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Book Review
| Itzhak Gust, Such Was Life: a Jumping Narrative from Radom to Melbourne, Makor Jewish Community Library, Melbourne, 2004. pp. 241. $28.00 paper.
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| A photograph taken by Itzhak Gust in August 1939 captures a street scene that was soon to vanish. It shows two elderly bearded Jews in Radom, Poland, on the very brink of Nazi invasion. Surprisingly, given all but two of his large extended family perished, it is not the Holocaust that preoccupied Gust but ideology: throughout most of his 92 years he remained an intensely political person. |
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Born in Radom in 1898, Itzhak Gutstadt (later abbreviated in Australia to 'Gust' after someone said he 'blew in like a gust of wind') evocatively recreates the world of Polish Jewry in the early twentieth century. Here the memoir is as its most evocative. Yet Russia, to which he was exiled without regret at the age of 16, exercised a more potent influence on his thinking than the fierce, and legendary, Polish nationalism. Immersion in Russian history, language and literature left an indelible imprint. In 1917 Gust jubilantly joined the celebrating crowds in Ukraine when news trickled through of the revolution in St Petersburg. Unfortunately, and curiously, his memoirs omit any reference to this defining moment in his life (for that, one must turn to an Age feature article, 'Children of the Revolution', 14 November 1987). In contrast, his reflections on the 1920s when he worked on a kibbutz in Palestine are extensive and illuminating: whilst never a Zionist, he identified strongly with aspirations, often socialist, for a Jewish homeland. In 1928, he arrived in Melbourne and settled in Carlton, then the demographic centre for Jewish immigrants. |
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This book is less a memoir than a series of long reflective letters and notebook entries written to and for his daughter, Amirah Inglis. Consequently, the narrative 'jumps' in time, place and style. At times his approach is teleological, as in his judgement of the Arab-Israeli conflict; at other times, merely judgemental. His pen portraits of some communist and labour movement activists, such as Guido Barrachi, Wally Clayton and Lance Sharkey (pp. 164–167, 222), are highly subjective and at times deeply jaundiced — instanced by his remarks about a Melbourne University Labor Club member who became 'a rotter' (p. 162) or his erstwhile close friend (and the reviewer's uncle), Paul Vardy (pp. 123, 146, 167–168). Generally his narrative avoids self-examination. Characteristic of his generation, he prefers euphemism to revelation: concerning sex, he comments: 'when life asserted itself one had to bear it till one got married' (p. 39). Importantly for the reader, many of Gust's omissions, contradictions and stylistic infelicities are clarified or corrected in the 16 pages of endnotes added by Inglis, who eschews the editorial pen in favour of letting the original text speak for itself. |
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Defying the migratory direction of anxious Eastern European Jews, Gust returned to Europe on the eve of war. He sold his prosperous business, persuaded his reluctant wife, Manka, left 12-year-old Amirah in Melbourne with friends, and sailed back to the Old World. They stayed only ten days in Warsaw, escaping invasion by mere days. By the time they reached New York 'Poland was gone'. Gust found America fascinating: then, as now, full of contrasts and contradictions. Such ambivalence was absent about the Soviet Union. As a foundation member of the Friends of the Soviet Union and fluent in the Russian language, Gust accompanied the first delegation to the USSR in 1932. Unlike other foreign visitors he undertook arduous factory work. Despite numerous privations and one interrogation, Gust returned to Australia misty-eyed about the 'workers' paradise'. His 'bursting with desire' to broadcast the achievements of Stalin's Russia recalls Lincoln Steffens' famous quip upon his return from the Soviet Union a decade earlier: 'I have seen the future and it works'. |
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Steffens became disillusioned while Gust remained devoted. Even the convulsions of 1956 and 1968 did not shake his faith. As a result, surveillance by the security services became constant and his ASIO file became thick. His photo was splashed across the front page of the Melbourne Herald in 1949 during the Victorian Royal Commission into Communism triggered by Cecil Sharpley's defection. Gust, by now a relatively wealthy factory owner, was making substantial donations to Communist Party funds and was identified by Sharpley as one of the important 'foreign-born' benefactors (I Was a Communist Leader, p. 23). Even before Gust joined the Party in 1942, he was 'continuously consulted on common matters' (p. 159) by members of the State Committee. To live on the Left was fulfilling: 'We were occupied, we were part of the movement and felt good belonging to a bunch of people who planned for the future' (p. 170). |
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Readers hoping for enlightenment into what it meant to be a communist in the traumatic decades after WWII will be disappointed. Gust was not one for whom the customary 'self-criticism' was translated onto paper. And it is a pity that in his story — notwithstanding reference to 'the Hill group' that split from the Communist Party in 1963 — there is no reflection upon many of the events that troubled or confronted communists during these years: the notorious anti-semitic 'Doctors Plot'; the savage purges in numerous Eastern European communist parties; Khrushchev's revelations at the twentieth Party Congress; or the Hungarian uprising. Yet, despite these omissions and despite the 'jumping', Gust's narrative is immensely readable. Amirah Inglis is to be congratulated for bringing her interesting father back to life. |
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| Victoria University |
PHILLIP DEERY | |
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