Published: 14 October 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
“I didn’t know what to do,” Perlman tells me. “I felt despondent, deflated, defeated and impotent. I thought, where do you even start? And my own answer to that was, you start with children.”
So began Perlman’s foray into children’s writing, one he is now following up with a sequel. The Adventures of Catvinkle is a story about bullying and acceptance, through the unlikely friendship between a dancing cat and a musky-smelling Dalmatian.
Perlman hoped that by telling the story of a dog and cat whose friendship challenges existing prejudice, he could show just how ridiculous it is to hate someone because they’re different. They are themes that take on another layer of significance this, month with reports of anti-Semitic bullying in Victorian public schools.
Indeed, there is an underlying Jewishness about The Adventures of Catvinkle, something deeper than its delightful references to “Ketz’s deli” and characters like the wise, backgammon-playing Russian wolfhound, Lobbus the brave dog Lobbus. Partly it feels Jewish because it tackles serious topics like prejudice through humour; partly because of those very messages of egalitarianism and fairness, messages that children, perhaps more than adults, respond to instinctively. Perlman agrees: “Children have a sense of justice that doesn’t get muddied until they get older and we, adults, muddy it for them.”
Although only his 2012 book The Street Sweeper confronts Jewish history directly, Perlman feels all his books are “Jewish books,” because of “a long continuous strand of Jewish history and culture that values the ethics that really propel my writing, that animate and fuel what I write.”
Perlman feels all his books are “Jewish books,” because of “a long continuous strand of Jewish history and culture that values the ethics that really propel my writing.”
Underpinning those ethics is a legacy of persecution, an alertness to the harbingers of hatred and violence which, on that sunny Melbourne morning in 2016, brought to Perlman’s mind “the summer of 1939.” Perlman’s father had come to Australia in the late 1920s with his Polish Jewish parents, and although they remained safe here, many relatives perished during the Nazi era.
There’s a family anecdote that his father was the only Holocaust survivor who never left Carlton, illustrating the enduring impact of genocide not only on those who directly survived but on those who, often by sheer chance or timing, managed to escape before they too were caught in its claws.
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It also highlights the transmission of trauma and resilience to future generations, as Perlman reflects, “It goes on to influence how you look at everything. Issues that have nothing to do with Jews or being Jewish. It just becomes part of your outlook. Fairness is the standard you’re always looking for.”
That search for fairness infuses Perlman’s writing, from his first novel Three Dollars, to the oppressive contemporary workplace that provides the setting for his latest book, Maybe the Horse Will Talk. In a context where daily humiliation and degradation are the norm, where a pervading toxic masculinity fosters systemic sexual harassment, Stephen Maserov, junior lawyer and true mensch, finds himself in the “murky moral terrain” of acting for the accused perpetrators.
At the same time, as he desperately grasps the opportunity to hold on to his job, house and marriage, and as he tries to survive a work culture that is, as Perlman describes to me, “frightening and so unfair and so uncomfortable, and so humiliating and degrading and precarious,” he becomes increasingly conscious of how women face “this whole other truckload of issues and problems … that men just almost never have to deal with or even think about.”
Perlman’s insights into the belittling of women in the workplace are expressed partly through the experiences of Jessica, one of the “girls” from Human Resources, as the boss refers to them, who has a master of psychology yet is often tasked with ordering sandwiches.
The devastatingly accurate portrayal of the devaluing and objectification of women, compounded by an almost pathological avoidance among corporate executives to acknowledge the problem, let alone take responsibility for fixing it, is infuriating. And Perlman is careful to treat sexual harassment with the gravity it warrants.
But the totalitarian workplace setting is lightened by Perlman’s ridicule of the bosses, including an astute and hilarious exchange about Jessica’s gender and ethnic background that captures the nuances of intersectionality.
Like in The Adventures of Catvinkle, Perlman’s use of humour is a particularly Jewish approach to dealing with sadness and injustice but more than that, writing about contemporary social problems is Perlman’s contribution to Tikkun Olam.
“So many people are tyrannised at work,” he says. “It’s comforting to see the bullies mocked, in a book, in a story, in a work of art … if I can make fun of them for you and show how ridiculous and awful they are, you can firstly feel that you’re not alone… And then we can begin to talk about what to do about it.”
Making the world a better place is too grandiose a description of his contribution, he says. But the concept of Tikkun Olam comes alive in Perlman’s writing – from Three Dollars to The Adventures of Catvinkle and Maybe the Horse Will Talk – not least because it brings hope to those who feel alone and disempowered.
The Adventures of Catvinkle is published by Penguin at $19.99
Maybe the Horse will Talk is published by Vintage at $32.99.
