Rebellious Daughters (5 page)

In my own, less cautionary, fairy tale, I willingly hopped into the bed of the wolf. I chose a boy at random. A tall boy, almost twice my height. A sporty, blokey boy so unlike me that I am surprised in retrospect that he agreed to have sex with me at all. I stole a rare opportunity to sneak away with him, unsupervised. We ran along
the strand, letting the ocean lick at our toes, and quickly mounted a dune at the beach and I ate, and was eaten by, the wolf-boy. And I liked how he ogled my breasts with his big eyes, and snapped at my neck with his big teeth, and tore away my hymen with his terribly big cock (My, what a big cock you have! All the better to fuck you with). And although I was devoured, I sprang whole from the belly of the wolf and raced out beyond the borders of my grandmother's castle and in the following years kept tangling with wolves, first with my body and then in my writing. In pursuing my passions, I grew strong just as my grandmother, in her abstinence, grew frail with the passing of years.

Recently she died.

This is the way with fairy tales, the tellers die but the stories live on in each subsequent generation.

My grandmother identified herself as a storyteller. On the rare occasions when paying customers did enter Dragonhall, she sat down with the children and told fairy tales to them, pointing to the life sized papier-mâché girls around them. This one fell into a sleep as deep as death, this one froze to death after she had squandered all her matches. I am not sure if she knew that she was frightening the poor children with her thick Slavic accent, her crabapple face, and – towards the end – the dark places where her teeth had fallen away.

In adulthood, I, too, turned to storytelling for a living.
Being the opener of locked doors, I find therefore that my own stories are all about sex. They leap over her rules of chastity, they stomp naked, they dance irreverently on my grandmother's grave.

At first glance, it seems that my storytelling project is the opposite to that of my grandmother's. She cautioned against sex and I rip the pants off our genitals and wave them cart-wheeling in the air. I have always seen myself as the rebellious granddaughter, the challenger of my grandmother's taboos, but really I have taken the mantle of the storyteller from her shoulders and, like hers, my
Wundermärchen
are full of wondrous things and of wondering. Scratch the surface a little and you'll see that, just like my grandmother, I delight in frightening the innocent, in speaking the unspeakable. In my case, I speak of sex, whereas hers were tales of death and fear. She refused to follow the rules of others, I break the social taboos. Art is my God as it was hers. Now that she is dead, I realise that I have become the retelling of my grandmother's story, similar and yet transformed, as are most retellings of fairy tales. My once upon a time began in her happily ever after. I wonder where my own story will settle and when I will reach the end of the tale I have to tell.

PRESSING THE SEAMS

LEAH KAMINSKY

‘A woman who makes her own coat is able to choose a style that will express her own individuality…' Tailoring for Women
by Gertrude Mason, 1935

Step 1: ‘The Importance of a Well-Cut Pattern'

In 1975, I flatly refuse to wear anything my father sews for me. He is a professional tailor, but I shop only at Sportsgirl to spite him. With a spoilt teenager like me for a daughter and a wife who survived the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, my father stitches together far more than suits and frocks. He holds together the fabric of our family with his love.

‘Ve sacrifice evrytink for our children,' he says, with a heavy Polish accent I laugh at.

It isn't until I'm much older that I find out my father was an apprentice tailor with the distinguished Getter Brothers on Haufgass back in 1937, in his tiny hometown of Zhetl. On May Day, the International Workers' Day, he was caught setting messenger pigeons free, red ribbons tied to their legs – a teenage gesture to prove his love for a beautiful girl who belonged to the Communist party. For that, he sat in Vilna's Lukiskes gaol for six months, urine poured into his nostrils. One day my grandfather shared a bottle of vodka with the guard and put my father on board the
SS Moreton Bay
, just before the storm of war began in Europe.

In 1938, my father stepped off the boat onto Melbourne's Station Pier. At first, he worked as a tailor for his uncle Yankel and lived in Rathdowne Street, Carlton. Later he was employed by Winik and Weiss in Little Bourke Street. He was a good tailor, sewing everything by hand. After a year he rented a flat on the corner of Bourke and Russell Streets with Sam Krycer, Harry Steinitz and Sam Helfgot, and together they made up samples of ladies' coats for a little extra pocket money.

In 1945, while Europe still blazed, destroying his youth, his love, his hope, my father sat sewing ladies' suits at 126 Flinders Lane, in the heart of Melbourne's
shmatte
district, looking down from the window at men
loading mannequins onto trucks. He basted coat sleeves and pad-stitched lapels. ‘Is it overlocked?' my father always asked, running his thumb over the jagged hem. It would take several years for him to find the remnants of his family who hid in makeshift dugouts in the depths of the Lypszynska forest throughout the war. He eventually saved up enough to bring them all out to Australia.

But now it is 1975 and I am cheating in sewing class. My father has cut the pattern for my lime green skirt – put in the zip and carefully hemmed the edge. The teacher gives me A+. The truth is I do not even know how to thread a needle and I have absolutely no intention of learning. I want to wear the latest fashions bought from department stores and trendy shops. I am a modern girl. I don't want my father's life and the frayed remnants of an old world threaded into mine.

Step 2: ‘Basting the Coat for the First Fitting'

My first holiday job, at 15, was folding monogrammed handkerchiefs into boxed Christmas gift sets at Buckley and Nunn's department store. I saved all the money I earned to buy a record player that summer, starting my collection of vinyls with the Beatles.
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
was by far one of my favourites. And I knew all the trippy word dervishes of
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
, which my best friend told me I shouldn't be listening to because the title was an
abbreviation for LSD. The track I loved most though was
She's Leaving Home
. I played it over and over, barricading myself inside my bedroom by creating a fortress with the cupboard door. My room became a bunker, out of earshot from the quiet weeping of my mother who would sit chain-smoking Craven A's in the kitchen, and from the mournful Yiddish serenades of my father as he clipped hedges outside my window while revisiting the blurry joy of his childhood in a shtetl. Every night, he would come into my hideout holding a plate of apple cake and peeled orange segments, which I barely touched, preferring to nibble on the stash of Smarties and Chocolate Freckles I kept hidden in my desk drawer.

One evening, later that summer, my father barged into my room without knocking and proudly announced that he was taking me on a month-long holiday to Israel: ‘We are going to the Land of Milk and Honey, so you can learn about your heritage.' A zealous smile was plastered across his round face. He was eager to introduce me to his friends from Zhetl. The few who survived went to Israel after the war and he hadn't seen most of them since he was a teenager. My mother didn't want to join us, preferring to stay at home and stare into her ashtray.

I had never been overseas, but a huge chunk of my childhood was spent dreaming of visiting all the exotic places in my stamp collection – floating in the pretty lagoons of Cocos and Keeling Islands, climbing icy
peaks in Greenland. Yet I wasn't in the least bit excited about the prospects of travelling to the Holy Land that summer – I wanted to spend it with my friends (my popularity was on the rise then, having recently joined the Beatles Club at school). Besides, going away would totally ruin my decision to finally act on a three-month-long crush I had on Mark Rabinovitz; I dreamed about him being the first boy I'd kiss and planned my attack for New Year's Eve. I'd spent ages carefully preparing for the occasion: perfecting the technique of wrapping my hair to straighten my frizzy curls so I'd look like Marcia from the
Brady Bunch
; saving up extra pocket money to buy a blue and silver check Miller shirt and some brown treads (popular shoes with soles made out of Dunlop tyres), so I'd be considered ‘spunky', the ‘70s equivalent of hot; and practicing ‘pashing on' with my pillow. The attraction of a pimply-faced adolescent boy who read Herman Hesse and quoted John Lennon was far higher up the ladder of my desirable bucket list than an organised tour around a dust bowl over the other side of the planet with a bunch of decrepit old Jews.

My father won against my feeble protests and I bid farewell to my friends, looking down sorrowfully on Melbourne fading away from view as the plane took off. After what seemed like endless hours of travelling, my excitement over opening tiny packets of salt and sugar and downing endless cans of free Coca Cola began to
wear thin. I also spent an inordinate amount of time in the WC to escape my father's embarrassingly loud snores. How on earth was I going to survive a month of sharing a room with him? And it certainly wasn't great for a girl's image to be seen walking around with a short, bald man with a limp, who always wore a suit and tie no matter where he went.

Twenty-four gruelling hours later I found myself on a Mercedes bus that had been bought with German guilt-money. Over the next four weeks, deserts merged into spindly forests as our tour guide, Shlomo, dragged our group across the country, hauling us out from the air-conditioned comfort of our bus to stand in front of memorials for the dead dotted everywhere. After the obligatory lowering of heads for one minute's silence, I'd retreat to my seat at the back of the bus, as far away from my father as I could get.

I was still furious at him for dragging me away from my friends. Sulking, I stared out the window at my reflection super-imposed on rocky hills pock-marked with stunted trees, or the yellow sands of the Arava desert. I daydreamed of home, wondering if, in my absence, Rachel Mayer had muscled in on my territory and pashed with Mark Rabinovitz. Meanwhile, back on the bus, Mr Waldman's toupee kept falling off into my lap from the seat in front of me every time he yelled at the observant Dr Honigman who demanded
the bus stop each day at dusk, no matter where we were, so he could pull out his ritual shawl and phylacteries and rock to and fro in evening prayer. I was stuck with these fellow travellers – an odd collection of the proud, the crass and the wounded.

One afternoon, our bus crawled into a shabby gas station in the middle of the Negev desert on our way to an overnight stay on a kibbutz in the south, where we were promised ‘a meeting with real Israelis, as well as experience in milking cows'. I wasn't excited about either prospect. On my way to the bathroom around the back, I saw fields of date palms stretching across the horizon and imagined myself running away in slow motion, hand in hand with Mark Rabinovitz. There was only one toilet and it reeked of stale urine and cigarettes. The door rested ajar and, as I pushed it open, I found our bus driver, his smile as greasy as his hair, standing there, his fly wide open. Suddenly, he grabbed me and pulled me in, rubbing against me as he made weird grunting sounds. He asked me in broken English if I wanted to play with his handbrake. My cheeks burned and I felt a rush of nausea as I shrugged him off and ran back to the safety of the bus. For the first time since arriving in Israel, I sat down next to my father, my heart beating like the wings of a fledgling fallen out of its nest.

For the rest of the trip I sat beside my father on the bus, feeling safer there. As time passed on our long
drives, my eyes began reading the contours of the land, searching for some kind of connection to my ancestry, culture and faith, maybe as a way to cross the bridge into my father's world. In the seat next to me, he would nod off to sleep, his wrinkled forearms bearing the scars of war. Looking at him, it felt as if exile was embedded in his epidermis like the ridges of limestone and clay outside my window, hiding layers of stories I'd never really wanted to hear.

While we were in Israel, each Shabbat my father would shave carefully, slick down his hair, don a suit and tie and drag me along to meet the
Zhetlers
, those fabled friends I had always heard of who survived the war. They would crowd together inside Fayvel Kalbstein's tiny apartment around a table that groaned under cheesecake,
babke
, blintzes, pickled herring, cottage cheese, slices of rye, gefilte fish, all draped with the heavy memory of the dead. There the Zhetler men poured shots of whisky, clinking their glasses together in unison as they shouted ‘
L'chaim
!' To life! They spoke in hushed tones – of Moteleh Iglak the dwarf who warned them German soldiers were on their way, of Noah Zalcstein (‘such a lovely man') who had to choke my great-grand-mother when she had a coughing fit just as Gestapo soldiers walked across the boards above the family's hideout under the house. And at some time through the afternoon, bellies full, collective tears almost spent,
Ethel Kovanski would burst into song, with a mournful rendition of
My Yiddishe Mama
or
Mein Shtetele Belz
, the longing hanging silently in the air well after the last of her slightly off-key operatic notes. And I sat there cocooned inside the reluctance of youth, picking at my metallic blue nail polish and refusing the constant offers of greasy food and cups of lemon tea. I was bored – tired of hearing about babies frozen in the forest, or men hanging themselves with their prayer shawls rather than be herded off to death camps.