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LIBERMAN / AUSTRALIAN JEWISH FICTION SINCE WORLD WAR II
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across the 1870’s through to the 1890’s, Millie Finkelstein and
Mrs. A(nthony) Blitz at the turn o f the century, Philip Masel in
the 1930’s, Nathan Spielvogel for the greater part of his 82 years
before his death in 1956, and a number of others. These writers
fall outside the scope o f this paper. They antedate the period dis
cussed here and their preoccupations and themes, too, are totally
different from those of the writers that followed.
The first work to beg attention is a bitter-sweet little volume
entitled
The Smile o f Herschale Handle
by Benjamin Newman
Jubal, published in 1947. Whatever little biographical informa
tion exists about Jubal suggests that at the time he was 46 years
old; he had escaped to Australia from Vienna some eight years
before. He had worked as a cook and factory-hand, although he
had been a trained theatre-director in Vienna and was active in
that field in the 1950’s in Ceylon. While in Melbourne, he had
produced a few stage-plays in English and Yiddish for the Jewish
Cultural Centre, “Kadimah.” He died in Sydney in 1961.
Now, what o f Herschale Handle (or Herschale the Hawker)?
One student o f Australian J ewish literature of the period calls the
work an apologia of the Jewish people. It is more than that. The
book consists of a series of vignettes often told with irony, humor,
self-mockery. In it, there are madmen and artists and prophets
and revolutionaries; there are golems and gabbays and heretics
and thieves. The book is a protest, for all its humor; it is a bitter
work, its bitterness directed at the violence of the world, at the
wanton hounding and killing of innocents — above all, of his
fellow-Jews. It is a heartless world that Herschale Handle tells
about; it is full of death, greed and injustice, and for the Jew only
the promise of wandering and liquidation. And yet, the narra tor
can be moved to say, as in a mother’s letter to an unborn son:
Whatever it looks like down there, life is still worth living.
This is not a fixed unalterable world. It changes and
changes. You will not be alone. Day by day there are many
arrivals like you. I believe in you and in all of you.
Technically,
The Smile of Herschale Handle
is not perfect. On
many occasions, Jubal confronts the reader too squarely with spe
cial pleading, and with didactic intent. But it is to be remembered
that the book appeared in 1947, a mere two years after the termi
nation of a war that had claimed millions of his fellow Jews,
among them his family. So if there is bitterness under the guise of