To a Caulfield boy from a Carlton boy

When Rai Gaita asked me to take part in this tribute to Mark, I felt honoured, but hesitated. After discussing it, we agreed there was a specific perspective I could bring to the conversation.

For want of a better name, I’m going to explore the contrast between our upbringings, as “Carlton boy” and “Caulfield boy”, as a means of  tracing the evolution of Mark’s all-embracing sense of being in the world.

First the context. And through it, a reflection on what Mark and I shared in common, before speculating on the differences.

How do we measure a ‘generation’? Twenty years is the biological norm, more or less. But perhaps there are other ways of measuring it.

After many years of reflecting on the experiences of Holocaust survivors, I have come to see that their life-journey can be viewed as a three-act drama. Three distinct periods. Indeed, three generations concentrated within one lifetime.

Act 1:  The time before: Life, far der melkhomeh, before the war: Once I had a home, an extended family, a connection to another place, another community. For my parents it was the shtetlakh of the Polish-Russian borderlands. For Mark’s mother, Genia, it was a rural settlement in present day Ukraine. And for his father, Yosl, a village in South-western Poland.

Act 2: The Rupture:  Lives overturned. Dispossession. Flight. A Shoah, an annihilation — there are countless scenarios.

Act 3: The time after: “Nokh der melkhomeh”. Emigration, putting down roots elsewhere. The roller coaster of rebuilding. The elation of new birth. Again there are many scenarios.

Both Mark and I had parents whose lives can be viewed in this way. And both of us, have explored the phases of their lives, in all their fullness, as writers, educators, travellers, and historians, and above all, as sons. And both of us embarked on journeys to “the time before”, the sites of our parents’ childhood and youth. And we both returned with the maps of their early years, the neighbourhoods, the streets they once inhabited. We were both passionately engaged in a similar mission — to restore the missing link in the ancestral chain.