Australians love hearing about writers’ roots – unless they’re Israeli

Several years ago, I was having lunch with colleagues from the writing and publishing universe. We were talking religion when one of them said, laughing, ‘My kids believe in all Gods! And I tell them, I don’t care what you believe in. Allah, Jesus, Buddha…’ He named more divinities, yet someone conspicuous was missing. I had to ask: ‘And what about the Jewish god, isn’t he invited to the party?’

Silence spread around our table until the liberal father gathered his wits and told me he doesn’t like what religious West Bank settlers do to Palestinians. I don’t like it either. I also don’t like Catholics sexually abusing children nor ISIS burning people alive nor other atrocities perpetrated by various godly representatives on earth. Nobody comes out clean if you look into it; yet the only god excluded from that family’s festivities was mine.

Which was kind of reflective of how I’ve come to feel amidst the increasing celebrations of diversity in Australia, particularly within my tribe – the literati. The tribe in whose gatherings I’m often the only Jew and always the sole Israeli. To my knowledge, I am the only Israeli-Australian author with some sort of a public profile.

For years I’d thought Australia, where I moved to 25 years ago, was my salvation. Not only a political haven, but a Mount Helicon teeming with muses. My first three books were in Hebrew and published in Israel, but in English I developed a stronger writer’s voice. Here I was also exotic enough to stand out. My accented public readings were exotic.

My stories were exotic. Some of them were about another part of my twice hyphenated identity – my childhood in the Soviet Union. I felt ambivalent about those works, thinking how risk-free and irrelevant it was to write about Russian antisemitism in Australia where such vile behaviour would not have been tolerated… I miss that naiveté!

Cracks began to appear way before that fated lunch brought to light dark, slimy things I’d been suppressing. Like at a literary event where I remarked to another writer that her Egyptian name reminded me of the Hebrew word for “lake”. Her pleasant demeanour changed and she said she wanted nothing to do with Israel. That incident disturbed me more than it possibly should have, as in Israel I often holidayed in the Sinai Peninsula, sharing joints with Egyptian tourists.

It took many more similar incidents, what we now call micro-aggressions, for my barometer to become attuned to antisemitic undercurrents humming in my tribe’s depths. Like when I met an internationally renowned author, who immediately informed me, unprompted, that he wouldn’t travel to Israel until the occupation ends. Later in conversation it came to light that his political principles didn’t stop him, in a variation of the uninvited Jewish God, visiting countries with questionable regimes, including Russia.

And that was the thing about which I was particularly wrong. Apparently, my salvation was not Australia. It was Russia. My Russian origins.

In the Australian literary world, where Israel is viewed as the epicentre of humanity’s most demonic elements, I present a problem to my peers. I am from Israel but not particularly demonic. I even share their progressive views. The cognitive dissonance is profound, but here is that other part of me that saves the day. Forget gulags, murdered journalists, annexed satellite states.

As my books began being published in Australia, the romance of Chekhov and Siberian tigers came to surround me publicly and in private conversations. I remember one time an ABC radio interviewer repeatedly asking about my change of writing languages from Russian to English, even though I stated clearly that my writing life began in Hebrew.

There must be more to this, however, than cognitive dissonance. To allow a writer with a powerful (albeit complicated) connection to Israel to speak about it hasn’t been the thing to do since way before October 7.

No matter that I support Palestinian rights and a two-state solution and am critical of many of Israel’s policies, still, because I also know how much there is to love about this country, I pose a risk to my tribe’s cozy consensus that everything about Israel is beyond the pale.

The one short story I wrote in English that engages with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, without demonising either side, was also the story that I found the hardest to find a home for in Australia. It got rejected by most literary magazines (eventually it was published in the Griffith Review, one of the few journals to genuinely foster a diverse conversation).

And although I was only 12 when I left Russia, when the scandal erupted around Elizabeth Gilbert’s recent novel, The Snow Forest, which was set in Russia, I was immediately approached by the media to comment. In a striking contrast, on the literary festival circuit where I am the only Israeli, I’ve never been invited to panels where Israel is concerned.

Although I’m not a political writer, neither are many other speakers at such panels. I, at least, did my time in a sealed room during the Gulf War and the compulsory army service... But nobody wants to hear what I have to say about the place where I spent my formative years.

I can attend the literary party – where everyone is vigorously encouraged by publishers, funding bodies and peers to “go to their roots” – but just as long as I don’t discuss Israel. So I go, hanging on the edges, feeling this most-loathed emotion of jealousy as I see yet another award offered to “foster diverse voices”…

The benefits of ‘ethnic minority’ status rarely apply to any Australian-Jewish writers. Most of us, if we engage with Jewish themes and are not outspoken anti-Zionists, remain on the margins of the throbbing, thriving multicultural party. But there is a difference between my Jewish peers and myself - and it is more than that being an Israeli migrant. I cannot choose whether to “pass” or not.

When Jewish writers engage with “Jewishness”, their works most often tell stories from the Holocaust or grapple with its legacy. Such narratives are intrinsic to Australian-Jewish community, where so many belong to families of Holocaust survivors. These stories are infinitely important and must keep being told. But Holocaust stories are also less contested. They are the kind of stories that Jews are (mostly) “allowed” to tell about themselves.

Whereas my ‘Jewish stories’ are of the forbidden variety (unless they are about Russian antisemitism…). My Russian-born family wasn’t physically impacted by the Holocaust. My parents were religious refuseniks and so my life has always been bound with Israel. Which is “unfortunate” for me, whose creative architecture, both in nonfiction and fiction, is like that of the poet Rachel, who famously confessed “only about myself I could tell”.

So even among Jewish writers, I feel like the writer with the most unsafe identity. Occasionally I even feel like the unwanted reminder of “the Israel problem” to some of my Jewish peers. I get it, though. We all have our different injuries to nurse on the page.

My chronic non-belonging grew so substantial during the 2021 Israel-Gaza conflict and then when October 7 brought to the boil all the simmering hatreds, that I could no longer walk around it. Fiercely anti-Israel open letters appeared signed by significant numbers of writers and publishing professionals.

Certain prominent Australian authors have been getting away with, and even receiving well-publicised peer support for, expressing antisemitic views. Some literary journals now make it a part of their policy to only publish “anti-Zionists”, which rules out at least 75 percent of Jews. So professionally speaking, I no longer know what the future holds for me.  

I suppose I could walk my earlier, safer path, keep writing about feminist issues or Russia. But I teach writing and the first thing I tell my students is: write only about what is urgent to you, no matter the risk. As antisemitism’s hydra keeps multiplying its terrible heads, all that burns in me is to explore what it’s like to be a Jew today, and my kind of a Jew – the one who comes from the most demonised country in the world, the only country not invited to the party.