‘To the light of a candle, my grandfather and parents sang plaintive songs in Yiddish’

In this extract from her memoir, RUTH WILSON recalls the warm memories of her grandfather’s Shabbat rituals during her childhood in regional Australia

A LOVE OF the sound of the English language was at the core of my passion for reading. It may sound incongruous, but an unlikely influence in this addiction was my paternal grandfather, with his thick European accent and very un-English habits of speech and social behaviour. His eccentric personality played a pivotal role in developing my verbal imagination.

I don’t know how, where or when he learned English, and in fact we were never quite sure where he came from. When he died, we found his passport, which recorded his birthplace as Bobroysk, Russia, his height as five foot ten, his eyes as dark grey and hair as grey.

But during his lifetime he insisted that he was subject to, and the subject of, no country in the old world. I can hear again the deep, heavily accented voice in which he wove simple but exciting stories around the courage of his parents as they fled from a pogrom presumably but improbably by train, since according to his account his mother miraculously gave birth to him on a train between Poland and Russia; his momentous decision as a young boy to make his way to Palestine on overhearing his parents’ decision to send him away to study religion; his hand-to-hand combat with ferocious bears in the dense forests he passed through; and an intimate account of his romantic meeting with my grandmother, who had emigrated from Russia with her parents and brother during what is known as the second migration of Jews to their ancient homeland.

By the time I was sitting on his knee to watch more closely as he deftly removed a thin tissue of paper from his brass tobacco box and expertly rolled yet another cigarette, he spoke surprisingly good English. He could hold an audience in thrall. He entertained family and friends with stories of his early life that both defied and delighted the imagination, and with his love of storytelling went an endless supply of riddles and word puzzles.