She won’t be right, mate

For many years in my younger life, I wanted to leave Australia and live in the United States. It was my passion, my dream, my mishigoss. My late parents were distressed at my plans. What could you possibly expect there that’s better than here in Australia? they argued.

My mother and father, who arrived in Melbourne in 1951 after a harrowing odyssey from Nazi Vienna to the Shanghai Jewish ghetto, then after World War II, to a nascent, troubled Israel, saw Australia as a big, bland, comforting place. They became immigrant super-patriots, rhapsodising about the innate fairness and friendliness of the people. (And yet, in those early years, they recalled a landlady hissing at them that “Hitler should have finished the job.”)

I found 1970s Australia claustrophobic, an outpost, a siding where the weeds grew. But a year spent living and working in the US dampened my notions that America was the place of my dreams, and I returned, and have lived here ever since.

And compared to North America, Jews aren’t nearly as well understood. Images of devout Jews on Melbourne’s Hotham Street or in Sydney’s eastern suburbs seem to have become the stereotype in many Australians’ minds. The complexity and diversity of our community seems to go missing when non-Jews discuss us. Our organic bond to Israel is still fundamentally misundersood by many. To most Australians, we remain othered, exotic. They know so precious little about us. (Even after December 14, I winced that TV reporters kept saying ‘Haaarnika’).

We often shrink inwards to our dark places, which makes it harder for wider Australia to understand us. Rightly or wrongly, we are Am Hazikaron, the People who Remember. Memory plays a huge part in Jewish tradition. Naturally, although sometimes wrongly, we project the nightmares of our 20^th-century past onto experiences we encounter in our interactions with non-Jews.

Living as a Jew in Australia is a bit like walking on one of those rickety rope bridges. So far, I’ve mastered the balancing act and have been confident I wouldn’t fall into the river, but then came December 14, and now I’m not so sure.

The old compact I had with myself, for all its shortcomings — that this is the price I pay for a life in Australia that’s safe, fair, prosperous and easily navigable – is now one I’m beginning to question. Since Bondi, Australia is starting to feel as crime-riddled as Chicago or Detroit and as Jew-friendly as modern Europe. And, hey, it’s still a day’s cramped airline seat from ‘Over There’.

I’m not going to make any radical decisions about where to spend my remaining years. Indeed, the barbarism of Bondi has stiffened my back! But I just find myself thinking about these things all over again, like the young adult who wanted to escape Australia. Bondi, December 14, changed things here. Forever.