Published: 5 November 2026
Last updated: 5 November 2026
“History will be kind to me because I intend to write it.” Winston Churchill’s maxim was on Josh Frydenberg’s mind when he lost Kooyong in 2022. His answer is A Grateful Son, a memoir that puts his own account on the record.
The book, which he calls “both a personal and a political narrative,” is named for his gratitude to his parents, his community and Australia, which welcomed his family as migrants. Speaking at Melbourne’s Jewish Museum of Australia last Thursday, he told the audience: “But for Australia providing that warm embrace and that open door to them and to their family, I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.”
During an hour-long conversation with the museum’s president, Gideon Kline, Frydenberg spoke about his family heritage as the son of a Holocaust survivor, his emotional response to the Bondi attack, his views on the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, and whether he will return to politics.
Written with author Gideon Haigh, who Frydenberg says turned him down repeatedly before agreeing, the memoir touches on his family’s path to Australia. His father was born here to Polish parents who arrived in the 1930s. His mother, a Holocaust survivor, migrated after the war. When she landed in 1950, he said, the nationality box on her arrival card read “stateless.”
That history made the challenge to his own citizenship in 2019 all the more painful. Frydenberg said a group of climate activists in his electorate took him to the Court of Disputed Returns, arguing he was a Hungarian citizen.
“This was obviously deeply personal, and it was hurtful,” he said. Support came from across the political divide, he said, from Malcolm Turnbull and Noel Pearson to Labor figures including Tanya Plibersek, who argued it was “a bridge too far” to challenge the citizenship of someone whose family had survived the Holocaust. The full Federal Court ultimately ruled unanimously that he was not a Hungarian citizen.
