The Prosperous Thief by Andrea Goldsmith

Author:Andrea Goldsmith
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: FIC019000
ISBN: 9781741154986
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2004-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

Several hours later, with Nell at a departmental barbecue, Laura sat on the couch with Wystan curled in her lap and a pile of work beside her. She glanced at the files and decided they could wait. For she was aware of an unmistakable grievance: at the end of his life, her father had finally opened up, but to a stranger and not his own daughter.And while clearly the stranger had certain claims on the information, surely Laura who had loved her father unreservedly had different, stronger claims. She wondered if Henry might have spoken to Daniel, and then quickly dismissed the thought. Perhaps a few years ago, before Daniel became religious; but since Daniel had pledged allegiance to what Etti used to call the meshuggeneh frummers – fundamentalist conservatives and of quite a different breed from ordinary orthodox Jews – there had been no significant exchange between father and son. Her father had chosen to leave his own son and daughter in the dark throughout his life, and it seemed he had remained consistent to the end.

If only there had been more words from her father and fewer from her mother, Laura was thinking, or through some sleight of hand it had been possible to slice off some of Etti’s and give them to Henry. For there was no doubting Etti had plenty to spare and never any sign she would run dry. Etti had talked ad infinitum about her family and friends in Lodz, all lost. She’d talked of the years in the ghetto, the drag of hunger, the threat of illness and the cruelty of rumour. And after the ghetto, the hiding, the starvation, the cold, the humiliation, and always the huge gnarled fist of fear. Etti, with an eye pressed to memory’s microscope, spared her children no details. Then when the war was over, meeting Henry at Landsberg DP camp, their years in Belgium and how they nearly went to Canada but ended up in Australia because of Etti’s second cousin. And how they’d been warned about the Australian heat, but within minutes of arriving at Port Melbourne were chilled to the bone. The full gambit of family life in the Lewin household had been riven through with the Holocaust, and presiding over it was not Henry and Etti together, but Etti alone, Laura’s fat, hugely loving mother whose very soul had been irreparably fractured and forced to wear splints forever.

‘No one listened then,’ Etti would say, ‘and no one listened when it was over. And people they still don’t want to listen. But if you talk long enough, soon they have to hear. And if people like your father won’t speak, then others have to do it for him. Me, you, even this Steven Spielberg.’

Laura had wondered whether forgiveness played a role in all her mother’s talking, but Etti was scathing about forgiveness. ‘Forgiveness is just an easy way of making normal,’ she used to say. ‘Not my life but the ones who did the wrong.

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