Michael King: At the edge of memory

By MARGIE THOMSON

Those of us who aren't historians can tend to forget what a specific set of skills those chroniclers of the past have. This latest book by Michael King isn't about being a historian, but reading it is a bit like watching any expert do their thing: the apparent ease and grace with which King tells this simple story about his extended family belie the hard work, the years of solid experience.

It is a slim volume compared with some of his other 30 works (his most recent biographies of Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame, in particular, display the skills of their author in their density and painstaking detail) but while it's a story about mostly unfamous people and much of it takes place in Hamilton - a small city in a small country - it nevertheless has far-reaching consequences.

Its tendrils snake out from the Waikato district, connecting the apparently ordinary among us to some of the most momentous events of the 20th century.

This is the story of King's great-uncle by marriage, Maurice Belgrave, who arrived in New Zealand in 1908 and became a successful Hamilton draper and businessman. He insisted he was a Gaelic-speaking Scottish Presbyterian (this seemed to explain his slight accent), although he converted to Catholicism to marry one of his shop assistants, Margaret Hartnett.

The couple had three sons and became, King says, "a prominent Catholic clan", well respected in the city.

Yet all this, King reveals, was invention, although during his life "Bel", as Maurice Belgrave was known by those close to him, gave his family no clues about his identity and history.

The only indication of his origins was given to the family's housekeeper who happened upon him one day in August 1943, listening with tears glistening on his cheeks to the BBC radio reports of Nazi extermination camps where most of the inmates were believed to be Jewish.

"Those are my people," he wept. Just days later, possibly worn out by repressed truth, guilt and grief, King speculates, he died of a heart attack.

King, born two years after the death of Maurice Belgrave, grew up close to his cousins from that side of the family but it never crossed his mind that they were anything other than as they appeared: Catholic, probably Irish-Catholic, just as he was himself, despite the unarticulated question mark over Bel's identity that was afoot in the family.

Conversations King had in the 1980s with people who had known Bel revealed long-held suspicions, but no actual information.

It was only in 2000 that the door to the past flew open, admitting a sudden view of a world now gone, the noisy shtetls of Europe, where poverty, pogroms and sometimes religious conservatism helped to drive the inhabitants out into the world, part of the ongoing diaspora of the Jewish people.

Out of the blue, King received a phone call from an American man by the name of Belgray who proved to be a long-lost relation with a fascinating story to tell. That phone call was the catalyst for King to do some exploratory work of his own and what he uncovered was a story that meandered through several cultures and time frames, from the shtetls of Poland and the Ukraine, to East London, to New York, Melbourne and the suburbs of Hamilton.

What elevates this volume from being something of interest only to King's extended family - apart, of course, from King's gleaming storytelling skills - is the way he places his great-uncle (and therefore himself) in the context of much bigger histories. Even backwaters feed, eventually, into raging torrents.

As King's exploration progresses, it is not just the Jewish diaspora - that great, centuries-long scattering - which takes its tragic form again and again in this little story as families leave communities, sons and daughters leave parents, brothers leave brothers; but also, inevitably, the Shoah, like a ghoul come to haunt, is seen as something with the power not only to horrify, but even perhaps to kill, all these thousands of miles away.

At the beginning of At the Edge of Memory, King quotes Israel Baal Shem Tov: "Memory is the root of all deliverance. And forgetting is the root of exile."

This book is certainly an act of memory, of reconciliation with the past, and of peace (of mind and spirit), as King makes clear in a moving scene in a Hamilton graveyard towards the book's end.

It is also part of the great cleaning that is going on in New Zealand of the colourful mosaic that is who we really are, despite the grey, monocultural wash that obscured us for most of the decades of last century, and which necessitated the personal camouflaging of Maurice Belgrave.

Anyone with an interest in their own family history will marvel at the way that King can assemble a family tree out of names that were all but forgotten, and then put flesh back on their bones and fill the air with their noise.

Even better, what he finally discovers is a kind of diaspora-in-reverse. "Astonishingly, what the Diaspora and the Shoah have ripped asunder, the internet is reassembling," he notes.

He goes on to observe, with the long view typical of his profession, that "the balance of the ledger of history, it turns out, is rarely one of irretrievable and unrelieved loss". It is as interesting to contemplate why some people, such as Maurice Belgrave, should want to close out the past, while others, like King, seek it out. Perhaps we could say that one strategy is about survival, the other about enrichment.

At one point in the story he is interviewing an old woman, a niece of Bel's. She is becoming upset as her memories are stirred up, and challenges King's reasons for asking her so many questions. King begins to question himself, his "justification for stirring up an old person's detritus of memory and grief".

He scrabbles around in his bag and finds the Israel Baal Shem Tov quotation, and the old lady thinks, blows her nose and is convinced. "Yes," she says. "Yes, that is true. Who we are comes from remembering."

Penguin

$34.95