© Goldie Alexander
In my seventh decade it
appears that my childhood memories are becoming stronger while my recall for
‘why did I go into that room?’ keeps fading. As a result certain events in
Australia’s history that occurred when I was a teenager have become my ‘writing
fuel’.
What triggered me to
write That Stranger Next Door was the plight of our asylum seekers and the
‘Children Overboard’ incident, a situation John Howard used to regain his
position as our prime minister. The similarity to the events of 1954 was
overpowering.
Having taught history to high school students I knew how boring that
could be. What had always been lacking was a sense of ‘being there’. Therefore
once I started fictionalising history, I viewed my challenge as creating
convincing settings, characters and dialogue. The all important narrative had
to develop from the problems my characters encountered - their aims, wishes and
fears. All fictions based on history
start with the premise ‘what if you were there at the time’. Though they must
be based on careful research, this research had to be invisible. The story must be seamless.
I had already written five historical fictions for young readers. In
‘Mavis Road Medley’ two contemporary youngsters time-travel to the Great
Depression. In “My Australian Story: Surviving Sydney Cove” a thirteen year old
girl convict lives in 1790 Sydney when the First Fleet felt cut off from the
rest of the world. In ‘Lilbet’s Romance, a disabled girl describes her life
just before the outbreak of World War Two. In ‘Gallipoli Medals’ Great Uncle
Jack is a soldier in WW1. And in ‘The Youngest Cameleer’, my 14year old
protagonist is a 14YO Moslem boy, part of a lesser known exploration into the
interior that led to the first non-indigenous group stumbling across Uluru.
When I was in my mid
teens in the mid 20th Century, PM Menzies was ‘king’ Australia was a
place when the Queen visited us wearing
pearls, England was Home, there was the Korean War, migrants being shunted into
camps, the Snowy Mountain Scheme, the six o’clock swill, nuclear families,
housewifery for women, and the coming of television. Politically, there was the
White Australia Policy, the Communist Referendum, and the split in the Labour
Party into ALP and DLP. And finally, the infamous ‘Petrov Affair’
It was that similarity
of ‘history repeating itself,’ that niggled at me to write about that incident.
When I approached several submission editors with the idea, some didn’t know
what I was talking about. Alternatively, if they did, they told me no one would
be interested.
Given that I am
obstinate enough to persevere, I went ahead and wrote the book anyway. But this
very political story needed a sweetener to make it appeal to young readers.
What could be better than a Romeo/ Juliet romance set against that infamous
affair?
Thus That Stranger
next Door is set in 1954 at the height of the ‘Cold War’. In the United
States, Senator McCarthy was using anti-communist laws to force academics, film
makers and other intellectuals to a senate hearing to ask if they ever belonged
to the Communist Party and to name anyone who had gone to their meetings. Many
people lost their jobs and their families. Some even committed suicide.
When an insignificant
Russian diplomat called Vladimir Petrov defected to Australia, promising to
provide information about a Russian spy-ring, he forgot or avoided mentioning
this to his wife. As Evdokia was pulled onto a plane in Darwin, she was rescued
at the last minute by ASIO and hidden in a ‘safe house’. At the time PM Menzies
was also trying to bring in similar anti-communist legislation to the US, and
thankfully, in this he was unsuccessful.
However, the
implications were frightening. So many migrants who had come to Australia in
previous decades, and thus escaped death in the Holocaust, had joined the
Communist Party. The propaganda coming out of the Soviet Union had been
successful as this was before Russian tanks rolled into Hungary. So when the
Petrov Affair was at its height, and people with membership cards were refused
visas to the States, they buried and burnt any telling literature and trembled
in fear. If Micks hated Protos, and vice versa, both groups joined together to
hate Asians, Aborigines and Jews.
I had to make a story out of that. Thus in That Stranger Next Door, 15YO Ruth, her Jewish mother, father, small brother Leon and her grandfather (Zieda) live above the family milk-bar in Melbourne’s Elwood. Because Ruth’s father once belonged to the Communist Party, the family fear that the ‘Petrov Affair’ will help bring in anti-Communist legislation that will produce another wave of anti-Semitism.
The story opens with
Eva moving in next door and Ruth meeting Catholic Patrick O’Sullivan.
(Patrick’s father is about to work for Bob Santamaria and the emerging DLP
party). Patrick offers to teach Ruth to ride a bike at a time when some Jewish
girls were actively discouraged from riding bikes, never allowed to mix with gentile boys, and kept sexually
ignorant. Eva agrees to provide Ruth
with an alibi for meeting Patrick, but only with the proviso that her presence
also be kept secret. As Ruth rails against her mother’s ‘how a good Jewish
daughter should behave’, she is fascinated by Patrick’s totally different
background. Between Ruth’s account of her first love, Eva fills in her own very
unhappy story. All this takes place
during the height of the Cold War when the world seemed on the knife edge of
nuclear annihilation.
Though many books have
been written by the children of Holocaust survivors, I don’t think anything has come out
about the after effects of the Holocaust on those Jews who were here well before WW2 and
their children, though repercussions have echoed through the decades. This is
my fictional account of what it was like to be a Jewish girl living in
Melbourne, Australia in the mid 1950’s. I should add that this story is pure
fiction. I never lived above a milk-bar, though I had a friend that did, and my
family left Elwood to live in a more salubrious suburb when I was only seven.
That Stranger Next Door by Goldie Alexander (Clan Destine Press)
www.clandestinepress.com.au ISBN 9780992492434 (Available at all good
bookstores)
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