From Generation Journal to The Fiftieth Gate

I worked at Generation Journal with Mark for the last five of its 11-year existence. For those who are not familiar with it, its full title was “A Journal of Australian Jewish Life, Thought, and Community”, later shortened to, simply, “Jewish Life”. It is available online thanks to Mark’s superhuman efforts before his death.

From the outset, Working at Generation was, like working on anything with Mark, exhilarating.

I started off doing admin, which I took over slowly from the incomparable Selma Seknow.I slowly began editing and organising, hence my title in later issues as Managing Editor.

The Generation office was firstly located at Beth Weitzman, then, because Mark found that too stuffy, we moved to rooms above the Classic Cinema, and finally to Carlisle Street, above where Dorevitch pathology is.

I was the only non-Jew working at these offices, amongst the incredible Executive Editors the Journal had during my time: Yvonne Fein, Sidra Kranz Moshinsky, Gaby Wenig; the ever-reliable Ros Loff as Subscriptions Manager, Eva Migdal as Arts Manager, and countless others like Kerryn Baker, who was brilliant at sourcing artists for us.

There were so many others, too numerous to mention here; and so many writers, poets, artists, cartoonists, photographers, whose brilliance Mark saw and nurtured, and who today are well known, some even famous.

There were also the graphic designers Mark picked up on his travels over Melbourne – you can tell how they varied with the changing look of Generation over the years.

Mark loved beautiful things, and by the end of its life, Generation was a work of art in and of itself. It had evolved from its aesthetic limitations as a desk-top published journal in its early years, to a stunningly produced visual feast by its end.

And the topics it covered were so diverse that in its last years it contained both academic discourse and half-flippant comedy sketches; it asked questions about Jewish life in contemporary Australia but always drew on what had come before, and in that, it was always and consistently a reflection of Jewish existence. Mark wrote many articles for the journal, and you can see the evolution of his intellect over the years reflected there.

I encourage you to read it online and see for yourself how truly cutting-edge it was.

But the practicality of getting it together was not without its frustrations. We who worked on Generation all felt the same frustration at different times: Mark was either not there, or when he was there, he was on the phone, or he wanted to meet at a café, not at the office, where he’d become distracted by gossip, or he wouldn’t return our calls, or he was evasive and non-committal about deadlines. It drove us slightly crazy.

But, of course, when he was truly there, in the moment, wherever we met, when he sourced brilliant people to contribute to Generation, when he had countless meetings with potential or existing benefactors to try to keep the journal afloat, we knew it could only be him at the centre, and HE was the reason Generation continued for over ten years, against all odds. It was his brilliance and charisma that people gravitated to; they wanted to be a part of it because HE was at its centre.

And he worried immensely about the journal. He contributed his own money to it at times when there was no alternative. He did not want to give up on it, and he fought passionately for its last few years to keep it afloat.

In its last issue of October 2000, there is no inkling in Mark’s editorial that the journal would cease to publish. He never wanted it to end, but it became inevitable. I remembered recently that the Generation office was broken into shortly after that last issue; all the equipment was stolen, there was no money to buy it again, and I don’t think we had insurance.

In any case, the internet age came upon us, and Mark became obsessed with what he called JewishMinds.com – one of a series of educational websites he hoped to launch that year. He was also consumed by other projects, such as his own photography which, he told me in his last weeks, would also be available online one day.

When I look back at the years of Generation’s existence, I realise that it began in 1989, which was the year I first met Mark. In the decade that followed, he had:

And throughout it all, he was the Editor of Generation.

No wonder he was preoccupied, difficult to get a hold of, challenging to work with. It’s astonishing to consider how much he accomplished in this decade of his thirties.

This brings me to his masterpiece, The Fiftieth Gate. There are so many complex threads in the book, and in the light of the tragedies that befell his family and him after it, it is a harrowing read.

The book is at once a reflection of his own life; an account of his parents’ ordeals during the Holocaust; a memorial to his ancestors; a roadmap to modern Jewish history. It’s funny, smart, self-deprecating, and devastating. Mark spent months interviewing and re-interviewing his parents in the book and these interviews (and the honesty with which they’re presented) are the foundation of the work.

The Polish research for the book happened almost by accident. I’d been in Poland for a year already doing research for my PhD; I met with Mark and his parents when they came to Poland and showed them around the towns of his parents’ childhoods.

I’d planned to go home to Australia soon, but Mark asked me to stay on as his research assistant, which I happily accepted.

Over the next year in Poland, I unearthed many documents for Yosl Bekiermaszyn (Mark’s father) and his family, which was a matter of good luck more than anything else. The various war fronts had never passed through Wierzbnik – Yosl’s town – and most of its archives had survived, so we ended up with a stupendous array of records, which included births, deaths and marriages going back to the beginning of the 19th century, school reports, wartime Judenrat and Nazi documentation, and testimonies of witnesses.

I remember the excitement with which I reported my findings to Mark, through long and expensive phone calls, or via fax machines wherever I could find them. Mark insisted I fax through the documents and often, their translations; he needed to see them for himself before he in turn called his parents and reported it all back to them.

He had great fun with Yossl’s report cards which had the word “niedostateczny” (unsatisfactory) against the subject of Polish. He jokingly mocked Yosl for it, who came from a traditional Yiddish-speaking family and never spoke Polish except for school, and wasn’t particularly interested in it anyway.

The Fiftieth Gate’s lightest, and perhaps also most loving moments, are the exchanges between Mark and his parents, or between Mark’s parents themselves, as Genia, his mother, taunts her husband for not speaking the perfect Polish she does.

When we found Mark’s father’s birth certificate in Poland, it showed him to be two years older than the family thought he was. I remember Mark’s grappling with whether to reveal this to Yosl, articulated in the book as follows:

Dare I tell him his age? Who am I, his son, to measure time for him?...

Mark did finally tell his father but regretted doing so. The book laments these two vanished years, while at the same time explaining the possible reason for the mistake by Yosl himself:

In Auschwitz, to make himself younger, he’d told the doctor he was born in 1929, and was thus put into the line headed for life.

In Buchenwald he told them he was born in 1926, to avoid the children’s section of the camp.

Postwar he’d told the International Refugee Organisation 1929, which granted him a child’s visa to Switzerland.

Mark’s mother, Genia nee Krochmal, was born in Bołszowce, a town in Ukraine today, from which very few Jewish records survived. What I found in Ukrainian archives and elsewhere were fragments, but no birth certificate for Genia, or marriage of her parents, or anything else of substance for her family in the interwar period. Mark was frustrated by this, but ultimately he allows the details of his mother’s history to be told by Genia herself, in her searing testimony which, to his credit, Mark prints word for word.

The Fiftieth Gate thus becomes an uneasy journey into Genia’s experiences, which she’d never told her boys about in detail before. Unlike Yosl, whose “past was shared by other survivors”, Genia’s survival is unique, and she was just a child when she was hidden by a Polish family in their cellar. The piecing together of her disparate memories is one of the greatest triumphs of the book.

But Mark being Mark, he does not let Genia off easily. When he insists on more detail in his quest to try to find a possible half-sibling born to Genia during the war, when he questions his mother’s version of events to fit another story of another child born nearby but in different circumstances, Genia exclaims, “don’t steal my memory”, or “don’t interrogate me. I’m your mother, not your prisoner”.

These exchanges between mother and son are some of the book’s most profound revelations. “For god’s sake, who do you think you are?” Genia says to Mark, “the people’s investigator? What does it matter now? Maybe you should ring Herr Muller [the SS man who oversaw Jewish deportations in the region], and ask him, “Entschuldigung, excuse me, but do you know when my mother was born, or when my uncle was killed?”

It is thus ultimately Genia’s own recollection that memorialises her suffering, the loss of her brother, the miraculous survival of her mother who jumped three times from different trains headed for the death camp of Bełżec, and then her mother’s shocking death in post-war Berlin because of a drunken driver. And it is Genia’s words above all others that commemorate the losses of her people from what Mark calls her “obscure shtetl”.

Over the year I was his researcher in Poland, my work for Mark took place in so many different archives - but none of it was as effective as Mark’s own methods of uncovering history and memory.

When trying to find his possible long-lost aunt, for example, and when none of my interviews had yielded results except for vague references to the family now possibly living in Szczecin, Mark jumped on a plane from Israel and we drove straight to Szczecin where, by use of the pre-internet sources of phone books and telephone directories, we found several families from the same place as Genia had hidden during the war. The child herself was not found, but it was not for want of Mark’s doing everything in his power to locate her.

It was this urgency, this intensity, this sense that nothing else was more pressing at that time, that carried Mark through all the important endeavours of his life. He writes in The Fiftieth Gate:

Sometimes I think that if I were granted the time before I die, I would burn all my private papers. I would prefer to leave the idea of me, rather than bits and pieces.

But how lucky we are, that today we have so many different “bits and pieces” of Mark, so much more than just the IDEA of him. That he left us with so many of his writings, from his books – two of which are still to be published – to his articles; to his social media posts and even his emails and messages to friends, is some consolation in the face of his loss to the world.

How lucky am I, that after The Fiftieth Gate was published, Mark got so many inquiries from people also wanting to find documents about their parents, that he put them all onto me, and that my small bureau, Lost Histories, was born thanks to it.  

As I continue to be astounded by the uniqueness of each person’s story, of the complexities and secrets and anguishes of most families, my life is richer for it, and thus Mark lives on in this way, as he does in thousands of others.

This article is a reprint of the speech given at Melbourne Jewish Book Week.