‘The Jews made Kings Cross cosmopolitan; that is why they are so important’

LOUIS NOWRA has lived in Sydney’s notorious neighbourhood for 33 years and written a biography of the area he says 'has one of the most diverse and tolerant communities in Australia'.

While Nowra’s Kings Cross: a biography takes in the whole gamut of life in our own "Montmartre", he spoke specifically about the Jews of the Cross when he launched another book on March 19. This one, Memories of Kings Cross, the Jewish Migrant Experience, 1930s-60s, edited by Evelyn Frybort, contains personal reflections by the children whose parents reinvented themselves here at that time.

Fittingly, Nowra gave context to the Memories by looking at Jewish life in the area since the earliest days, and included anecdotes about some of the more flamboyant characters who made their mark. The following is an edited extract of his off-the-cuff speech.

IT'S OFTEN FORGOTTEN that from the 1840s onwards, when the major estates were broken up around here, that a lot of Jews shifted to Kings Cross because it was in walking distance of the first synagogue (The Great Synagogue on Elizabeth Street), and William Street from the 1880s onwards became the shopping centre. Many a Jewish merchant was centred in William Street; they lived above the shops and had a walk to the synagogue.

Although there was a very small Jewish population in the 1830s and 40s, there were two Jewish men who were very interesting.

One of them was Barnett Levey, who in 1833 opened up the first commercial theatre in Sydney; called the Theatre Royal. Unfortunately, the standard of acting wasn’t very high. Many people forgot their lines and other people just fought one another because they hated one another on stage. And it was where prostitutes would congregate because that's where they'd pick up the customers at the end of the show.

Then there was the first real professional composer, Isaac Nathan, who came to Australia in the early 1840s. He had worked with Lord Byron on a very famous songbook called Hebrew Melodies.  Isaac Nathan spent too much money gambling on boxing matches. He came to Australia with his six children. He was an exceptionally good singing teacher. Two of his boys were exceptionally good singers. He would come up to houses owned by Gentiles and by Jews and teach their daughters singing. And he became very famous for that.

He was also very famous, for a very short time, because he wrote the first opera that was performed in Australia, called Don John of Austria.

I've listened to it, and let me tell you, it's probably one of the reasons why it's never been performed since. Isaac was also good friends of Ludwig Leichhardt, the explorer. Leichhardt disappeared in the Northern Territory and was presumed dead. Isaac wrote a sad piece commemorating the death of Leichhardt. Who should turn up on the day he was going to play it? Ludwig Leichhardt! So Isaac wrote a welcome to Leichhardt that was played that same night.

Gradually, more Jews came to Australia, but not very many until after the First World War.,

One of the great Jewish generals of all time was John Monash. He opened up the Jewish Memorial Hall in Darlinghurst. I’ve written a biography and a screenplay about Monash. He came from Melbourne, which had a very different Jewish population to Sydney.

Sydney was much more flamboyant; whereas Melbourne was much more conservative and, he thought, much more cultured. And like Jews at the time, he was very, very ambivalent about eastern European Jews coming to Australia. He thought that the cultured ones came from Germany, France and England. But he saw big a division between the “eastern” ones who he regarded as illiterate, more asssociated with ghettos.

One of the things that was common to both Melbourne and Sydney in 1930s was the White Australia policy. Australians were not very open to Jews coming here because essentially, they came from countries we didn't want to know about, especially Germany, who we fought against in the First World War.

But in the 1930s, more and more Jews started to leave Germany because of Hitler, and came to Sydney because essentially, the ships came to Sydney. The Jewish people would come up to the Cross, because there was a Jewish welfare organisation here at the time, and they had boarding houses here.

The thing that came across was the rest of Australia’s dislike of Jews. It was the time we saw [the expression of] a kind of antisemitic impulse. Before that, the religious hatred that people had was against the Irish Catholics.

READ INTERVIEW WITH EVELYN FRYBORT

But when more and more Jews arrived in Kings Cross, they were much more obvious to the ordinary Anglo-Australians. They spoke differently. They seemed to congregate together and it seemed as though the Jews were taking over Kings Cross.

One of these was Walter Magnus, who was born in Germany. He came to Australia in 1937. He was a brilliant linguist; knew every language. He was also brilliant at sport. He was a professional dentist, but he wasn't allowed to practice dentistry.

So he opened up one of the great restaurants in the Cross called the Claremont Cafe, which was near the railway station. That changed the eating habits around here, especially in the eastern suburbs. You could have goulash, schnitzel. Everybody loved Walter and he grew larger and larger and larger and larger.

He was painted by William Dobell as a huge, huge figure, but he was very important.

One of the things that’s never commented on is just how much food changes culture, and how important it is. When the Jews came in the 1930s, delicatessens started to open and this changed the way that people regarded the refugees.

The refugees also included intelligent people who were despised. A typical example was the music group, the Weintraub Syncopators. They were the most famous German jazz band in the world. They were the musicians that you saw on stage in the Marlene Dietrich film, Blue Angel. They played everywhere, and they decided to emigrate to Australia to avoid Hitler in the late 1930s.

The musicians’ union hated them so much that they refused to allow them a licence to play. They could only play at places with food, particularly the famous posh restaurant in the city called Prince’s. But they couldn't play in a lot of venues because of the union.

The lead musician, Stefan Weintraub, became a motor mechanic, here in the Cross. But the band would secretly play at various functions, especially for Jewish organisations. And there was always comments about how on a Saturday afternoon, you'd see all the Jewish musicians carrying their instruments through the Cross as they went to parties. So Jews also changed the musical culture.

The residents at the time bemoaned the fact that their little Paris had turned into little Vienna, and there were signs all over saying “English spoken here”.  Lillian Gill, who wrote about the scene in the 1930s, said strange, sometimes overpowering cooking odours wafted out of many a kitchen and people worried that Kings Cross was going to be totally Jewish.

The joke was doing the rounds: “Tell Hitler he could have Danzig if we could have the Cross.”

Australians could be cruel; a frequent response to refugees’ thick accents was the question: “Why don't you refo bastards talk English?” The Australian Jewish Welfare Society played an important role; it spent a lot of time trying to explain to the rest of Anglo-Australia that they weren't creating a separate entity but that they wanted to assimilate.

Then a strange thing happened. When it became clear that war was going to break out, the documentary makers came to Kings Cross and filmed this propaganda, spread across the rest of the world, that Australia was open to Jewish refugees. But essentially, it was only Kings Cross that was open to Jewish refugees.

Then people would always say, “It could only happen in Kings Cross”, this openness towards the Jewish population and refugees. Later, in the 1940s and 50s, Holocaust survivors and then the children of Jewish refugees came from displacement camps in Europe to Sydney.

Nowra then turned his attention to the Memories. 

What I particularly liked about the Memoirs of Kings Cross was how particular the memories were of dress shops, particular food places. I learned that a fellow like Bernard Hammerman, who started the All Nations club, was important because he tried to create a mixture of locals and Jewish refugees, a melting pot until it was no longer necessary.

What I also liked about the memoirs is that they are a great evocation of a period when doctors or dentists or dancers had to find other ways of earning a living. I liked reading Michael Visontay’s piece about his father, the [Minerva] delicatessen and the relatives.

I realised that it is very important to write memories down. This is a vanishing world. Kings Cross changes all the time. And that's why I wrote my book.

One of the pleasing aspects of the memoir was by Anny Pollak, who writes about where she lived in Westminster Hall, in William Street. I have just sold my apartment after living there for 23 years. When she described walking into the apartment, what was on the right-hand side, the sunroom … it hadn’t changed since the 1950s. It was really nice to have that feeling of how it was in the 1950s.

I think it’s a wonderful thing to recall that period and the sense of how important florists and dress shops were; food too.

These intangible things make life worth living.

This memoir makes you realise how important it was to have that Jewish impulse to actually open up dress shops, and food and everything. This is part of being a cosmopolitan.

When you look back at the 1930s, through the memoirs, I think that the Jewish population made Kings Cross cosmopolitan. That is why it's so important, and this book, too.

Louis Nowra is the author of Kings Cross: A Biography, 2013 (UNSW Press)

This is an edited version of a speech given by Louis Nowra at the launch, on March 19, of Memories of Kings Cross, The Jewish Migrant Experience, 1930s-60s, edited by Evelyn Frybort

Photo: 1940s glamour (Flickr/Wikimedia Commons)