Category: Life Experiences

Welcoming in the New Year

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I had plans for today. Mainly I intended to tell you about books, including the ones I’m reading now. A confluence of circumstances undermined that. That’s my words masking the fact that I’m living one of the books I was going to tell you about. Do not live a book, it’s not nearly as much fun as novels suggest.

The book I’m living is a group of essays, Ruptured, edited by Lee Hofman and Tamar Paluch. Thirty-six Australians write about their lives in Australia since October 7. In every essay there’s something that also belongs in my life, even though most of them come from very different abckgrounds to me. We’re all Jewish. We’re all women. We’re all Australian. Most of us are in the Arts. And we are so very different.

How am I living this book right now?

There’s always a rise in antisemitism just before big Jewish festivals. At least there is in Australia. And by ‘always’ I mean the last decade. October 7 put the rise on strange drugs and made it bigger and nastier, but it’s been happening for a while. And Rosh Hashanah has always been difficult in other respects. There was the year I wasn’t even allowed to take a single day off for it, even though the union had negotiated for moments exactly like that. The Federal public service let me know back then, in 1989, that being Jewish was not acceptable and that microaggressions would be the norm and punishment for wanting to take a day off for my new year was acceptable. I was on flextime back then. I had heaps of hours on my flextime, but had not even been allowed to take two hours off using those hours, in the morning. I did what every Gillian should do at moments like these. I brought a great deal of honeycake into work and everyone kept dropping by my desk to be fed. I worked the fewest hours I could, with the latest start and the longest lunch. I was on the computer maybe for 10 minutes, to sign in and out and check that I wasn’t missing anything urgent (I wasn’t going to let my sulk actually hurt anyone) and … I made my point. I was allowed to take Yom Kippur off, when it arrived. These days I am not allowed in places to begin with and feel like a child who has been sent to their room and can hear the other children play. I am lucky. I’m not banned from some things – in fact, I’m a welcome friend. This means I lose Rosh Hashanah this year for some things, but still get Yom Kippur and even Sukkot. Ironically, I first discovered this problem when someone destroyed my Yom Kippur a couple of years ago. I am alert this time of year these days. Always.

This year is better and worse. I have friends watching out for me. I’m not alone. Some years I have been very alone. The worse is that the public ferment is already worse and is going to get worse still.

The amount of work I have to do is immense, but VICFA (the organisation running a conference just before) has made sure that everything will be done several hours before Rosh Hashanah begins. And I have deadlines galore, but I’m used to that. This early in third term in Australia and the rest of the country does a lot of work in September and October so that things can be finished for the big shutdown from December. Rosh Hashanah was not planned with Christmas in mind, nor the Australian summer.

Why does this feel as if I’m in Ruptured? The essays show women having to do everything to the schedules and needs of the non-Jewish community, while fielding antisemitism, and having to be Jewish and do family stuff and remember that ordinary life still exists.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about what this means for Gaza. In fact, I just typed a very long paragraph on the politics and my concern about following slogans rather than seeking the human needs that the slogans are supposed to address. But even saying what I have just said may enough – in this ungentle year – to provoke anger and threats if the right person reads it. Free speech is not part of my new year. Not free speech for me, anyhow. I’m too Jewish. And that is something every woman who wrote an essay documented. A silencing. Even if our opinions are similar to the person speaking, we can’t speak safely unless we use the right words. And the right words are terrifying. My secret historical linguist (historical linguistics is a part of being an ethnohistorian, but I’m not a specialist in the field) analyses how words are shifting and… the new meanings of some of the words and phrases we’re told we must use imply that Jews are evil, by nature, and that a country with no Jews is an improved country. My secret historical linguist wants someone other than me to do a really, really good study into changing political language and protest language in 2025. I want to be proven wrong.

This new year, when I dip apple in honey and say “To a Good and Sweet Year” I will mean it fervently, for all of us.

Some Thoughts on Cooperatives

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

In our book club meeting last week, we got off for awhile on a tangent about cooperation and competition and human nature. This was in part because we were discussing a book on Elinor Ostrom’s work on the commons, which is a form of cooperation.

Now I’m a big fan of the cooperative approach from way back – I organized food co-ops, lived in housing co-ops, and am currently a member of at least three credit unions. And I also think competition tends to be overrated, especially since it so often leads to cheating and overemphasis on the winner of some contest.

On the other hand, competition is a good way to block monopolies and to give us the diversity of enterprises we need.

But here’s the thing about cooperation that really hit me: we don’t just use it to do good.

As my Aikido friend Ross Robertson once observed when we were discussing the subject, one of the first things human beings cooperated to do was war.

Now it’s likely that they cooperated to raise kids and feed each other first, but war does go back quite a way in human history. It’s not new.

And while an army usually has forced cooperation, it can still be seen as a cooperative enterprise, with the competition side coming out in fighting with others.

I mean, mobs can also be a form of cooperation. Social groups cooperate to keep others out.

We are social beings, and standing up against the group is difficult, even when we’re right. So while I’d like to think that true cooperation isn’t done for evil purposes, the truth is that people cooperate for both good and bad reasons.

Which, to get back to Ostrom and the commons and various kinds of co-ops, is one reason why it’s important to create solid and workable structures for such enterprises. Continue reading “Some Thoughts on Cooperatives”…

Some Thoughts From a Wedding

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

Last weekend at a wedding, my partner leaned toward me and, with tears in his eyes, said, “We are seeing the future.”

And it’s a good future. Or, as some of us old folks like to say, “The kids are all right.”

Earlier at the wedding, I found myself thinking, “Fuck those people who want to destroy all this.” Because this wedding was the antithesis of all the horrific violence that is being done to our country (and in the name of our country) right now.

This was a wedding for our times. It was a queer wedding. The people in attendance were quite diverse — a mix of genders, races, ethnicities, ages, backgrounds, and home locations.

The couple – one woman, one nonbinary person – met at the orientation for the graduate program in public health at U.C. Berkeley in 2021. I mean, these are folks who chose to study public health during a pandemic, so you know already they are people who are out to make good trouble in the world.

As a rule, I’m a bit skeptical about marriage. I’ve spent most of my life single and while I’m now in a committed relationship, we aren’t planning to get married for reasons that range from philosophical to practical.

But I do like celebrations and I also like the people who got married, who are neighbors of ours. Their joy in each other is wonderful.

The wedding ceremony reflected that individual joy, the political awareness of the complexity of the times, and the vital importance of ritual in our lives, not to mention the joy that comes from gathering. Continue reading “Some Thoughts From a Wedding”…

Reprint: Traumatic bereavement and how to help the survivors

personby Deborah J. Ross
schedulePosted on

When grief involves trauma − a social worker explains how to support survivors of the recent floods and other devastating losses

Rain falls over a makeshift memorial for flood victims along the Guadalupe River on July 13, 2025, in Kerrville, Texas.
AP Photo/Eric Gay

Liza Barros-Lane, University of Houston-Downtown

The July 4, 2025, floods in Kerr County, Texas, swept away children and entire families, leaving horror in their wake. Days later, flash floods struck Ruidoso, New Mexico, killing three people, including two young children.

These are not just devastating losses. When death is sudden, violent, or when a body is never recovered, grief gets tangled up with trauma.

In these situations, people don’t only grieve the death. They struggle with the terror of how it happened, the unanswered questions and the shock etched into their bodies.

I’m a social work professor, grief researcher and the founder of The Young Widowhood Project, a research initiative aimed at expanding scholarship and public understanding of premature spousal loss.

I was widowed when I was 36. In July 2020, my husband, Brent, went missing after testing a small, flat-bottomed fishing boat called a Jon boat. His body was recovered two days later, but I never saw his remains.

Both my personal loss and professional work have shown me how trauma changes the grieving process and what kind of support actually helps.

To understand how trauma can complicate grief, it’s important to first understand how people typically respond to loss.

Grief isn’t a set of stages

Many people still think of grief through the lens of psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief, popularized in the early 1970s: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

But in fact, this model was originally designed for people facing their own deaths, not for mourners. In the absence of accessible grief research in the 1960s, it became a leading framework for understanding the grieving process – even though it wasn’t meant for that.

Despite this misapplication, the stages model has shaped cultural expectations: namely, that grief ends once people reach the “acceptance” stage. But research doesn’t support this idea. Trying to force grief into this model can cause real harm, leaving mourners feeling they’re grieving “wrong.”

In reality, mourning is often lifelong. Most people go through an acute period of overwhelming pain right after the loss. This is usually followed by integrated grief, where the pain softens but the loss is still part of everyday life, returning in waves.

Although grief is unique to each person and relationship, researchers have found that mourners often strive to a) make sense of the death; b) adjust to a world without their loved one; c) form an ongoing connection with their deceased loved one in new ways; and d) figure out who they are without their loved one.

It’s difficult and at times disorienting work, but most people find ways to carry their grief and keep living.

A grandmother embraces a young woman in front of a wall of flowers.
Julia Mora embraces her granddaughter, Isla Meyer, during a vigil for Texas flood victims on July 11, 2025.
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
When grief and trauma collide

However, some losses carry an extra layer of pain, confusion and trauma.

Sudden, unexpected, accidental, violent or deeply tragic deaths – like those experienced during the recent floods – can lead to what researchers call traumatic bereavement: grief that is disrupted by the traumatic nature of the death.

People experiencing traumatic bereavement often endure a longer and more intense acute grief period. They may be haunted by disturbing images, nightmares or relentless thoughts about how their loved one died or suffered. Many wrestle with dread, spiritual disorientation and a shattered sense of safety in the world.

Some of these deaths are also considered “ambiguous” – unclear or unconfirmed loss – such as when a body is never recovered or is too damaged to view. Without physical confirmation, mourners often feel stuck in disbelief and helplessness.

This was true in my case. Not seeing my husband’s body left a part of me suspended between knowing and not knowing. I knew he had died but couldn’t fully believe it, no matter how much I lived with the reality of his absence. For a long time, I caught myself repeating these words every morning: “Brent is dead. Brent is dead.”

In many cases, these reactions aren’t short term. Many people affected by traumatic loss remain overwhelmed and sometimes physically and emotionally impaired for years. Symptoms may taper over time, but they rarely disappear entirely.

Supporting mourners

Traumatic bereavement can feel unbearable. Many mourners struggle with intense, long-lasting reactions that can leave them feeling helpless, altered or even unrecognizable to themselves. They may appear withdrawn, forgetful or emotionally drained because their systems are overwhelmed. Coping can look messy or self-destructive, but these are often survival strategies, not conscious choices. I’ve also seen how those same struggles become more survivable when mourners don’t have to carry them alone. If you’re supporting someone through traumatic loss, here are three ways to help.

  • Make space for the horror. Listen without flinching. Acknowledge the full weight of what happened and how terrifying and unjust the loss was. This means saying things like, “This should never have happened,” or “What you went through is beyond words.” It means staying present when the mourner speaks about what haunts them. Let them know they don’t have to carry this alone. You may feel the urge to say something hopeful such as, “At least the body was recovered,” but there is no silver lining in these cases. Instead, say: “There’s nothing I can say to fix this, but I’m not going anywhere.”
  • Help them find others who can understand. Trauma can be isolating. Mourners often feel uniquely overwhelmed or confused. Support groups, peer companions and therapists trained in treating grief and trauma can offer the kind of recognition and validation that even the most devoted friend may not be able to provide.
  • Take care of yourself, too. Being present for someone in deep grief takes energy, especially if you were personally affected by the loss. Stay connected to replenishing people, practices and routines. If you don’t, you may begin to experience trauma, too. Taking care of yourself will help you remain grounded so that you can show up.

I believe supporting someone through traumatic bereavement is one of the most meaningful things you can do. You don’t need perfect words or a plan. What sustains them won’t be advice or solutions, but your simple, powerful act of staying.The Conversation

Liza Barros-Lane, Assistant Professor of Social Work, University of Houston-Downtown

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

Continue reading “Reprint: Traumatic bereavement and how to help the survivors”…

Finding Books

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

Part One

One of the less-talked about side effects of the current wave of antisemitism is that we simply don’t hear about Jewish writers. Some of us (Jewish writers) write for the wider world, some specifically for Jewish communities. The vast majority of us are less visible. I was chatting with other Jewish writers a few weeks ago, and I discovered that this was worse in Australia than in the US, but that there’s no place not infected by the hate.

What readers read is our choice. Finding out about books we’d like to read is far more difficult than it used to be. If a reader has a favourite author who happens to be Jewish, they might not have access to anything new by them because the book publicity trail ignores much of the new work by Jewish writers. At the other end of the spectrum, if a reader doesn’t want to read any book by Jews, they can simply not buy the books or not borrow them from the library. Losing public awareness of Jewish writing doesn’t change the situation for those who will never read a Jewish writer: it changes it for those who want to and have no idea what books to ask for.

What I shall do here is, on the Mondays when I have a group of writers who share being Jewish and who want to be introduced… I shall introduce them. It’s that simple.

I’ve gradually, over the years, found other ways of sharing news about writers, to make up for those essays I used to write, that looked at so many books that I’d read. I miss the parcels of books in the mail, and excitedly reading a dozen of them and finding three that would work together nicely.

My new way of finding books for other people (when I can’t obtain them all myself or read them all) is to ask writers, “Who would you like to be in a group with?” When I get answers to this question, I’ll write more posts like this. They won’t always be about Jewish writers, because there are other groups that are also less seen than they should be. That’s the thing about antisemitism (as most of Australia saw on Sunday, even if they had no idea what they were seeing): it spreads into distrust and silencing of other minority groups. It’s as if people discover permission to lose chunks of culture and the people who create that culture. I can’t tell you about the books or who their audience is unless they’re in the world of science fiction, fantasy or historical fiction, or unless they write history at my end of the history trail. I used to be able to! One of the side-effects of being unwell (and plodding towards blindness) is that I no longer read three books a day. I miss having read all the books and being able to say “Oh! I read that! I can talk about it!” This is not a review series, then, but a simple set of reports.

Call this a series on how writers see themselves and which books they see sitting nicely alongside theirs on the shelf.

If you know of writers who are missing from bookshelves and from essays and from talks, encourage them to contact me and to share with me some details of their work and that of several other writers. And now on to our first group of writers!

Part Two

Debbi Weinberg Lakritz writes children’s books. The US has its own labels, and there they’re called picture books. If there’s a pile of books and a child instantly sits down with it and will not budged until all pages have been turned, then her books may be in that pile. The writes she suggests belong with hers on that pile (shelves don’t work nearly as well as glorious stacks of books when we’re talking about picture books) are Liza Wiemer, Ann Koffsky and Erica Lyons.

When I was a child there was just one picture book for Jewish children in our home library and none at all in our local library. We read it and read it and read it. One of my sisters learned how to use the stepstool before it was actually safe, because this book talked to us in a way that other books didn’t. The book disappeared fifty years ago and I only half remember its title. It was published in the 1940s or 1950s, and was a beige hardback. I look back at my Melbourne childhood and wonder at it and am totally pleased that these days there are choices for picture books that talk to Jewish children.

If any of you explore those books, let me know about them? I would love to know how children read and enjoy books that reflect their own background. I was not one of those children and nor were any Jewish Australian children in the 1960s.

Tomorrow night I attend the launch of a book that discusses what it’s like to be a Jewish Australian right now. I shall raise a glass there to these four authors, and to every other writer who helps give children a sense that they belong in this world. Debbi explained her group of writers to me and told me how warm and supportive the Jewish kidlit world is. This is another excuse to support kidlit. We need that kind and generous world to expand, so very much.

Escaping

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

Is it already Monday?

I am going to write a series on Jewish writers.

Why?

I’m so glad you asked!

I spend a lot of time each week fighting hate. Some people don’t hate so much as think my whole life should be spent fighting the cause their heart is with, which is, in Australia right now, fighting everything about Israel, including its existence.

I am not Israeli (I fight the bad things it does and cheer on the good, just as I do with any other country), however most Australian Jews are dealing with unprecedented levels of antisemitism. This should leave me free of the need to articulate shibboleths, since I’m already one of the bad people in their eyes, right? Entirely wrong. Just over the weekend, these folks have been saying (if they’re nice) “You’re looking at this all wrong. I’ll explain to you how you should think.” If they’re not so nice I learn many things about myself I did not know.

Mostly the bad language and accusations fall into two categories: what I like to think of as new DoubleSpeak, or accusations. I asked someone if I could use their words here to illustrate the DoubleSpeak, as I wanted an example of the particular language they used – it was gloriously fake – and they disappeared from the discussion entirely. The insults can be mild, but they’re usually more dramatic. I’m learning how to handle them better. When someone calls me a child-killer I generally tell them to let the police know and to hand over all the evidence, for instance.

I’m trying to work out what kind of mind hates in this way. This is a marvellous opportunity to find out, because there’s so much hate directed at most Jews. In Australia, we’ve even got ‘good Jews’ and ‘bad Jews.’ I’ve seen people labelled this way three times in the last two days. Last week there were even more labels, because of a literary festival that went terribly awry.

I don’t know about you, but I need a break from this shambolic mess. This is why I’ll introduce books for the next few weeks.

Several groups of Jewish writers gave me details of their books to share (and I’m watching out for more!). The sadness is that I can’t read them until I’m caught up with all my backlog. I’ve been unwell again so the backlog is severe. My normal “Let me read everything first so that I can introduce it properly” will not work. If I’ve read and enjoyed something, I’ll let you know, I promise. Otherwise I’ll tell you what I can.

I’ll share books right up until Jewish New Year. If you want more books after that, I’ll happily continue. I might not be the only person who needs books to distract them from the rather scary everyday.

Walking After Midnight

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

When I was a teenager, I wanted to go hang out in the pool hall like the “bad boys” did. I wanted to learn to shoot pool – and I also wanted to just be in that kind of space – but it was made pretty clear that girls weren’t allowed.

I didn’t want to hang out in the pool hall because I was sexually attracted to bad boys. I wasn’t. It wasn’t sex I was after; it was the freedom to do something like hanging out and shooting pool.

(Learning some years later that my father was something of a pool shark and could have taught me to play well made this fantasy more poignant. I could have worked my way through school shooting pool instead of making pizzas and loading trucks.)

In the chapter “Walking After Midnight” in Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust,  she quotes Sylvia Plath writing in her journal at 19:

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars — to be part of a scene, synonymous, listening, recording — all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstructed as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

That sums up exactly how I felt. While I read Plath back in the day, I don’t remember stumbling across this observation or realizing that she, too, understood this need, but I suspect this explains some of the tragedy of her life.

We didn’t want a romance with the likes of Jack Kerouac. We wanted to have adventures like he had. Of course, those adventures were all like the boys’ clubs in the funnies – “no girls allowed,” except, of course, as sex objects. Continue reading “Walking After Midnight”…

Unintended Consequences, or How We Fail to Hear About Good Books

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

Today I’m thinking about how we hear about writers. This is not only for general reading, but also for academic writing. The second, in this case, leads to the first.

One of the subjects academics ask me about or various bods want me to write about is Australian science fiction and fantasy. Until a few years ago I knew when any book was coming out and knew most of the writers and was exceptionally useful. Right now, I’m only useful on some subjects.

I can talk about writers until about 2015, and often write about writers before 1900. An article of mine on Tasma-of-the-many-names was just published in Aurealis, an Australian speculative fiction magazine. I can write about Jewish Australian writers and, in fact, do. I can also write (and do) about the links between Australian writing and the writing of other countries. Also, many books that incorporate history are still part of my terrain because, first and foremost, I’m an ethnohistorian.

Recently, I stopped writing about most contemporary Australian writers. Some I still know a bunch about, but for many I know only the names of their works. Given I have so much else to write about and don’t have the physical capacity to go chasing, I now avoid mentioning certain types of writers. I still consult, behind the scenes, when international scholars want to flesh out their knowledge, but I have to tell them that, “I know about this person and their work, but I don’t know where it belongs.” I no longer introduce Irish fans to the latest in Australian speculative fiction: we talk about other things.

Why did this change?

There are three reasons.

When I let the wider world know that I was not well, two groups of local writers dumped me from their social circles, almost instantly. This marches alongside with when my eyesight started failing and I was no longer permitted to be an award judge. It was apparently too difficult to give me lifts or to make sure that a dinner was reasonably COVID-safe or to find a type of text my eyes could read without making them worse.

These decisions by others makes it much harder for me to find out more about writing from Australia, and especially from Canberra and the Canberra region. Given how much the world of publishing is changing and how we hear about something is often somewhat random, this has significant consequences. If I can’t answer questions at an academic conference, very few of the scholars asking questions look further. They’re also overworked and under stress: this is not an easy decade for any of us.

I don’t hear about work now by these groups of writers or those who are close to them until after the work is published. I would have to put in extra work for each and every published book to find out that it has been published and if a book is in my scholarly ballpark. I have chronic fatigue, five books to finish, and I am no longer paid to write articles about groups of books. I miss being a pro-blogger and a literary magazine person, because they gave me paid time to chase things. My paid time is firmly Medieval right now, and does not include modern SFF unless I’m writing something for Aurealis.

Prior to my exclusion, chat told me what was going on and I could chase it and… I knew so much without much effort. My social circles, in fact, were what initially pushed me into writing about contemporary speculative fiction online and in magazines and giving papers at conferences. One of the symptoms of my illnesses is chronic fatigue: I will take that extra work, but only when I can. I’ve had this symptom since my 20s, but it’s only after I confessed to it that it changed what I knew by changing who would accept me in their social circles.

Only a very few non-Australian academics write about Australian speculative fiction. I know many of them. My refocus on subjects that are achievable without make me more ill affects how these writers are seen outside Canberra. It is not intentional discrimination on my part, but if I don’t have time or energy to chase up something new that touches on my areas of expertise I then write on subjects that are just as interesting to my readers, but that don’t push me beyond my capacity. Eustace the Monk is a case in point. I’ve now been asked by a number of people about Eustace, and used the same core research for each inquiry. This enables me to have a full life, despite the illness.

Second, when I was excluded from a particular science fiction convention, the writers who consulted with me there lost access to me. And me, I was no longer in a position to hear about their work while they were thinking about it, because they no longer asked me questions or did my workshops. Work by those writers has to wait, the way work by most other writers waits, for me to get around to it. Since I was first working on a dissertation and now on non-fiction books, and also write my novels, the wait is long.

The first and second reasons added together affect one group of writers in particular. When scholars and fan organisers ask me about most Canberra authors, I tell them what I know, but what I know is no longer insider-knowledge for most writers. I’m not the only one, as local academic jobs in the Humanities are few and far between. Scholarly work about Australian speculative fiction is likely to mention writers’ names in passing than to look at their work closely or to teach it at university. Those who were part of my earlier studies are still getting articles written about them or even being tagged for (paid) academic stuff as a long-term result of that work. I am not doing the research or running academic programmes: I am merely one of the half dozen people who can be asked casually about the subject. That ‘merely’ has consequences for how much attention given to some writers who are probably very deserving of scholarly work and being taught at university. Some writers still get attention, but most writers won’t be seen. This only affects a group of universities, but there are very few universities in the world that teach Australian speculative fiction as a subject. Other courses that include Australian writers will only include the extraordinary,  and most of our fiction will be passed over.

The third reason, of course, is that I’m Jewish. I am no longer included on lists of writers to ask about this or that, because Jew cooties may be infectious.

So many other writers locally have no idea of my work at this point, much less my research. I joke that I’m better known in Germany than in Australia, which is not entirely true. I’m better known in some parts of Germany than in some parts of Australia. I’ve gone from being an Ambassador of Reading for the country, to being left off lists as a writer. This, again, reduces who I see and who I can recommend to others. It has, in fact, a bigger impact that the other two reasons combined. Jew cooties would not be a problem in the writing world if there had been a flurry of activity to replace the Jewish writers and publicists and editors and more. There has not been. We’re seeing an increasing numbers of holes in communication in both the writing world and in academia, and even in bookshop events, simply because of individuals who are too Jewish and whose work has not been replaced.

This is worse in the US than Australia. In Australia it’s my kind of work that’s missing. That’s too big to examine here. Maybe another day.

This disadvantages those who are not leaving me out of things, because I won’t write the general introduction to a field I am not on top of. The result right now? An introductory article I was going to write for an academic journal is not even going to be suggested. Someone else will have to write it.

When we play games with people’s lives, the person whose life is targeted is not the only victim. As a Jewish writer, my book sales are down by 75%. As a Jewish/chronically ill academic, the book sales of those I would have written about are also diminished.

The writing world is complex. Hate and exclusion do not affect just the target: they change what books we know about and what writers we want to read. My recent life is an example this.

 

Update: The chrnoic illnesses have ruled my week and so I put this up unedited. If you read it before 14 August, note that it is now edited! And tagged.

Lateness

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I’m late with this post because I’ve been wrangling antisemitism again. It’s become worse… again. And so I’m behind on things… again. The good news is that the book I’m writing on how a bunch of people see and share the Jewish history of Germany from before 1700 is reaching the end of a first draft. It may be difficult to find a publisher because things Jewish are not popular right now, but I’ve been exploring how museums and tourist places, and books, and strangers, and community presentative, and historians and archaeologists and even occasional random antisemites are part of how we see the past.

In one way, this is Gillian as she always is. My life revolves around story and history, after all.

In another way, it’s a new path, because I’ve not had the confidence to question some of our big assumptions about who we are and how we came to be. Just today I saw a comment about Ashkenazi Jews not being actually European. I want to revolt when people say things like this, because it shows how very little they know about Jewish history. Most of us were first brought into Europe by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago. Some came earlier, some came later. If we’re not European, then there are a lot of other people counted as European who are not.

The heart of Ashkenazi Jewish culture was formed in what’s now France and Germany in the Middle Ages. Our religion is from the Levant and our religious culture is from the Levant, but our popular culture and how we shape our world is European. yet there are many people who question this and yet accept eastern and central Europeans whose ancestors arrived in Europe far more recently. And I know why this is.

What I haven’t understood is how deeply I and all my teachers accepted the othering. I’m now de-accepting it and discovering that the reason I’m so comfortable analysing English and French and German history is because the heart of Ashkenaz is not only in Germany (I was there last year, exploring for the book) but even Ashkenazi Jewish educational teaching has a French and German heart.

We are both Levantine and European in equal amounts. They’re not separate things, either. There’s not a section of my European ancestral cultures that’s European and another section that is from Jerusalem. There’s a wonderful integration. Maybe I’ll explore this hen I’m finished the five big projects I’m currently engaged in. Or maybe I’ll just sit back and think, “This explains so much.” Last night I explained how much and why to a friend who is a chazan and he was mindboggled because … once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

There are so many reasons I adore research. Being mindboggled is definitely one of them. Also, it’s such a very Jewish thing to experience more and more hate and to turn to learning for comfort.

Farewell to Eden

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I’m still in Eden. I leave at 7 am tomorrow and my very nice neighbour just knocked on my door and checked that all is well. I cannot get to the bus stop on foot, you see. It’s over a kilometre and all uphill. She’s lovely and is driving me. We both checked up on bus stops and we both want to make sure I’m there on time and I feel very reassured.
What have I done in Eden? First, I’ve done a truckload of research for a novel to be set here. I have two other novels to finish first, but Eden has such a lovely complex history that it makes the perfect setting. Also, it has a lovely climate, charming and chatty people and once had a Jewish whaler. The killer whales were characters of their own until they moved on for better harvests and… it’s perfect for my weird Australia. I suspected it might be, which is why I spent so much time here.
I don’t have proper access to internet (the wifi is too weak) so the big things, as I said last week, remained undone. I have, however, almost finished three short stories and completely finished 7 short pieces of non-fiction. My Monday and Tuesday will be all about editing, once all this writing is on my own computer.’
What else did I do? Besides walking as far as I could every day (I extended my physical capacity – I’d be very proud of myself if I had extended it to the distance most other people can walk, but I can now walk to my own local shops in Canberra, which is unexpected and good) and chatting with everyone and taking many, many pictures? I’ve been watching The Mysterious Cities of Gold. This was something I needed to see because it answers many questions about children’s television in Australia at about the time I stopped watching children’s television. I grew up on Astroboy and Kimba and The Samurai and The King’s Outlaw and, of course, Star Trek and Doctor Who. Anyone 15-20 years younger than me grew up on The Mysterious Cities of Gold. And other things. When I learn what those other things are, I can analyse them.

My TV viewing was, you see, work. I am trying to work out how hatred is suddenly everywhere. Why we other and mistrust and don’t see the very real lives of our neighbours. It’s very easy to see why I live in a wide world: I watched a Japanese detective series when I was still in primary school. I studied Christina Rosetti when I was in Grade Four. The weather poem was silly and Goblin Market was overwhelming for a 9 year old: I owe Mr Remenyi a lot for letting us grow through poetry.  Furthermore, I could be very rude in Greek when I was in Grade Five. The antisemitism was there (it never fully goes away) but avoiding the toilets while I was at primary school and answering questions like “Why do you drink babies’ blood?” was part of a big and complicated world and wasn’t so scary. These days no-one asks. They make statements. Wrong and hateful statements. This cuts the world down in size and turns it claustrophobic. I knew not to ask questions about the childhood of anyone who wore long sleeves in summer, because they were Shoah survivors: these days I’m told all sorts of strange things about my own life. I’m waiting for one of them to be true, and then I can crow like Peter Pan. I may be waiting a while. While I wait, though, I need to understand the stories people carry from their childhoods so that I can know where all this comes from.
I know what I did and what I was taught. I do not know the same about the next generation. They’re the ones leading the hate. I need to understand them better. And I am starting in a safe place for all of us… with what TV they watched.
I am open to suggestions of what other television I need to see. It would help me immensely if you explained when what you’re suggesting was on television and where it was on television. That way I can see patterns. Patterns are far better for understanding hate than shutting the world down and deleting bits of it.