My Sack Full of Memories
Zwi Lewin 1964
Published by Hybrid Publishers
Melbourne Victoria Australia
© Zwi Lewin, Joe Reich 2019
This publication is copyright. Apart from any use
as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced
by any process without prior written permission from the publisher.
Requests and enquiries concerning reproduction
should be addressed to the Publisher,
Hybrid Publishers,
PO Box 52, Ormond, VIC Australia 3204.
First published 2019
ISBN 9781925736267 (p)
9781925736274 (e)
Cover design: Gittus Graphics www.gggraphics.com.au
To my late parents Yitzchak and Gitel,whose story I needed to tell
1
My name is Zwi – that’s the name my wife, children, grandchildren and friends have always called me – but a name I only acquired as a teenager when I first arrived in Australia. Like the Queen dubs a Knight with a new name, my Jewish youth group, Bnei Akiva, dubbed me Zwi those many years ago, but I wasn’t short of names, as by then I already had four names and Zwi was the fifth, the final and the most satisfying one. So, please call me Zwi (pronounced as Tsvee).
I live in Melbourne, Australia, in my ninth decade of life. I am that old man who saves himself from the long walk to synagogue by using a motorised scooter, yes, permitted even on Shabbat (the Sabbath); the one who is getting slower going up the stairs, carrying aches and pains and puffing a little at times; the person you might not glance at as you pass. Even I don’t recognise myself, for in my mind only a little time has passed since I could have outsprinted you on my daily run to the beach, sent a sizzling backhand down the line or taken a ruckman’s mark over a pack. Like you, I was young and indestructible.
I have enjoyed living in Melbourne, for this city, which I have made my home for most of my life, has allowed me to breathe the air of freedom, to make my way among the least judgemental and friendliest people on earth, to create a home and family, to practise my beliefs; and yet I note that Melbourne has recently been displaced as the world’s most liveable city by Vienna, Austria – a decision demonstrating once more how quickly the cracks of history are smoothed by time, and how the world forgives and forgets. Austria is the country that spawned Hitler and rapturously cheered the arrival of the Nazis; and Vienna, a city glittering with broken glass on Kristallnacht, a city whose art galleries fought to keep stolen artworks as their own, a city whose Jews were expelled or dragged to extermination camps, is now considered the best place to live on this planet.
So, as Zwi, I have lived for so many years, but this was not the name written on my original birth certificate. I suspect it was in a drawer in our family home in Bielsk Podlaski, Poland, and was lost, but trivial compared to what else I lost when the Germans invaded.
On that certificate you would find my parents had named me Herszel, a Yiddish word meaning ‘deer’. Yiddish was my first language, for it was the common language of the Jews of Europe whose borders did not constrain our tongue. A language now taught as an oddity, for Modern Hebrew is the language of Israel and the basis of Jewish education worldwide. The dying of Yiddish is but collateral damage of the extermination of six million people, but with it went a mountain of culture and literature.
It was not long after I arrived in Melbourne that I was swept up in those forces pushing for Hebrew as against Yiddish and, as I have said, Yiddish lost.
Bnei Akiva, the religious youth movement I first joined, responded to this new boy called Herszel, so recently arrived from Europe with the ever-so-Yiddish name, in the way you would expect. It was, after all, the early 1950s and the Jewish world was changing. Israel had been established in 1948 and Bnei Akiva was naturally also strongly Zionist. It hoped that us teenage members would ‘make aliyah’ and ultimately live in Israel. Bnei Akiva decided I needed a Hebrew name and so I was dubbed Zwi, which is the Hebrew translation of the word ‘deer’.
I arrived in Melbourne by ship, as immigrants did in those post-war years, on 10 November 1948. The events of a week earlier, the first Tuesday in November, would have still been reverberating around the city. Rimfire had won the Melbourne Cup, ridden by an apprentice, a boy just a day short of his sixteenth birthday. It was a good time to be a teenage boy arriving in the city.
The shipping records illustrate the attempt of the Australian officials to spell ‘Herszel’, for on arrival I was Herzel Lewin, not bad and only missing one consonant. A cousin, waiting at the dock to meet her European refugee family, a schoolgirl, turned her nose up at my foreign-sounding name, for Herszel was certainly not anglicised enough for her liking, so she suggested an alternative.
Not speaking any English, I accepted her decision and so, based on the fact she was studying Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest at school, I became known to the Australians as Ernest. I was Ernest in earnest – Ernest Lewin when enrolled in my first classes at state school, but as Aussies love to shorten a name, I was soon called Ernie.
So, I have always had the three names in Australia, my Jewish friends and family calling me Zwi, while at school, work and in business I was Ernie. Only my mother and sister kept to my birth name and in their homes I was always Herszel.
Others imposed the other two names I have responded to. Grigory by the Russians and Gjegus by the Poles, names I have not been called by for over seventy years. When I became a grandparent for the first time, I decided that rather than getting called Zaida or Pa or the like and add yet another name, I would stick with Zwi.
If I had my birth certificate from my home in Bielsk Podlaski the records would show my father’s family name in Poland was also spelt Lewin. The ‘w’ in Polish is pronounced ‘v’ and my first cousins in the USA use Levin as their surname.
The name Lewin derives from Levi, the tribe of Israel with the honour of being the servants to the high priests, the Kohanim. At the high holy days, we Levyim are still required to wash the hands of the Kohanim before their blessing of the congregation. This would have been a long Lewin family tradition, for my family in pre-war Poland were devoutly religious as well as being wealthy merchants.
Unlike my first name, my Lewin surname has never changed.
In my ninth decade – yes, I am over eighty, but by how much is a question that my putting a finger to the keyboard has disturbingly raised. Age, my age, signified by another candle to blow out on a cake each year, was known to me, until now.
Children today are so aware of their birthdays. As a young child living in such strange and tumultuous times, I was not aware of having any birthday celebrations. I have always believed I was born on 13 February 1936, for that is the date on my Australian documentation, my passport and my driver licence, all created long after my birth. Not long ago I celebrated my eightieth birthday with family and friends but in researching this book I have found I might have been a couple of years late.
The entry card to Tashkent in Uzbekistan in 1941, which still exists, has my date of birth recorded as being 1934, not 1936. This can easily be dismissed as an error in transcription, accidental or deliberate. More compelling is the only photo of myself with my parents, dated in