Published: 6 October 2023
Last updated: 12 February 2026
Once, as a small child, I casually asked my Polish mother why she kept more than a dozen tubs of margarine in the fridge. She looked at me surprised, as if it were abundantly obvious why our pantries burst with super-sized produce, as though every Australian family invested in Nuttelex, and stockpiled for the looming table-spread famine. “Darlink!” she exclaimed, “Don’t you know? Where there’s butter, there’s bread!"
For as long as I can remember, my family’s arduous past hovered over us like thick slices of carrot on gefilte fish. It pricked my childhood like toothpicks in herring. This must be why Beth Patterson’s one-woman show NIUSIA was such a profoundly validating experience. It is a veritable looking glass for anyone processing inter-generational trauma.
For more than an hour, Patterson weaves childhood memories, Holocaust anecdotes, and interviews with her own psychologist mother (through a voice over) to reconcile past with present, history with personal identity.
"What does remembrance look like when all I remember is the space where questions should go?"
The space is modest, at the back of a Carlton pub. A table, a couple of chairs and a mannequin torso, a nod to her family’s shmatte business. Patterson is animated, throwing books around for dramatic effect.
She attended an Anglican school in Toorak. Her connection to Judaism is functional, she jokes. “I used Jewishness to get out of Church Mass like other girls used periods to get out of gym class.”
But she is well-versed in Lily Brett, Arnold Zable and Hannah Arendt and seems fluent in self-effacement and post-Holocaust ambivalence about Jewish identity.
