the economy, yet they had little ambition to engage with any facet of public life.

They directed their economic power inwards, towards various forms of self-indulgence, often to impress their compatriots and fellow exiles. Many lived in spectacularly stylish houses and apartments. They drove expensive cars. They invested considerable sums in furs and jewellery, even though they knew that in Australia these items were not the negotiable commodities they had been in the financially chaotic world from which they came. They began to travel abroad at a time when it was prohibitively expensive, even by sea. Since they trusted none of their employees, being at times pathologically suspicious of even the most obviously honest of people, they preferred to take trips of short duration, travelling by air in those days before the cut-price world of the 747 cattle-trucks. They spent large amounts of money on fares; at their destinations they stayed in the best hotels. In their earlier life a week's holiday in a modest boarding house in Vienna, Rome or Paris represented the usual limit of their ambitions; now they travelled vast distances to stay at the Crillon, the Dorchester and the Waldorf Astoria.

Despite their affluence and readiness to spend, they seemed to experience little satisfaction or stimulation from their enviable way of life. Though they travelled widely, they showed little interest in the places they visited. In Paris their ambition did not extend beyond shopping, strolling along the Champs Elysées and the obligatory visit to the Lido or the Folies Bergères. Some acquaintances of my parents got in touch with me one day when I was living in London in the early sixties. They said that they would like to take me out somewhere; what was there to do in London? They were not interested in any of the suggestions I made—a play, a concert perhaps, or a musical? We ended up at a Hungarian restaurant in Soho which served vile chicken paprika. They complained that London was filthy, boring, that the people were drab and lacking in style. The shops were not much better than at Double Bay, and certainly not a patch on Düsseldorf. How could anyone live in such a hole? Yet back in Sydney, seated around kidney-shaped tables, they and people like them lamented endlessly about the cultural desert in which they were forced to live. In sharp contrast to the much smaller number of prewar migrants from Central Europe, many of whom made a remarkable contribution to the appreciation of the arts, especially music, in this country, these people made almost no attempt to foster cultural life in their new home—apart perhaps from taking out a subscription to the orchestral concerts (where one of the series was nicknamed ‘goulash night' by members of the orchestra), which they would usually endure until interval.

They were too much stunned by their wartime experiences, it seems to me, to engage with life in any positive or satisfying way. They were passive even in their greed and acquisitiveness. Though they hungered after success, they had neither the spiritual nor the cultural equipment to channel that success into life-sustaining directions. They were, many of them, empty shells as they sat around tables in espresso-bars chattering, matchmaking, boasting and strutting in their finery. The world outside looked on them with a mixture of amazement and curiosity—it was in the early sixties that wealthy Hungarian Jews entered into the sarcastic mythology of urban Australia.

Only behind the plate-glass windows of their favourite cafes could they find a modicum of solace and a social structure, artificial though it was, to keep at bay the despair many of them experienced and tried to brave with rich clothes and noisy ways. Their plight was to be pitied, though it was easy to ridicule them, because they were suffering the worst afflictions of dislocation. They could not sufficiently master the language or the customs of their new home to dare to move out of their cosy and comfortable ghettoes. They felt trapped. Their old world had ceased to exist. At that time there were considerable dangers in their undertaking even a brief visit to Budapest, Australian passports clutched tightly to indicate that they were, or so they hoped, beyond the reach of the secret police and other potential instruments of terror. Their new world remained hostile and perplexing.

The living death they were obliged to endure was much exacerbated by the absence of a spiritual or at least a satisfyingly cultural dimension to their lives. The espresso-bars were as close as they could approach to an involvement in a community or a traditional way of life. In this their predicament was very different from that depicted by White in the figure of Himmelfarb. He, at least, feels the acute torment of the loss of a rich communal and spiritual life. His sense of guilt and betrayal, while imposing on him far greater suffering than that experienced by the frequently plangent denizens of the espresso-bars, at least confers a necessary humility on him. People of my parents' acquaintance were also, in a way, much less fortunate than members of several other migrant groups who had come to Australia in the years after the war. Those people had brought with them strong traditions of social life, religious practice, and even of ethnic or tribal loyalties. They were, it is true, frequently locked even more securely into their ghettoes than the more cosmopolitan society among which my parents moved, and many kept alive ugly regional or ethnic enmities (of a kind entirely alien to the culture of the espresso-bars) which still erupt from time to time in public violence.

The world of the espresso-bars at least confined rivalries to a personal level—these people never rioted at soccer games or stormed embassies and consulates. On an emotional and psychological level, however, they lacked the comfort and support that tightly-knit groups, fully aware of their cultural identity, are capable of providing. In such communities the various social and religious rituals, the continuity of the generations, and the sense that individuals are members of a group create a type of communal life far above the capacities of the Twenty-One at Double Bay or Quittner's in North Sydney.

The people of my parents' circle belonged to a totally secularised society. The families of many of them had discarded their Jewishness generations earlier, and had intermarried with people of vague and ill-defined religious backgrounds. Some even came from families that had formally converted to Catholicism in the late eighteenth century, thereby escaping, theoretically at least, the legal restrictions placed on Jews throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the days before their emancipation. For that reason, for many of them who had thought of Judaism as a religion, the Nazi-inspired legal insistence that Jewishness was a race—something to be inherited, rather than embraced or discarded at will—came as a profoundly disturbing shock. They knew of course that in the past members of their families had been reviled, persecuted and slaughtered. But they had given all that away long, long ago—who could remember a time when garberdine was anything other than a type of cloth? They had to suffer the stigma of being Jewish, and the persecution that followed from it, without the spiritual comfort and sustenance that faith or commitment could provide.

Even those who resumed after the war the customs and ceremonies abandoned in their parents' or grandparents' time did so in a sentimental way as a mark of respect for the sufferings of others. In few of them did it rekindle a sense of community, of belonging to a group, from which they could draw psychic sustenance and spiritual nourishment even in adversity. They lived in a limbo where they enjoyed the freedom to indulge themselves in the worst tendencies or characteristics of their heritage, becoming parodies of a way of life that had, for them, entered the realm of sentimental nostalgia. They evolved a mythology of loss, regret and yearning which, over the years, twisted their lives into bizarre and grotesque forms.

The other great institution of this world developed into precisely such an essay in nostalgia, even though its roots were firmly located in the most commonplace of physiological facts. Most Central Europeans find it difficult, almost impossible, to endure a subtropical maritime climate. For many years I believed that, given sufficient time, I would come to tolerate humidity and high temperatures, the oppressive blanket of damp heat that hangs over Sydney for almost half of the year. I now know otherwise—I know that each February will be more difficult than the last. The discomfort of the climate led people, sensibly enough, to seek relief at high altitudes. The cult of the mountain holiday began, therefore, as a purely practical attempt to find a place that would provide a couple of weeks of escape from the heat and humidity of the coast. People soon discovered that on many summer days the Blue Mountains were as bad as Sydney; consequently they explored the high country near Mt Kosciusko. They began spending several weeks at The Chalet at Charlotte Pass, a blessedly cool place just above the tree line, where they could stay in a modest, old-fashioned, rather rundown establishment operated in a half-hearted, lackadaisical manner by the state tourist authority.

We did not join the annual pilgrimage to Charlotte Pass until after the arrival of the beige Morris Minor. It was possible to get there by train and bus, but to all intents and purposes you needed a car. A certain camaraderie arose, therefore, among the people who made the trip each year: they were game enough to undertake the tiring and hazardous drive. For people who had not in most cases learnt to drive a car until middle life, whose eyesight and reflexes were frequently in decline, the drive to Kosciusko provided a daunting prospect. The road between Canberra and Cooma was an appalling ungraded dirt track, pitted with murderous ditches liable at any moment to cause major damage to suspensions and differentials. There were several unmarked level crossings where you were likely at any moment to have a train carrying material for the Snowy Mountains Scheme bearing down on you. From time to time the road would be blocked by a fallen tree. No sign of life was visible anywhere—the Central European fear of empty spaces had full play on that desolate stretch of road. We sighed with relief when we caught sight of the outskirts of Cooma or Canberra.