In my youth, interest in Henri’s childhood was submerged under the more exciting deeds of his adult life seen through eyes ideologically fixed towards the heaven of the future. For Henri too, all that remained to be told were a few episodes surfacing from an eminently forgettable early life in which the deep abiding love and admiration for his only sister was the one continuing fact.
When Haim Adler arrived in the world on the night of November 11 1912 he had the bad luck to be born in Sosnowiec, a small Polish Silesian coalmining town, perched near the border of Austrian, Prussian and Russian imperial lands. Could there have been a worse place for Jewish child to arrive in 1912, who can say?
Haim , to give him the Jewish name he received at birth, and the family of five children who gathered around to see the blonde and blue eyed baby had no idea of that. They were David, a sturdy fellow of eleven or twelve years , Manka ,the only girl, a lovely, lively nine year old; Shmulek , about seven, Simeon , two years younger and, keeping himself shyly in the background, the unfortunate Bernard, a good, simple- minded three-year-old. Another girl had been born around 1900, Manka, my mother, had told me ; she had been named Ruth and had died horribly at four years old, when the cook accidentally poured boiling water over her. Shmulek, the fourth child, would die of typhus during the Great War, but after that they would avoid further disaster. By the time their sixth and last child was born, Jacob Adler and Hannah Pozmentier had produced a child every two years of their married life and were flourishing.. They employed a cook and a servant – both Poles, not Jews- and they also kept a family retainer. “L’homme de confiance de la maison”, as Henri recalled him, the family’s steward, who received no wages but was fed, lodged and clothed. He was about the age of the eldest son, they knew him by his first name, and he ate at their table and performed any task asked of him by parents or children. He ran errands for everyone; he was trusted with family secrets. I imagine that he too was a Jew, but never thought to ask.
The family had not always lived in a fine apartment, worn fine clothes and taken holidays in the mountain resort of Zakopane. Jacob Adler, born about 1870, descended, so the story goes, from a family of Kohanim originating in Frankfurt am Main. They were given the German name Adler which meant Eagle. Hannah Pozmantier and her family, with their oddly French sounding name, had settled in the older nearby town of Beszin; but only God knows the date it had happened or where they had come from. Orphaned at 12, Jacob began his first job as a labourer in a brewery. He worked hard, made money, saved, invested in a flour milling business and added to his prospects, I was told , with a lucrative alcohol licence from the state owned monopoly that he had been granted because he was an army veteran.
The dry goods business was later augmented by a restaurant, which his children remembered proudly as the most modern in the town. Pairs of beautiful Percherons pulled the flat wagons that rolled around the streets of Sosnowiec, delivering the grain, flour and other dry goods Painted “Jacob Adler & Son”, the wagons were watched with pleasure by his youngest son and first grandson who were only six years apart in age.. The son of “& Son” was David, the eldest, who had gone into the milling business ,while his father concentrated on the liquor and the restaurant Hannah too worked in the restaurant; sitting each day behind the high cash desk, counting the takings at the end of the day and keeping the household as firmly in her hands as the bunch of cupboard keys at her waist. Jacob, the horse lover, rolled about town for business and pleasure, in a two-horse gig, driven sometimes by himself and sometimes by his Polish driver. Strong in body and mind, he was a self made man and a modern, reformed Jew who had travelled along the assimilation road. He was clean shaven, unlike Orthodox Jewish men who were enjoined by the Torah to wear beards, and he had discarded their traditional long robe and flat round hat. Hannah kept her own hair and had not, with Orthodox women, shaven her hair at marriage and replaced it with a wig. Yiddish was their mother tongue and Jacob could read and write only in that language. The parents spoke Polish to the servants and outside the house and on occasions even with their own children, while the children rejected tradition and spoke only Polish among themselves and used the Polish versions of their Jewish names.” Miriam” was Manya or Manka; “Simeon” was Szymeck; “Bernard” was Berek; “Haim” was Henryk or, affectionately, Hermush. David, whose name is universal, remained David. As the family became richer, Yiddish was spoken less frequently; Haim, the youngest ,being the least fluent.
The Adler household was only casually kosher, observing the main dietary rules- kosher killed meat and no pork- but often mixing milk and meat in the house. Outside the house, all the children ate treifa, unclean and forbidden food. At the regular Friday night meals though, when the Sabbath candles were lit and the shabbus meal served, the children , further in the road to assimilation than their parents, for their sakes, smoked no cigarette and turned on no light. Jacob Adler’s shop was shut for the Sabbath and he sometimes walked to the synagogue, but he attended regularly only on high holidays. The children did not attend at all. Everyone fasted on Yom Kippur, and while none of the boys had a barmitzvah, it goes without saying that all were circumcised. A strictly Jewish operation in Poland at the time, often a death sentence in the Polish past and an almost certain one in the future.
Jacob Adler’s family though assimilated, as Polish Jewish families went, lived in a country where the majority considered only Roman Catholics worthy of the name Polish, and most Jews were Yiddish speakers who followed their own religion and customs- or at least gave lip service to them. A minority of both groups was tolerant enough to accept that Yiddish speaking Jews were also Poles, or to think of themselves as both Jews and Poles. And, as everywhere in the world, the assimilated, without the strength of religious or ethnic pride to stiffen them or make them oblivious to their surroundings, had often unknowingly assimilated the anti semitism of their surroundings.
Chaim’s only living grandparents, the Pozmentiers, were different beings. Hannah’s father, the retired tailor, lived on in Henri’s memory as ‘ a very fine and very old Jew’ with a white beard, a cap and a caftan – traditional Jewish garb. He and his wife lived 7 or 8 miles away in a tiny apartment opposite a coal mine and every Saturday afternoon the children travelled to see them. Here everything was strictly kosher. Though all the Adler children received from their inheritance and education a double dose of tradition with a single dose of deep religious belief, only two of them, Hermush and Manka maintained strong beliefs, transmuting into Communism the Judaism of their Pozmentier grandparents.
*****
Religion meant nothing, even less than nothing, to my parents and to any of the Adlers I met later in life. Henri rarely mentioned his religion when he spoke of his early life and spoke of the rabbi only once. Before her last pregnancy, he said, Hannah had consulted the rabbi: “Can you help me how to get another daughter?” she pleaded. “Kill a chicken” he advised, “bury it – not deeply- in front of my door, and you’ll have a daughter”. Henri, the atheist, enjoyed telling this story. “My mother got me” he laughed, “but the rabbi got the chicken”.
The story, surely a shtetl myth, mixed cynicism about religion with his mother’s disappointment and perhaps explains Henri’s later criticism of his mother.
But another memory of his mother, which he recalled in the 1980’s, was sympathetic. “Hannah suffered from Jacob”, he told me once. “When I was a small boy in Sosnowiec, I heard her crying out and crept into the maid’s room, frightened. I think he beat her. He was a tyrant; a bad character”. Then he added that his father’s favourite children were David, Manka and himself. “The strong ones?” I asked. Henri thought about it, and agreed.
When he later revealed himself and his past in rhapsodic war time letters , Henri wrote to Yvette: “Tenderness the great deprivation of my life; my mother was a business woman ”. Did he mean she had no time to devote to the son she had not wanted; or that tenderness was an emotion foreign to business people? Or, that like so many youngest children, he envied his older siblings? In his sister, my mother’s memory, Hannah was a soft hearted, emotional and gullible woman and her oldest grandson, who also remembers her as warm hearted and loving, smiles at her concern about money. “She always believed that one day she would find a package with 100,000 zlotys in it”.
Manka, I learned from my European cousins, had protected her Polish Jewish family, concealing any actions that would provoke disapproval from her Australian daughter with no understanding of traditional Judaism, invasions, pogroms or fierce nationalisms! Most Polish Jews led double lives; the Adlers had early learnt the habits of self-protection and keeping secrets and they never lost them. Their religion was casual, their ethnicity not deep seated and though shared no Jewish sense of superiority to “goyim” , “parszywy yid” (filthy jew) was a term the Adlers and all Polish Jews grew up with. Even in peacetime, Jews lived insecurely and during the Great War, those who inhabited a border town, trampled over by many armies from Russia and Germany, were constantly in fear for their lives.
The post war pogroms, when the Jews had to barricade themselves in their houses while drunken anti Semites celebrated Polish independence by burning the beards of traditional Jews, burned into my mother’s consciousness. Haim was two when the war began, six when it ended and eight during the troubled time of independence. Too young to remember much; if he did remember those days, he never talked of them. With his schooldays , they had not survived later tumult.
The children had attended Polish schools but only Manka and Hermush made it to the gymnasium. The only scholars, they were also the only idealists among Jacob and Hannah’s children. The beautiful, determined Manka, much loved by her brothers and courted by many of their friends, completed Polish secondary school by the time Hermush arrived there and had left Sosnowiec and the family home for Warsaw University. Afire with a love of Polish literature and history and having a strong a social conscience, she left behind a lonely schoolboy brother , bereft of his best friend but ready to follow the path set by one he later described as his second mother, guide and teacher.
Szymeck had early abandoned school, and lived an easy going fun-loving life; supposedly working for but always in conflict with his tough, self made and hard working father he finally left for Palestine in the early 1920’s. “To avoid military service” according to Henri. But Manka- always hyper sensitive to Jewish weaknesses or wrong doing and its effects on anti Semitism and always presenting her brothers in the finest light – explained it differently: “ He left for Palestine because of anti-Semitism in Poland and his pioneering spirit”. Berek lived quietly at home; he had never attended school and, according to Henri, could barely read and write.
David had followed his father. A resourceful and bold business man, who bought largely on credit, he borrowed money from the friendly bank manager who joined him in his night frolics, for he was also a charmer, a high liver and big spender who enjoyed the life of a rich young man about town.
All his children shook under the gaze of Jacob’s hard grey eyes. Even his high spirited and strong willed only daughter feared his wrath. Henri never forgot the night Manka stayed out later than her father had counted on and was smacked across the face when she was delivered home, in front of her startled escort and horrified little brother who ran away and hid himself in his nurse’s bed. Neither did Manka forget or forgive.
Henri recalled a night when David and his friends, returning home very late in the family gig from a round of dissipation in nearby Katowice nightclubs, knocked over and killed someone on the road.. The police were bribed, the scandal hushed up and the story never got out, he said. And years later, David’s eldest son Willy, who had inherited his father’s charm as well as his tastes and abilities, told me with some pride the story his grandfather had told about his father’s youthful behaviour. How shocked Jacob had been, on greeting David as he returned from an evening out, to see two buggies: one held his dog, hat and cane, the other David and his mistress.
David, it appears, could get away with anything in the family, and none of his brothers or his sister had a seriously hard word to say about him. He was tall and dark, with the prominent eyes of all the Adlers and curly hair of half of them, and like all of them he was good hearted and generous. He had married young , Manya Fishel, the daughter of a neighbouring Jewish family who lived further down Modjewska Street. Their two sons born soon after were given the Jewish names of Wolf and Israel, but were known throughout the Adler family by the pet names of Wowush and Juleck. As Wowush and Juleck, the perfectly aged virtual boy cousins, they were important characters in my girlhood fantasies; indispensable in cousin free Melbourne. They took me to dances, introduced me to their gorgeous friends who fell in love with me at first sight, whirled me off to parties, showered me with flowers and gifts and tactfully disappeared as I got on with my school work.
**** ***********
Suddenly, some time late in 1924 , or it may have been 1925, the Adler family upped and left Sosnowiec and Poland, secretly for Palestine. Though Szymeck was living there, the family had never shown any interest in Zionist solutions. So why did they go? The explanation depends again on who tells the story. Jews were taxed heavily by Grabsky, the recently appointed Polish Finance Minister, said my mother, and David had devised a scheme to avoid these impositions. “ Father had nothing to do with it”, Manka insisted, “It was David’s idea”. He persuaded his father to liquidate the wholesale business. He would also borrow another large sum of money from his friend the bank manager “ to buy more goods “ and with all this cash they would go secretly , leaving the house with everything in it and even leave Manka behind in the house to avoid suspicion. The plan depended on her co-operation and David had turned all his charm on to his sister. “He had lots of practice and a heart of gold when it suited him”, Manka wryly recalled years later. “He used to call on me. when I was a student in Warsaw, and ask me to help him choose a hat to pay off Manya for his unfaithfulness. And he once he threatened to kill me if I didn’t sign over my inheritance “ she remembered, as his price of keeping her social life secret from their father.
“Did you sign?”
“ I did. Of course I didn’t think he’d kill me, but he knew I was going out with a goy and I didn’t want him to tell father. Now he even went down on his knees so I would stay”.
Staying behind was no hardship for Manka whose attachment to Poland and her lover, Jasek, were so entwined that she would have stayed permanently she readily agreed to the risky plan. She was to follow, with her sister in law Manya and the two little boys, after the rest of the family had got safely away from Sosnowiec by train, to go through Italy to Trieste and from there by boat to Jaffa.
The journey was one of the few happy memories of Henri’s childhood. They had stopped off for a night or two at Metz to visit his mother’s sister. “ The most beautiful woman I ever saw” was how his Pozmantier aunt married to a Mr.Poch stayed in his memory. The family fled, the restaurant stayed open and the house was inhabited by Manka and the family retainer. When the bank manager rang asking for David, Manka managed to stall him, but something in his voice warned her that he would ring again and she left the house to lie low with friends while Jasek, concerned that she would be sent to jail when the truth came out, urged her to decamp for her own safety. He produced his wife’s passport to help her. Some months after the others had left Poland, the two sisters in law, both Manyas, one horribly sad and the other wildly happy, boarded the train together with the two boys. They were on their way.
“The Eagles Have Flown!!!” shouted the local paper angrily, when the news got out at last.
And they had flown, according to Henri’s story, carrying 15-20,000 Pounds sterling. Henri’s story of their exodus, told to me in 1975, was very different from Manka’s. “Crooked Jacob Adler and Crooked Son” were the words that should have been painted on their wagons! was his blunt seventies view of “the whole manoeuvre- a bankruptcy prepared by David and father.” Willy saw eye to eye with his uncle Henri, looking back at the whole story with a business man’s eyes. twenty years later: “Manka’s story is wrong. He went into bankruptcy. No bank manager lends money just for nothing. They had to give collateral and must have owed the bank money when they skipped the country. The bank must have cleaned up on the warehouses and their other assets. They must have decided that cash in hand was better than staying. It was just an ordinary little bankruptcy”.
The Eagles of Sosnowiec had been doubly lucky. They escaped the consequences of father and son’s skulduggery and the fate awaiting the Jews of Poland.
***** ***
It was in wintry February 1976 that I visited my Eagles’ town for the first time. Travelling with my daughter Judy, we were to be guests of Henri’s first love, the girl from Sosnowiec, who had survived the war and remained his good friend. To her large old-fashioned apartment she warmly welcomed his niece and her daughter, though the beautiful tall pale blue tiled stove which stood in the corner of her abandoned guest room remained empty, for want of wood. Madame Kawka helped us negotiate the icy streets and led us to the Adler apartment on Modjewska Street; she recalled the impressive wagons of Jacob Adler and Son as they trundled through Sosnowiec streets. We had stopped off first in Radom, my father’s town where we had bought ponchki from the very same shop that he had favoured in his childhood and had eaten, with intense pleasure, those sugar coated and jam filled balls of dough, that had been my delight as a child in the Jewish cake shops of Acland street, St Kilda.
But there was little, in bleak icy streets of Sosnowiec to conjure up images of my Paris uncle and my Melbourne mother. Auschwitz was not far away , One day we travelled in a rackety old train filled with poorly dressed local citizens along the line on which so many Polish Jews had made their last journey. As we passed through the flat dreary countryside, broken only by mean looking peasants’ dwelling, I took out my knitting and immediately became the centre of interest. “Will you look at the funny way she’s knitting!” said one woman to her companion, and she started questioning me. “Who are you? What are you doing here? How come you knit in this very strange way?” My childhood kitchen Polish helped me to explain that I was Australian, visiting with my daughter the birthplace of my parents. Polish Jews from Sosnowiec and Radom. As we exchanged family information and I offered to teach them our way of knitting , chatting and knitting, we arrived at the terrible station. And then in deep snow we walked through the high gates surmounted by the cruel cynicism of ARBEIT MACHT FREI. The place was as horribly stark and desolate – as it should have been- with little in the way of modern museum amenities or explanations. Behind a glass partition in each barn like room mountains of spectacles, suitcases and other banal domestic objects taken from the arrivals piled high the horror. Among them could have been a case belonging to my Adler uncle Bernard and Aunt Dora or my Gutstadt Aunt Rose and her husband, or Uncle Zygmund and his beautiful son. Mid-winter in un-heated buildings , the shivering walk around each display of vicious anti- Jewish malice froze into a more frightening experience than the one before.
A leaflet displayed in one of the cabinets recorded the daily ration of bread allowed each type of prisoner; Jews received the least. I exploded. But the deep layer of snow which covered the hellish place was not more cold than 22 year old Judy’s off-hand responses. Like Rosa Luxembourg, , the non-Jewish, Jewish revolutionary murdered in 1918, a heroine of young radical women of the seventies, she was not impressed. ”Why”, Rosa asked, after a Russian pogrom in 1917, “do you come with your special Jewish sorrows? I feel just as sorry for the wretched Indian victims… the Negroes in Africa… I cannot find a special corner in my heart for the ghetto.” The cold blooded determination of civilised barbarians to clear the world of every human being defined as a Jew; the acute viciousness of giving them less food than other prisoners did not touch my daughter’s idealistic young Australian revolutionary nerves.
*** ************* ********
The Eagles who had flown from hard times in Poland landed on even harder ones in Palestine.
Arabs were already hostile to Jews before 1914 and became more so after the war as Jewish migration increased and both the British Government and the League of Nations gave support to the Zionist cause leading to Arab attacks on Jewish settlements and the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem in 1920 and 1921. Haim and his family arrived in Jaffa, inadvertent drops in the double wave of Jewish post war immigrants. The first, of mainly socialist pioneers had brought the Jewish population to just on 14 thousand. The Adlers were among the second group of “capitalist migrants”, who had left home and possessions behind but brought money to invest and were freely admitted by the British to the colony among the 65,000 Jews, mainly from Poland, in the three years from 1924-27. It was a bad time to arrive ; unemployment, strikes, and renewed Arab hostility outside the walls and inside nothing to remind them of home. No cook, ho servant, no family retainer and a small flat in a harsh, hot and sandy new town.
But for schoolboy Haim, whose twelve Polish years had been comfortable and fairly uneventful, this strange new land was just another perch for his family; he would have been astonished could he have foreseen how many years he would eventually spend in a place which he never believed would or should become the “National Home for the Jewish People” after the First world War when it accepted the British Government as Mandated rulers of the former Turkish colony.
The Adlers had arrived not long after the 1924 “Afoula affair”, a Bedouin attack on Jewish settlements whose effects were still felt, in hostility between both peoples and divisions among the Jewish leaders. The tiny group of devotees who formed the Communist Party of Palestine (PKP), the party that Haim would join ten years on, supported the Arabs and soon found itself in a treble bind. Ostracized by all Zionist parties, pounced on by the British administration as agents of Moscow, and roundly criticised by the Communist International for nationalism and their sluggishness in recruiting Arabs.
**** ********* ***
Brother Szymeck had rented his family a flat on Rehov Hayam in the centre of the oldest part of the first all -Jewish town of Tel Aviv, created fifteen years before on the dunes near Jaffa. The town itself was a shock..
As it had been, five years earlier, to another young Polish man who arrived with a Zionist group from Radom, further north and west in Russian Poland. He wrote down what he remembered fifty years later: “One little street with a row of small cottages on both sides and at the end the gymnasium (high school) ‘Herzlia’ blocked further expansion. On all sides, sand dunes to the sea and between this city and the sea a small two storied hospital. This was the Dream City! But the people were friendly, mostly Russian Jews who came early in the century to Palestine.” Actually, by that time, Tel Aviv boasted almost 200 houses and a population of more than 2,000 Jews, but you can feel what he meant. The Adler family were soon to meet this young, man when the outgoing Szymeck, who had been living in Tel Aviv for more than a year, brought along to the new flat the Polish friends he had made in the town. Among them were the brothers Gutstadt. Itzhak, a former kibbutznik from Gan Shmuel and Degania had recently recovered from recurrent malaria, the end of a serious love affair and the gunshot wound of a failed suicide attempt. He was a romantic and handsome young pioneer in his twenties, who had departed the kibbutz for Tel Aviv where he was working as a labourer in partnership with another young man from Radom.
With his brother he was also chaperoning their two good looking sisters who had been sent from Radom for a visit of reconnaissance. Szymeck Adler, a susceptible fellow, had already fallen for one of the sisters, another beautiful Manya, (Miriam) and spent a lot of his time with Itzhak (Isaac) and his brother Bronek (Abraham) and their crowd.
Times were bad. Small farmers growing oranges, olives and grapes were finding it hard to make a living, but there was not much else to invest in, so David and Jacob put their money into an orange grove that included a farmhouse and everyone moved on forty miles away from Tel Aviv to Petah Tikvah. The first all- Jewish village, settled on land bought with Jewish National Fund money from Turkish owners in 1878, it had been abandoned because of malaria, and re-settled a few years later with money given by the French Baron Edmond de Rothschild, Peta Tikvah was hot, sandy and crude. The fact that Tel Aviv was the first all Jewish town in the world had not endeared the place to Manka Adler, a young socialist woman, wrenched from her Polish love and her nationalist activities, who loved cities and especially large, civilised and deliciously cold Warsaw. Petah Tikvah, smaller, hotter and further from the sea had still fewer charms for her. Not even its distinction as the site of the first co-operative societies in Palestine could redeem the village.
. The Adler family arrived three years after Arab attacks; beaten off by guardsmen but still talked of in fearful voices.
Earlier Jewish immigrants from Europe had come with a sense of purpose that enabled them to withstand hardship and danger or with a pioneering spirit of adventure, which can enjoy both. Some appreciated the harsh beauties of the desert. I used to imagine that Hermush, like any Australian twelve year old boy, had run happily wild in this exotic, hot and unfettered life, but his hatred of the heat and the desert, expressed in war time letters, and his sister’s influence were working on him. Manka had never felt any stirrings of Zionism and hated the desert.
While Jacob settled down to running the orange grove, David conducted his life as he had in Sosnowiec and spent most of his days away from the dull farm, back in Tel Aviv, doing business and finding congenial company. Haim started at a new school and two new languages, Hebrew and English.
Petah Tikvah and Palestine became more bearable to Manka when she and Itzhak, immediately attracted to each other, fell passionately in love. A 24-carat Adler, she had again chosen an unsuitable man- this time a labourer who wore shorts and boots.
“I was not exactly proud of my future capitalist in-laws,” Itzhak recalled, “They were not proud of me either, and it was funny how we tried to avoid each other when meeting in the street. But her younger brothers were both very nice and Herman, a young school boy, was the only one in the family who approved of me.”
Manka’s determination overcame her father’s disapproval ( “ Well at least he was Jewish” she laughed years later) and the pair were married by a rabbi from the verandah of the farmhouse at Petah Tikvah on March 4 1926.
Soon after the wedding, she told me many years later “ I started to go at Itzhak about Palestine; I didn’t like it. I was not a nationalist, I didn’t like the language, hated the climate and saw myself surrounded by race hatred. I believed Itzhak was ready to go.” He was. From his own account of his life, written after many years in the Communist Party, I had learnt that he too was uncomfortable with the Arab- Jewish conflict, aggravated, he felt, by ruling Zionist policies. He agreed to leave and despite the disappointment of his old kibbutz mates, a few months after the wedding Manka and Itzhak boarded a boat at Jaffa . With them travelled David’s wife Manya and her two boys . All were headed for Brussels, where Manya had relations and where the rest of the family planned to join them.
The orange grove at Petah Tikvah, which had been sold to the Adlers by a prominent family of Yerushalmi, first earliest settlers in Jerusalem , had turned sour. Soon after they settled in, while David was walking through the fruit laden trees he came across a strange man who was also inspecting them.
“ What are you doing?” David asked.
“I’m checking the crop, just to see how it’s coming along.”
“But it’s not your crop, so it’s none of your business.”
But it was his crop. He had bought it from the family who sold the grove.. The Adlers had been conned. With no other income, they were eating into their capital and prospects looked bleak in a country suffering depression. At David’s suggestion, they sold the farm and the block of land they had bought on the corner of Allenby and Maze- and set off for Brussels. “Would be worth a fortune now”, smiled Willy, as he told me the story in 1999, sitting in the comfortable living room of his inner city Mannheim apartment. Tall, straight, strong, companionable and still handsome at 80, he had settled there since the 1950’s with his German wife Cristel, after a life as peripatetic as his Uncle Henri’s. The account must have come from his mother or father, since he had been a small boy of less than ten when the family left Petah Tikvah.
Itzhak, a severe critic of all the Adler men , and especially David, offered a harsher version of their departure:
“We only later realized how much this planning and scheming was the job of her elder brother David. Changes occurred in their economic life. David insisted on his share of the property and the only way to get money was to sell the orange grove. He needed the money because he had an expensive girl friend. The family moved back to Tel Aviv and David somehow found out that in Belgium they would be safe from the tax charges of the Polish government because Belgium had no extradition treaty with Poland. No one knew for certain the position, but as it happened we were first to go with David’s wife and two children.” Manka’s memory moves the blame a little from her brother: “David started to spend huge sums. He had a mistress who drained him dry so Jacob bought him out and went to Brussels.”
But Willy in1999 did not agree.: “Father wanted to get rid of us,” he said without rancour. “He was having a good time with his mistress. My father was very generous with his wife’s dowry”
By the end of summer 1926 all the Adlers except David had moved again and re- settled in Brussels.
The eagles’ second perch on their flight from Poland, Brussels
became another temporary home some of the family, while for others it remained home until the end of their lives
Fifteen year old Haim must have happily anticipated the second migration in three years and the prospect of a new city, a new language, and a new life must have filled him with joy.
“I read once”, he wrote to his future wife Yvette in 1942, “in the work of a talented Roumanian author Panait Istrati, the joyous cry, ‘Leaving is living’. That corresponded exactly to my state of mind. I have travelled much in my life and at each journey, began an intense new life. I love that. To see new countries and new things, to study the manners and customs of different people, to try for a time to live their lives. My heart was on holiday every time I mixed with the disgraceful railway station crowd about to journey towards the unknown. My spirit is always interested in those things not yet experienced. A vein of vagabondage? Perhaps. But I don’t regret it.”
With his parents and two of his brothers Haim moved into an apartment found for them in Etterbeek, a quarter of Brussels favoured by Manya’s relatives and close to the single room inhabited by his sister and her husband at 32, rue d’Artois which soon became his second home. Everyone, Willy recalled, ate together at the huge table in the parent Adlers’ apartment. At least a dozen people sat down before the great bowls of soup which his grandmother cooked to warm their thinned Middle Eastern blood, against the cold of Brussels winters. Adult Henri held no such happy memories of his Brussels life; or if he had, he shared them with no one.
The Adler family now confronted not only a harsh winter but also a new beginning in another land. What was to be done? Jacob first bought a cinema and sold it, then opened a Jewish patisserie-charcuterie near the Gare du Midi and sold that; later in partnership with a charcutier also from Sosnowiec, he invested his now dwindling capital in another charcuterie and bar. His old Sosnowiec skills seem to have deserted him. Perhaps they were not so easily transferred to a strange land ,perhaps he lacked his eldest son’s talents, for the business did not succeed. Perhaps Jacob’s mind was not on business, for it was in Brussels that he met the widow who became his mistress and later his wife. She lived with her 3 children 40 kilometres away in Antwerp and he was often away. Now Hannah Pozmantier and her daughter in law Manya Fishel found themselves in much the same sad predicament. Jacob’s son-in-law Itzhak, puritanical, soft hearted and reserved told me that the affairs of the family were “ complicated”, and the atmosphere of the Adler household “not the best.” Henri, whose awakening political opinions embraced a severe moralism, if he noticed his parents at all, must have responded at least coldly to his father’s behaviour. The tender hearted Haim, sensitive as he was, could scarcely have been ignorant of the problems of his adults; perhaps he was less moved than he should have been by the troubles of a mother who had shown him so little tenderness , perhaps his mind was on other things. For like so many an idealistic and compassionate student , then and later, he was deeply troubled by the problems of all unfortunates in the wider world and his socialist sister showed him a way forward.
While brother Bernard worked with Jacob in the charcuterie and brother Szymeck enjoyed the life of a smart young man about town and occasionally peddled soft goods round the countryside, Haim , now 15, had enrolled at the lycee Athenee Royale and entered enthusiastically into the student life of learning, music, politics and fun. The idol of his seven and five year old nephews, how impressive he looked to them as he ran around with the crowd in his smart student cap – wiped first over his shoes so that it would not look new, Willy recalled . And how devoted he was to them. “He loved music and had a perfect ear. He transferred this love to me and to Jules”.
Loved music? Henri? This was news to me. Music had played no part at all in the life of the Henri I had known, a man who sang no songs, owned no records, attended no concerts and on the radio listened only to the news. I listened with amazement as Willy revealed another man. After Henri’s visits to the opera, he would arrive at their door and perform the songs for his nephews. “Very heavy stuff, it was, too! Wagner.” He sang a lot and he read to us too. We loved him,” Willy fondly recollected. Willy’s Henri, the stranger to me, turned up again in one of his earliest letters to Yvette. “Some years ago” he wrote, “I was at a symphony concert in Brussels. There I heard Beethoven’s Pastorale. You know the music. The passage that comes after the storm and which is interpreted as a paean to nature and to peace. Well that so profoundly invaded my whole being that I was unable to free myself of it for a long time My throat was filled with it. In bed that night, the sacred melody remained with me. It was everywhere, on the wall, the ceiling, the floor; my whole body ached with it.. I couldn’t sleep. My head was bursting…. And after all this time the Pastorale is still there, proud and strong in all its glory. It has accompanied me throughout my life.”
French , his new language of school and street, gave Haim not the slightest trouble , for he had an extraordinary gift for languages. At home, with his family he spoke Polish, from Palestine he had brought English and Hebrew, and in time he would master Spanish and Russian. New sights, new sounds, new people were always a delight for him and he drank in the rich life of the big city his restless family had dropped him into. He remained , like his sister, a European and, like her, had found “the Levant” too hot, too sandy and repellent.
**** ****
When David arrived from Tel Aviv, the family rejoiced, but not for long, for he was followed soon after by his mistress, the lovely, rich and talented Ala Levantine, and David moved out of the family apartment to live with her. Niece of the general manager of the Anglo Palestine Bank in Tel Aviv, of Russian origin, the fabulous Miss Levantine, as they referred to her, was always described admiringly by Adler men as “aristocratic”. Henri in his old age, tolerant of his oldest brother and of obsessive passion, remarked sympathetically to me one day that Ala represented “another world” for David. As Yvette did for you, I said to myself
Down the road his sister Manka and her husband faced difficulties of quite another sort. The child conceived on their wedding night had arrived after an incompetent forceps delivery that left Manka wounded and she was forced to leave the baby to the care of Itzhak while she returned to hospital to be mended. Even after her return home, her health did not improve; she became thinner and weaker. Life was tough. Itzhak’s job as a leather worker in Brussels left him impoverished and dissatisfied. Both had become fed up with the proximity of the Adlers and when her health improved, after a spell of coddling with his parents in Radom, Manka agreed with Itzhak’s proposal that they emigrate yet again. America’s quota for Polish Jews was filled but Australia, where a cousin of his had already settled, was open. Australia it was. The Adler family pleaded with them to stay in Europe. But this time Manka was determined to stick with her man though she fell in with their insistence that he go ahead, in the common way of emigrants, and send for her when he had found a job and made some money. Jacob Adler offered to pay Itzhak’s fare to Australia and throw in the forty pounds landing money in return for another piece of dodgy business. “I had to go to Paris, Itzhak related. “The old man was afraid to travel on his Polish passport and decided to use his younger son Berek’s Palestinian one. That meant a switch of photos and Paris was the place for that. I was told what cafe to go to and who to contact. It cost a little money but it was a perfect switch, and never detected.” I doubt he ever realised the fatal consequence to Berek of this switching job; if he did, he never spoke of it.
1928 was the year Itzhak left for Melbourne. It was Hermush who lavished love on his sister and infant niece then and during the three weeks Manka spent in hospital again for the surgery she had finally agreed to undergo. “Who knows what sort of surgeons they have in Australia? If they have them at all”, everyone around her had said, after her ticket and landing permit arrived. 1928. The year had carved itself into Henri’s memory. Ten years later in Spain , when he filled out a biographical questionnaire for the Spanish communist party, it was the date he gave in answer to the question asked under the sub-heading Political Life. “When did you become interested in the Proletarian movement?” Under what circumstances? What influenced you in that direction? (reading, ambience etc) Haim Adler named his sister and his student life first among his influence then his work as a labourer in the Citroen factory.”
The turmoil that was to mark Henri’s adult life began soon after.
First Manka, with her toddler Amirah, left Brussels on the long journey to Melbourne. “It was a dramatic and awful occasion”, said Henri as he recalled the whole family gathered at the station to farewell them, “because we thought never to see Manka again.” All the tenderness the 17-year-old so craved was leaving on that train and travelling far over the sea. It would be ten years before he saw his sister again.
And then, in the year of her departure to the other end of the earth, Hermush was thrown out of home. I used to lap up the story. told by my parents, still shocked twenty and thirty years later, of the defiant and revolutionary Henry and the angry and reactionary Jacob, who had torn up Henri’s subversive school books and thrown him out of the house.
I first heard Henri’s own account of the episode in 1975.
“Bernard came in late one day for his work at the shop and Father straight away shouted at him for his laziness, told him to pack his things and clear out.” Henri, who was watching, sneered abusively at his father, “You throw him out eh? “It’s easy to have sons and throw them out!’” Jacob, still the violent and strong ex-brewery worker, said nothing but left straight for home and Henri’s room where he locked the door and tore up his son’s school books.
The source, Jacob felt certain, of all this disrespect. “I rented a room and got a job at the Citroen factory; just like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times”.
Forty six years after it had happened and himself older than his father had been, Henri’s recollection was calm and even sympathetic to a father affronted by his son’s disrespect and rudeness.
Not long after, cold and long-suffering Hannah , then about fifty years old, died suddenly of a stroke at her sister’s house in Luxembourg. What was grandmother doing in Luxembourg? I asked Willy, a naive Australian response to this European slipping from country to country. He told me that she had been living there since Jacob divided his time between Brussels and “Mrs Lauffer’s” place in Antwerp. “Mrs Lauffer” was a recent discovery. In my youth, I had never heard of her , although she and Jacob had married and remained together until he died in 1954, at 80 years old and although he had been corresponding regularly with his children who sent him money for them both. My mother, always reticent about her father’s infidelity , was protective of the Adler family and though my father in his old age had revealed the fact of Jacob’s “girl friend”, no name was mentioned. I heard Mrs Lauffer’s name for the first time from Henri in a story that absolved his father from serious blame. When Hannah died, he said, she was visiting Luxembourg with Jacob, who was doing business in the city. Faulty memory? Hostility to his mother? Who can say?
Family ties loosened for Henri in Brussels, but friendship flourished and it was here that he met his closest lifelong friend, a Polish Jew like himself, originally named Leon Gelasko but known quite early by his nom de plume of Leon Arega. Together they had worked in the Citroen factory, together they had enrolled at Brussels university and together, during 1927, they had joined in the demonstrations and street fights that followed the sentencing to death in Boston of Italian immigrant anarchist workers, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Henri’s first political act. And long remembered.
Police had him early under surveillance, he told me. He was not allowed into the Belgian Union of Students because he was a foreigner and also, he believed, on account of his communist ideas. After someone tried to assassinate an Italian prince who had come to marry a Belgian Princess, his room was searched, he said, and he was arrested, brought to the Police Commissariat, beaten up and given two or three days to get out of Belgium.
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tom rigby - melbourne 