Arnold Zable: Scraps of heaven

Picture / Paul Estcourt

It's 1958 in Melbourne and 12-year-old Josh is, like any boy of his age, absorbed in his own energy, taking pleasure in running, fighting, playing. The streets of his neighbourhood Carlton are his world and he knows it well. Home is an alien place, however: his mother Zofia is going mad.

Josh is old enough to be able to observe with detachment his mother, a Polish immigrant irrevocably damaged by the war; more specifically, her harrowing time in a concentration camp. Zofia speaks little of it, but those experiences are in her head and the feared voices, the dybbuk, which she's hearing more loudly each day, are crowding out all else.

Josh is also able to see that his father, Romek, cannot reach Zofia and he is literally shrinking in stature. Romek drudges away at his stall at the markets, while Zofia mends and sews, following a routine but trapped in the past.

The couple have some friends, most of them also immigrants, whose traditional ceremonies such as weddings keep the old ways afloat. But Zofia has lost all of her large family — except her older brother, who emigrated to Melbourne before the war. A fat little man, Yossel lords it over Zofia, boasting about his contemporary material possessions, yet unable to look her in the eye.

Moving through the four seasons of 1958, Scraps of Heaven is less a narrative — in fact, not much happens at all — than a tapestry of a neighbourhood and a group of people trying to make a new life and regain some dignity. Their Australian neighbours are rough, and the immigrants — many of whom were highly educated in the life before — are subject to racism.

How little things have changed. Zable, who was born in Wellington and has spent most of his life in Australia, has devoted his career to the Yiddish stories of those new Australians who flooded into the country after the war.

There's a wider message at work. Zable is also a vociferous critic of the Howard Government's treatment of refugees, the new wave of desperates engaged in the endless search for safety and tolerance.

Scraps of Heaven is an evocative expression of the struggles of people such as Zofia and Romek, whose lives in the new land are mired in the past to the point of ruin. Their son, however, is running headlong into a future in the country where he was born. Meanwhile, even Zofia can take some comfort from the small, dull things in daily life, those little scraps of heaven. A strangely moving read which resonates long after the last page is turned.

* Linda Herrick is the Herald arts editor

* Text Publishing, $35