Category: Books

Pocket universes and super heroes

personby Gillian Polack
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Eight years ago I spent ten days in Amiens. I had great aims and ambitions. I wanted to explore how World War I changed the people and the landscape. I did a lot of research in Australia early on, which was just as well, because my body was beginning to ache at the seams and I could only do half the research. I did that half, and I also did the related research for a novel. That novel is timely now, for all the wrong reasons.

It’s about the Green Children. There are medieval tales of the Green Children of Woolwich, and they are oddly consistent. I wanted to add a pocket universe to the story and turn it into fantasy with a little bit of scientific underlay. The best place to do this wasn’t in England, where the story came from. It was in the Zone Rouge in France.

I wanted to understand how Jewish superheroes would create themselves if they weren’t strangers in a world full of hate, but refugees in a tiny universe where they were the majority. I wanted to see the stupidity that comes with confidence and being the centre of things, and to put a non-Jewish superhero at the heart of the story, showing how she saw the world around her and how she dealt with some really bad cards. In other words, I wanted to reverse some of our assumptions.

Part of this was asking, “What would our world be like with magic?” I’m an historian and for me there is not one simple type of magic, but complex systems that interact and that change over time. In my novel I used some historical systems and some less historical, and added a couple that only belong in that other world. If there are many systems and if they’re not simplified for ease of tale-telling then they leave more chaos in their wake when they’re abused. Also, how would magic be regulated? I used the UK for the regulation of magic, because I could bring important and old families into the story. Also because it means I could play in the wonderful sandpit of alternate history in London. Imagine a history of England where Jews were brought back in the 15th century? I wrote a short story to explain a part of this, and it was a finalist in the Sidewise Awards, which means… it’s Alternate History, even though it has magic. I rather like this. The story is in Other Covenants.

I lived in London and I lived in Paris for a little, many years ago, and, historically, London is a lot more fun for the type of story I wanted to tell. Pop-up history, small churches with pits to hell… I needed to know that terrain. I know the church in question (and its history) and I know the streets in question. This is not just due to having lived there for a little, many years ago.  It’s because I used to teach students about medieval London at the Australian National University, and because I spent a whole day walking the whole of Cheapside because the maps of it showing it in the Middle Ages did not fit the modern maps. I took photos that document how and why Cheapside changed and can explain what this means to the wider City of London. I looked at the difference between Old Jewry, the newer Jewry where my family came from, and Golders’ Green. I walked all these places an took pictures, at various times.

A small US imprint published my novel as their first book. I never got to do a slide show of all the places and explain how the Somme and how London and Paris came together and how I used my historian-self to furnish the novel. Before the novel came out, I talked with a writers’ group about the layers of history in landscape and how war changed everything, using the Somme as a case study. Then COVID hit. Most novels published in the first two years of COVID are lesser-known. This doesn’t change the fact that my world-building for The Green Children Help Out was amazing fun.

What book should I introduce next week? Time-travel, magic in Canberra, non-fiction? I’m open to suggestions.

Introducing my books: Wizardry

personby Gillian Polack
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I promised to introduce my work, then got bowled over by my own urgent need to understand one small aspect of our current world. That aspect has changed my life in some important ways, and I suddenly realise that not many people know much about everyday life in Jewish Australia. This is not the first time I have suddenly realised this thing. Last time, I wrote a novel with magic and feminism and much discovery of lost culture and foodways. It also contains prophecy. In fact, I wrote The Wizardry of Jewish Women.

There are three different sets of Jewish life in the novel.

One is like quite a few friends in my Jewish circles, with a mild religious sensitivity and a vast desire for community and understanding and service. Belinda in Canberra could easily have been part of my Jewish community, twenty years ago, before I was too ill to do everything. I asked permission from a friend to use her garden in the novel. She had a spectacular garden. We knew each other through dancing and through a women’s group, mainly. Belinda has the gardening and the cooking and the care. She’s someone everyone should meet.

The second drew on the knowledge and experience of a group of Jewish (but not practising) friends who I did women’s stuff with. Judith in Sydney is my readers’ favourite character. Her politics and the deep wish to improve the world were core to my life 25 years ago, though she’s a bit more left than I was. I can’t do these things now because, simply, most of the women who used to love working with me have dumped me for being too Jewish.

It’s all post October 7. They would have dumped Judith, too. She would have failed their purity test by being too Jewish. Judith would have waxed delightfully sarcastic and been very upset. She would have been especially upset because no-one would have asked her what her views were. She would simply have been left out of everything. Now is not then, and Judith is way political in Wizardry.

The third is what happens to an Australian with Jewish ancestry who has retained key aspects of the culture but not the religion or the family. What does Rhonda share with me? She’s an historian.

Each of the three women inherit something that was considered very standard for Jewish women in medieval France: magic. Each of them does quite different things with this inheritance. I wrote their stories because I wanted to meet them. I still do.

Baggage

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m about to embark on a big essay. As a prequel to it, however, I want to introduce you to a book.

A-many years ago, when I was young and charming, I edited an Australian anthology called Baggage. It’s still in print, published by Wildside in the US. The Australian original was taken out of print when the collapse of Borders in Australia imploded the publisher. Every piece Eneit Press published was special (maybe excepting my novel – I cannot judge my own writing) and the loss of the press shut many doors for readers.

Why is Baggage so important to me today? I asked writers for stories of science fiction or fantasy that discussed the cultural baggage we all carry. I had an initial list of the perfect people to make the best anthology. It had two parts, since I couldn’t ask everyone at once. I emailed the writers on the first part of my initial first (obviously) and all but one of them agreed. The rest of the wonderful authors I had on my list don’t even know they were on my list, which I find sad. I still want to read stories by them. Every single story I was given by those writers is a treasure and thought-provoking and none of them overlap and they created such a fine anthology that I’ve been nervous about trying another.

These are not Jewish stories. For those most part, these are not Jewish writers. Yet the collection is one that will help anyone trying to understand about the current wave of antisemitism. How? It demonstrates, through story, some of the massive differences in the cultural baggage we each bear. What we carry, how we carry it, how much of a burden it can be and how different people see it quite, quite differently. It achieves all this through very well told story. Which means, if you don’t want to jump straight into theory and definitions and cultural analysis, you don’t have to. You can read some of the best short stories I’ve ever edited.

Then I’ll bring in the heavy stuff, either here or on my own blog. In this difficult few years, however, we don’t always need to confront. Sometimes we can simply read and enjoy and find our own paths from what we read. This is why I’m giving you a prologue, which is Baggage.

 

Reading The Body Digital by Vanessa Chang

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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cover of the book The Body DigitalMy morning reading book for the past several weeks has been The Body Digital, by Vanessa Chang. It’s a powerful book and I’m still integrating it into my own thinking.

Part of my practice is to copy some of the sentences that really strike me when reading. I do this rather than taking notes, though sometimes I add a few notes as well.

I’ve chosen a few that are related to writing to share here today. That will give you some flavor of the book, though it’s only a small part of what Chang is doing.

It can be easy to forget that writing is an embodied technology.

There are three powerful thoughts in those few words.

First of all, it’s easy to forget these things about writing because we take it for granted. We don’t think about it much, unless we’re sitting down to do some of it. It’s a fact of life in our world.

Secondly, it’s embodied – we use our bodies to do it. Now right now I’m writing on a keyboard, which is my preferred way to write, but even that requires physical movement.

Writing by hand requires other kinds of movement, and dictation to produce written words a third kind. All of those are physical.

Chang goes on to say:

While much of writing’s profound impact lies in its massive capacity to store and transmit ideas, its ancestry in handmade marks makes it the twin of drawing.

I’ll get to the first part of that in a minute, but the idea that writing is much like drawing – which preceded it – amplifies the fact that it’s an act of our bodies. I keep thinking about Japanese and Chinese writing and particularly about how people do calligraphy with words in those languages, creating their own understanding of the word through the way they do the lines.

Much of the traditional poetry in those languages is also done as art. It’s a physical act – you could dance it, really – but it also stirs the mind, makes you think about ideas. Continue reading “Reading The Body Digital by Vanessa Chang”…

Things Happen

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m late!

This is because Australia is antisemitism central again and I’ve been dealing. You don’t need yet another post on Australia’s problems, so let me tell you the story of a book.

Some years ago, I wrote a novel. A publisher signed it up but said “This should be a duology.” I rewrote the first book and added the sequel. Then they went bust.

Shortly after, another publisher fell in love with the duology but said, “I want the rest of the story.” I did the rewrite and the last volume and it became a trilogy. The COVID hit and the publisher ran into so much trouble. I’m still with them for other books, but we agreed I should find a new publisher for the trilogy.

A US publisher has taken on the first volume. If it sells well, then the trilogy will finally emerge. I so hope it sells well. I’ve been quiet about it because this book was having so much bad luck. Not as much bad luck as my cursed novel, but still, much bad luck.

However, we are finally in a “Watch this space” moment. The cover artist has Ideas and the editor is getting back to me very soon.

When there is an official announcement, I promise to share it. In the meantime, it’s about time I talked about my other published work. I might do a series of posts, to remind myself of novels written and books published.

That gives you two reasons to watch this space.

Reprint: The Joy of Mindful Reading

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Deep reading can boost your critical thinking and help you resist misinformation – here’s how to build the skill

Just slowing down gives you time to question and reflect.
Morsa Images/DigitalVision via Getty Images

JT Torres, Washington and Lee University and Jeff Saerys-Foy, Quinnipiac University

The average American checks their phone over 140 times a day, clocking an average of 4.5 hours of daily use, with 57% of people admitting they’re “addicted” to their phone. Tech companies, influencers and other content creators compete for all that attention, which has incentivized the rise of misinformation.

Considering this challenging information landscape, strong critical reading skills are as relevant and necessary as they’ve ever been.

Unfortunately, literacy continues to be a serious concern. Reading comprehension scores have continued to decline. The majority of Gen Z parents are not reading aloud to their young children because they view it as a chore. Many college students cannot make it through an entire book.

With their endless scrolling and easy reposting and sharing of content, social media platforms are designed to encourage passive engagement that people use to relieve boredom and escape stress.

As a cognitive scientist and a literacy expert, we research the ways people process information through reading. Based on our work, we believe that deep reading can be an effective way to counter misinformation as well as reduce stress and loneliness. It can be tough to go deeper than a speedy skim, but there are strategies you can use to strengthen important reading skills.

woman sits on end of bed holding head in hand while looking at phone
Counterintuitively, social media can make you feel more bored and lonely.
Dmitrii Marchenko/Moment via Getty Images
Deep reading versus doomscrolling

People use smartphones and social media for a variety of reasons, such as to relieve boredom, seek attention, make connections and share news. The infinite amount of information available at your fingertips can lead to information overload, interfering with how you pay attention and make decisions. Research from cognitive science helps to explain how scrolling trains your brain to think passively.

To keep people engaged, social media algorithms feed people content similar to what they’ve already engaged with, reinforcing users’ beliefs with similar posts. Repeated exposure to information increases its believability, especially if different sources repeat the information, an effect known as illusory truth.

Deep reading, on the other hand, refers to the intentional process of engaging with information in critical, analytical and empathetic ways. It involves making inferences, drawing connections, engaging with different perspectives and questioning possible interpretations.

Deep reading does require effort. It can trigger negative feelings like irritation or confusion, and it can very often feel unpleasant. The important question, then: Why would anyone choose the hard work of deep reading when they can just scroll and skim?

Motivating mental effort

Mindless scrolling may come with unintended consequences. Smartphone and social media use is associated with increased boredom and loneliness. And doomscrolling is related to higher levels of existential anxiety and misanthropy.

In contrast, attention and effort, despite being exhausting, can deepen your sense of purpose and strengthen social connection. People also feel motivated to complete tasks that help them pursue personal goals, especially when these tasks are recognized by others. For these reasons, sharing books may be one tool to promote deep reading.

One example is a teacher who guides students through longer texts, like novels, paired with active discussions about the books to reinforce comprehension and interpretation. While the debate over the ongoing practice of assigning excerpts over full books in schools continues, evidence does suggest that sustained reading in social settings can promote lifelong enjoyment in reading.

With social connection in mind, social media can actually be used as a positive tool. BookTok is a popular online community of people who use TikTok to discuss and recommend books. Fans post in-depth analyses of “K-Pop Demon Hunters” and other movies or shows, demonstrating that close analysis still has a place in the endless scroll of social media.

three people laughing together at a table, with books open in front of them
Talking about what you’ve read can add a social dimension to what can be a solitary activity.
Alfonso Soler/iStock via Getty Images Plus
Slowing yourself down to read deeply

There are steps you can take to meaningfully engage with the constant stream of information you encounter. Of course, this process can be taxing, and people only have so much effort and attention to expend. It’s important to both recognize your limited cognitive resources and be intentional about how you direct those resources.

Simply being aware of how digital reading practices shape your brain can encourage new attitudes and habits toward how you consume information. Just pausing can reduce susceptibility to misinformation. Taking a few extra seconds to consciously judge information can counteract illusory truth, indicating that intentionally slowing down even just a bit can be beneficial.

Reading deeply means being able to intentionally choose when to read at different speeds, slowing down as needed to wrestle with difficult passages, savor striking prose, critically evaluate information, and reflect on the meaning of a text. It involves entering into a dialogue with the text rather than gleaning information.

Awareness does not mean that you never doomscroll at the end of a long day. But it does mean becoming conscious of the need to also stick with a single text more frequently and to engage with different perspectives.

You can start small, perhaps with poems, short stories or essays, before moving up to longer texts. Partner with a friend or family member and set a goal to read a full-length novel or nonfiction book. Accomplish that goal in small chunks, such as reading one chapter a day and discussing what you read with your reading buddy. Practicing deep reading, such as reading novels, can open you up to new perspectives and ideas that you can explore in conversation with others, in person or even on TikTok.The Conversation

JT Torres, Director of the Harte Center for Teaching and Learning, Washington and Lee University and Jeff Saerys-Foy, Associate Professor of Psychology, Quinnipiac University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Golden threads and weirdness and Australia.

personby Gillian Polack
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I haven’t forgotten that I was going to introduce tsedakah last week. Stuff happens. And then more stuff happens. Much of the stuff has links to matters Jewish.

First we had the Bondi murders, and then a major literary conference fell to bits largely because of internal clashes about ethics. These internal clashes became a national mess. And now, Parliament’s back early and we had so many kind words about those lost at Bondi, and a national day of mourning later in the week and I think the whole country is confused. The latest political opinion poll suggests this. A far right party is coming out of the shadows and making one of the two largest parties in the country scared. The far left has most of its old vote, but not all. And our prime minister has lost most of his personal support: if Labor want a safe election next time, they might need to change their leadership. Or not. Labor is stubborn and full of factions.

All this pales compared with what’s happening in the Middle East, in Iran, in the US, and even in the UK. But it’s our mess, and we must handle it. One thing I would like to see us return to is civil society. Discussions and analyses rather than street marches.

Why? The big Sydney Harbour Bridge march last year had a lot of wonderful people doing what they thought was the right thing. Marching alongside them in support of Gazans were the Bondi shooters, and the rather antisemitic writer who upset the applecart in Adelaide and led to one of the most important writers’ festivals in the country being cancelled. Marching alongside this writer was almost everyone I’ve seen who is loudly and opinionatedly antisemitic. Many of these individuals were grouped near a guy holding a picture of Khomeini. I don’t know if it was a photo op, or if all these people actually work together, but the cluster of them in the most famous photo of the march indicates a cluster of problems.

It’s going to be difficult to roll back the performative and to return to the Aussie politics I used to know. I’m not connected in the way I used to be. I was pushed out of the behind-the-scenes stuff through being too Jewish and too ill. Australia admires health. It also has this really stupid habit of sweeping people who belong but should not be heard under the front stairs.

Why am I thinking of front stairs?

I’m back in the Middle Ages this week and ought to be talking about foodways, but have been focused on trying to understand our current very strange politics. What happens when the Middle Ages is there and I try to pretend it isn’t? Literary references happen, most frequently.

The boy under the stairs was Saint Alexis being holy. I’m probably under the stairs, but being sarcastic. The sarcasm means that old friends and new sneak in to join me, and we watch the goings on and are surprised at how people we know to be intelligent get caught up in performance and leave a goodly portion of their intellect behind.

Tsedekah is much nicer, but must wait until life is less exciting.

Just for the record, I could have gone to Parliament House and heard all the sorrowful speeches today. Instead, I watched the second last season of Stranger Things and I did some work and filled in all kinds of questionnaires. I decided it was not wise to hear those who ought to have sorted out the hate when it was straightforward being terribly sorry at all the murders. All those people should still be alive. Synagogues and mosques should not be burning. And all the time we spend trying to find that bolted horse could have been spent in doing so many things that Australia needed.

It will be Purim soon and gifts to two charities are traditional for this festival. I’ve chosen two that are important to me. It’s early, but all this thought led me to think what I could do. One charity gives reading to children. Those children are very rural and living on the land of their ancestors. They do so much better when they have books that concern themselves and are written by people they know in the language they speak. The other is for OzHarvest, which helped me out when I was under the poverty line. It rescues food and makes sure that food reaches people who don’t have the money to buy it.

Maybe around Purim will be an appropriate time to explain why the books are more Jewish as a gift than the food. Not more Jewish. I’m explaining badly. Ranked more highly as a type of gift. You’ll have to wait until March for the explanation.

Tomorrow is research-for-writing. I am interviewing a group of Jewish teenagers for a novel. A rather special novel, and one that I was not expecting to write. It’s not a guaranteed publication, but it’s a guaranteed “I’d love to see this if you’d consider writing it.” It’s the kind of book I’ve been saying we need for the last 20 years, one where Jewish Australia is shown as the driver of a story about Jewish Australians. The US has many YA novels that do just this for Jewish readers, but Australia, far less so.

I’m also finishing a short story where the King of Demons meets a very English vampire in Sydney. I have other fiction happening, including a novel emerging later in the year, but this week everything is Jewish.

The more hate there is, the more I write Jewish stories and Jewish history. Hate has reinforced my Jewishness ever since I was a child. When I was accused of eating baby’s blood in unleavened bread (in primary school), I taught the accusers basic kashruth. These are the type of stories I always tell.

What I don’t always tell is the reason I learned the Grace After Meals (the long one, all in Hebrew). I was so annoyed with several bigots and I decided I would say it every single lunchtime until the haters stopped bugging me. I kept saying it even after they stopped bugging me. Also they would have stopped bugging me anyhow, but I didn’t know this until it happened.

They didn’t stop because I could babble in Hebrew. They stopped because I became the high school student everyone else needed to ask questions of, especially in the lead up to exams. I could teach and I remembered everything teachers’ said and I understood it all. This gave me a place to belong, a role that was so very much mine. After I put the siddur away, someone would sit next to me and ask “Gillian, do you remember the calculus from yesterday?” or, a couple of years later, “Gillian, tell me about this piece of Chaucer.”

What most Jewish Australians have been pushed out of are those places we belong in the wider community. Since Australia is so secular, this is rather more important than it looks. Changing definitions, not listening to our voices, not publishing our books, telling us we have to leave our home country because we’re Jewish, accusing us of all kinds of impossible crimes… this all smudges together and makes an everyday that’s very difficult to handle.

Every single Australian organisation that still accepts me as Gillian (right now, my professional Medieval one, the Tolkien folks, and the Perth science fiction convention) gives me a golden thread to hold and to guide me through this labyrinth. Every single one that cuts off that thread (more than one writers’ organisation), leaves me stumbling. I find my balance within Jewish Australian culture, because that’s the place where my identity is not questioned.

As has been said so many times about Australia, we’re a weird mob. This is just another facet of that weirdness.

Aqueduct Authors Share Their Favorites From 2025

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Every year in December, Aqueduct Press invites its authors to share the books, movies, music, plays, and assorted related things that moved them in 2025. A new blog post is put up each day until they run out, usually some time in January.

One of the best things about these lists is that they’re not restricted to work that came out in 2025, which means they can and do include a lot of older books, etc.

Mine went up last Saturday. It’s all books because I seem to be doing more reading than anything else these days even if I did venture out to hear Ruthie Foster in concert.

I recommend reading them all and making a list of things you want to check out!

Language and Writing

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The Japanese edition of The Fall of Language in the Age of English
This is the Japanese edition. I am reading the English translation, not this version.

One of the (many) reasons to browse bookstores is that you stumble across books that you never heard of and would not have known to look for because it would never have occurred to you that you wanted to read a book about that particular thing until you stumbled across it.

Right now my morning book is one that fits that description. It’s called The Fall of Language in the Age of English, by Japanese writer Minae Mizumura (translated by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter). I’m sure I bought it at East Bay Booksellers, because they sell a lot of small press and academic books and are a very likely place to run across the books you didn’t know you wanted until you picked them up.

I’m not 100% sure I bought it there because I’ve had it awhile and just got around to reading it. (Yes, I do that all the time. Doesn’t everybody?) It is a perfect book for my daily reading practice, which requires books that are best read a few pages at a time because they give you something to chew on.

(I should note that this daily practice of reading for about 15 minutes in the morning is far from the only reading I do. It is in a way of reading akin to meditation, which is very different from diving into the world of a novel.)

This book is about writing in national languages (and what constitutes a national language) when so much of the world’s written work is written and published in English, which is a universal language in much the same way that Latin was a few centuries back. But it makes its points slowly, clearly discussing important points along the way.

The whole book is fascinating, but here’s the concept that got to me on a personal and gut level as a writer:

The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one’s bidding.

This, I think, is the essence of being a writer, the combination of having something you want to convey – be it a story, a philosophical approach, an understanding of the world – and struggling to find the right words for expressing it.

(The term “fine literature” makes me, as a science fiction writer, uneasy, since it is often used to exclude many pieces of writing I consider very fine indeed, but I define it more broadly as work that aspires to more than basic communication.)

This is in no way the same as learning how to apply the rules of grammar, though understanding them is one of the underpinnings of writing. It does, however, require a deep and abiding familiarity with the written language you use.

You certainly cannot write effectively in a language unless you have read in it deeply and thoroughly. Continue reading “Language and Writing”…

Books

personby Gillian Polack
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I have 2 posts for you in the same day because this week is suddenly impossibly different. I wrote the prior post before the massacre and am spending my whole Chanukah dealing with consequences for myself and friends. My Baltimore nephew just checked in on me and I never would have thought that, with US shootings, it would be he who had to check in on me.

If you need to understand what happened, ask me, and I’ll post more next Monday. In the interim, I’m seeing a total lack of knowledge about Jewish Australia. Loads of generic good wishes and concern for safety, and some friends write to me directly and most put general statements on FB and don’t think that, just maybe, every single Jewish Australian is in mourning. Some people are full of theories about the role of Israel and want to share their theory without stopping to say, first, that they’re sorry that so many people were murdered and they mourn with us. Their thoughts count more than the humans caught up in this mess. This is what happened here when we heard about the Tree of Life stuff from 2018. I have a friend who goes to that shul and I was there for her then and she’s there for me now and it’s all so wrong. We should be complaining about the weather, not worried about getting safely through the week.

Even the least antisemitic non-Jewish Australians other Jews. American friends help. I wish the reasons for you understanding were not so full of hurt, but I’m grateful to every single one of you who reaches out to me.

How do we handle this? For me, books always help. I posted about this on Facebook – I thought I’d copy my post for you here. maybe books help you, too. After all, Jewish Australia is very, very different to Jewish America. For one thing, we think we’re much wittier and we like our spelling more and… Australian Rules Football. (The footie is an argument in itself – ask me why sometime)

From FB, but with more notes):

Jewish Australia is in the news for the worst possible reason and it might help some people if they know who we are. Jewish Australians may not be many, but our culture is diverse and very Australian. I thought you might like some books to understand a bit better. I’ve included one of my novels, because it’s specifically about Sydney Jews and so that you can have a novel to read if the others are too much right now. It’s safer: the protagonist merely discovered she has Jew cooties – having Jew cooties was much less scary back then.

Apple, Raymond. The Great Synagogue: A History of Sydney’s Big Shule (one of the most important synagogues in the country, and definitely the most important Modern Australian Orthodox synagogue in Sydney, often targeted by marchers who claim they’re not bigots – not yet bombed – the recently-bombed synagogues were in Melbourne)
Baker, Mark The Fiftieth Gate (Mark was an historian, just ahead of me at university. Australia has/had per capita, the biggest Holocaust survivor population outside Israel and one of these survivors was murdered on Sunday. Mark had to deal with those issues as an historian and also a child of survivors. This is that book.)
Gawenda, Michael My Life as a Jew (very recent. Michael was the editor of a major newspaper and so experienced antisemitism quite differently to most of us. He was born in a displacement camp.)
Kofman, Lee and Tamar Paluch Ruptured (a new anthology that shows the path Jewish women walked in the time after October 7.)
Polack, Gillian The Wizardry of Jewish Women (I’ve written far more Jewish things than this, but this is a novel exploring Jewish Australia from the view of someone who nearly lost all their Jewish past. What’s important about it here, is that Judith’s friends are all people from the Left who would not even talk to her now. I’m exploring this a little in short stories, which my Patreon folk have been reading. When I have enough, I’ll think about a story collection. I’m only 2 stories away from enough.)
Rutland, Suzanne The Jews in Australia (the standard history, dated but a very handy introduction)
Sackville-O’Donnell, Judith The first Fagin: the true story of Ikey Solomon (This is a fun way of discovering what’s now Tasmania’s early Jewish population. The differences between Fagin and the guy who inspired him are immense and tell a lot about antisemitism and how it warps things.)
Zable, Arnold Jewels and Ashes (And Aussie classic, all about the last days of a family in Bialystock. Arnold is one of our best story tellers and helped me understand why my grandfather wouldn’t talk about his childhood nor his lost family. His father brought him to Australia in 1917 or 1918, and 35 years later there was no family in Poland at all. Arnold was the last family connection to leave. His family was on a boat on the way here and were banned from entry because Australia had put up fences to keep jews out. Arnold’s family managed to be accepted in New Zealand and they moved here later. In the book, Feivel is the one who married my mother’s cousin. 120,000 people is not a lot, but it’s an enormous number compared with the hundreds in Australia prior to 1810 or the thousands in most of the 19th century. Older families are very interconnected, which is why I have so many links with the authors of these books. I don’t have the same links with post 1950s arrivals – we’re a complex bunch.)

If you want more, try here: Australian Jewish Writers Database | Jewish Australia It’s not updated frequently and it’s not complete, but it gives you a sense of the range of Jewish voices in Australia. You won’t hear most of those voices at Australian literary conventions. I’d love to see suggestions for other books that talk about Jewish Australia.
We’re not a big community, and we only go back to 1788, but there are lots of connections between this group or that group. Some other writers have no idea I exist, while others have known me or my family forever. Through my family, I am connected to several other writers. Some of them have met me but are unlikely to remember me. My favourite example of this is Michael Gawenda. His sister married my uncle and Michael and I sat on the same table at my cousins barmie. Arnold Zable is another example. His most famous book includes relatives of mine. And one conference of the HNSA I found myself next to one of my favourite children’s writers… who turned out to be my aunt’s best friend. Others were connected through school or university: Mark Baker was just ahead of me at university, while Raymond Apple went to Sunday school with my mother when I asked him. He was my rabbi when I lived in Sydney.
How does this play out everyday? We catch up a bit when we see each other, or we do introductions from scratch because we didn’t know each other well as it was 20 years since last time, or (and this one happened to me recently) the usual checks on “Are we related” can turn into something hurtful.
One of the reasons Jewish Australians know each other is because we have a kind of verbal code to find out connections. We talk about relatives and their experiences past and present – this also works with almost anyone with a military background and, entertainingly, with the very far left – or it used to, when they would chat with me. One New Year’s Eve I was sitting with a member of the Communist Party of Australia and we chatted happily for ages because “You’re A’s cousin!” When someone has not had a traditional upbringing, they don’t know this and much hurt can ensue. This is a more recent phenomenon, and most arises when someone from the left needs the right shibboleths said to accept that I’m an acceptable Jew to talk to.

Anyhow, if you want to read more books or want to learn specific aspects of Australian Jewishness, just ask. Books help. Questions and answers help even more.