The Fig Tree...

QUOTES

Telling Tales
p.5 Stories can reveal a forgotten past...And stories link us to the wisdom of our collective pasts...
p.7 To be a writer, perhaps, is to be in a state of childhood: to see, smell, hear, taste, and touch things in a state of openness; to be in touch with life itself.
p.9 Yet, just as my son has become a teacher, guiding me back to the pure essence of things, so too did my father live long enough to show me that there is a way back to radiance, even in old age.

Singing Eternity
p.13 - of his father at his death - Your mind was forever churning with novel ways of creating order out of chaos, a wholeness out of fragments; and in time I came to understand that it could not be otherwise for someone with such a fractured past....You wrote poems that measured the ticking of a clock...
p.22 The rhythm of gardening conveyed him back to the rhythm of words...
p.24 The only true gold, he concludes, is the fire that burns within, the gold of one's own soul...He is wary of the mob...He is conscious of the illusions, the paradoxes...

The Record
p.35 His mother - She sang without restraint...
p.36 Yiddish music permeated our lives...
p.39 Yiddish song remained her one constant...A quiet woman by nature, when she sang she came alive. In singing she allowed herself to fly.
p.42 Singing was Hadassah's act of renewal. This is how she held herself together while she raised her three sons in an alien land.

The Fig Tree
p.49 Mother-in-law Lily - Her mind always sways between fear for herself and concern for the welfare of Alexander, her one-year-old grandson. Lily is Alexander's last living grandparent.
p.52 A Sunday morning in St Vincent's. Birth and death cross paths.
p.56 As she moves toward her final coma, it is the fig tree that Lily recalls...The one she planted in the final garden after a life-time on the move...It was the one fig tree that she was able to see mature and bear fruit.
p.57 As the tree grew and stretched outwards, Lily grew inwards...Lily sat under that tree...This is where she wants to be...
p.64 Time becomes more significant when someone is dying...

Dancing towards the End
p.68 - Jack or Sugar - 94 - has returned home to Ithaca after 52 years in Australia
p.70 Jack's wife Maria - I carry Australia in my heart...Australia was a land of space and infinite horizons...
p.77 Each period of economic downturn...has seen more migrants return home to Ithaca than leave...
p.78 Sugar is dancing towards the end...towards the one common destination that transcends all times and places.

Ancestral Roads
p.83 There are ghosts on the ancestral road, and scattered clues to a veiled past. And there are many detours...
p.89 The island breathed with the collective toil of ancestors...
p.125 Is this the curse of Ithaca, to remain in limbo, forever wedded to an island of seafarers and scattered clans?

The Ballad of Mauthausen
p.130 Mauthausen - concentration camp in Austria
p.143 This is the legacy of Mauthausen, the one ray of light we can take from its blood ridden century: to be alert to suffering and to heed the cry of those in need; to cross the boundaries and to see the common humanity that lies beyond our tribal divisions...

Walking Thessaloniki
p.147 By 1900 there were 80,000 Jews in the city out of a population of 170,000...The history came to an abrupt end with the mass deportation of almost the entire Jewish population of Thessaloniki to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
p.149 It was a city that could produce wonderful hybrids...
p.168 I think of our treatment of strangers, here in Australia, in recent years...Perhaps we need to venture out and become seafarers again...

The Treasure
p.170 The melodies evoke another place, another time...I felt both entranced and safe, seated among my elders in a hall simmering with longing.
p.183 Mila + Moshe - They had become the wandering graduates of Auschwitz.
p.186 Their repertoire recreated a lost world.
p.187 [Moshe] directed several plays, among them David Pinski's 'The Treasure', which so entranced me on that memorable winter's evening in 1958.

Between Sky and Sea
p.189 On 30th June 1933, a Yiddish poet arrived in Melbourne...He was the bearer of news, of greetings from their loved ones, and of a vision etched in words.
p.191 The poet was Melekh Ravich. He was on a mission on behalf of Yiddish schools in Poland...a wandering Jew. He longed for places new.
p.192 Through his eyes the southern continent assumed an aura of mystery. Ravich sang the land's praises, and saw its promise as a haven, a place for a fresh start.
p.194 The eucalypt was the poet's tree. It was clothed in a spectrum of colours, from ghostly whites to bleached reds...It was at once fragile, yet more enduring than the trees of old Europe.
p.195 This was the most poignant aspect of Ravich's journey, his encounter with outback Aborigines. He noted their troubled eyes. He could see in them a familiar look, the gaze of the outsider, of a people estranged within their own land. He could see, also, their ability to travel light.
p.200 Ravich's younger brother Herz Bergner wrote 'Between Sky and Sea' - depicts the voyage of a group of refugees on board a Greek freighter bound for Australia.
p.216 the kadimah stage

5 of 5 stars to The Fig Tree by Arnold Zable https://t.co/PgD8yjOB3Q

— Gemma Wiseman (@AuraGem) July 4, 2020