Published: 21 February 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
EVELYN FRYBORT tells MIRIAM HECHTMAN what drove her to document a missing chapter in the social history of Sydney’s Jewish community.
"Would you like to have your story included in my book, Memories of Kings Cross – The Jewish Migrant Experience – 1930s – 1960s?”. That was the question Sydney resident Evelyn Frybort posed to potential contributors when she began curating her book last year.
Frybort, whose parents Ruth and Joseph Zack migrated to Sydney from Europe in early 1939, were like many other Jewish refugees who lived and/or worked in Kings Cross and its neighbouring suburbs during these years.
Frybort’s father operated his hairdressing salon Zack's Hair Stylist in Bayswater Road, Kings Cross until he retired in 1967. Both parents worked in the salon, and Frybort and her sister Vicki Israel spent a lot of time in Kings Cross.
“There were a lot of continental women who went to my father's salon because he was trained in Europe. And so we saw them, got to know them. But there were also prostitutes. There were gay people. He had quite a cross-section of customers.”
Patrons also included performers from Les Girls and Frybort recalls her father would have to tint men’s hair at the back of the salon behind a curtain because in those days if a man got his hair tinted, it might have made his more conservative clientele feel uncomfortable.
The notion to document her family’s and other Jewish residents’ experiences in Kings Cross evolved after Frybort and her sister read Louis Nowra’s Kings Cross: A Biography. “It was an amazing book because he'd lived in the Cross and he knew a lot about it, the characters, and it was very colourful.
“But there was rarely a mention of the Jews. And we knew from our own family experience that the Jews played quite a significant role for a certain number of years in Kings Cross. It doesn't make headlines, but we knew about it and we felt there was a story to be told.”
