Grappling with Mark Baker’s last words

Mark Baker was adamant his final memoir should only be published if it met the high literary standards for which he had become renowned. 

Upon being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the Jewish scholar, author and public intellectual worked with urgency as he strove to write his last book while battling immense pain.

Baker died in May last year aged 63, so he never saw the publication of his book A Season of Death, which is out now. His wife Michelle Lesh, says Baker worked hard on the memoir and she would often find him asleep with his laptop open in the middle of the night.

“Any waking moment, his priority was to write,” she says.  

Baker showed her drafts of the book, which details their courtship, the birth of their daughter Melila in 2021and documents in detail his cancer journey. She helped him reconstruct the timeline of events, including medical appointments that he describes in the book. As he neared the end of his project, Baker provided a draft to both Lesh and her stepfather, acclaimed writer Raimond Gaita. 

He only wanted Rai and I to publish it if we thought that it would meet his literary standard, the legacy that he had created,” she told The Jewish Independent.

Lesh says she was touched by the beauty of Baker’s writing. It was clearly worth publishing. Although she described feeling a range of emotions, partly because it featured many intimate details about her life, she let him write it in the way he saw fit. 

While the book grapples extensively with death and tragedy, she believes it does not succumb to self-pity. “He can make you laugh, and he can make you cry within a page.”

Gaita and Lesh took a year to edit the book - a particularly challenging task given they were unable to check final changes with the author. 

“Rai constantly reminded me and guided me in saying, ‘what would Mark want to say here? What did he mean here? Would Mark be happy with this?’,” she says. 

“He made sure that we remained true to Mark and what Mark wanted this book to be.” 

The book is laced with biblical references and plenty of Hebrew and Yiddish. Lesh says Baker was very much “at home with his Jewishness in his writings and in the world”.

Baker was the director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University from 2008 to 2018 and Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He could read Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish. 

His final work is clearly written by someone steeped in Jewish knowledge, literature, language and culture. The diversity of Baker’s Jewishness, Lesh says, gave it great depth. She says he described himself as an atheist - even though he founded an egalitarian orthodox shul. 

“So even though he was so engaged and spiritually attuned with religious and biblical texts, he didn't believe in God.”

A Season of Death documents the pain of losing his first wife Kerryn to cancer, whom he wrote about in his book Thirty Days. His older brother Johnny also later died from cancer. Baker’s latest book also recounts the death of his father Yossl - a Holocaust survivor whose story he explored in his first memoir The Fiftieth Gate. 

Lesh says she told Baker that he shouldn’t feel compelled to confine his last memoir to the final part of his life and encouraged him to write about other aspects of his life, if that is where his writing took him as he faced his death. But he told her that he saw this book as the last instalment in a trilogy and wanted it to take up where Thirty Days ended.

The book is dedicated to the couple’s daughter. Lesh believes Baker also succeeded in his desire to remain his authentic self in this final work. 

Now, in a post October 7 world, Lesh says Baker’s absence takes her grief “to another level”. People often tell her how they wish he was still here so they could know his views about the conflict. 

“We don’t know what he would think and I don’t want to speculate. But what I do know is that he would have had courage and clarity and would have said what he thought to no matter what audience,” she says.

“He would have been nuanced and he would have seen lots of different perspectives and shown sophistication through his commentary. That much I’m sure of. So, it’s a massive void for me, the Jewish community, the wider community.” 

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Michelle Lesh and Raimond Gaita will be in conversation with Michaela Kalowski at A Season of Death's Sydney launch on Tuesday 12 November at Gleebooks. Bookings here