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Reviewed by:
  • This Crazy Thing a Life: Australian Jewish Autobiography
  • Serge Liberman
This Crazy Thing a Life: Australian Jewish Autobiography, Richard Freadman. Crawley, Western Australia: U of Western Australia P, 2007, 301pp.

In fairness to the reader, I must declare a direct personal interest and involvement in the book under review. On the strength of my Bibliography of Australian Judaica, the aim of which has been to include all material of substance written by or about [End Page 108] Jews in Australia, I served as one "port of call" among others in providing information about titles and other materials that Professor Richard Freadman required for his project on Australian Jewish autobiography.

As a prelude to this review, it is also appropriate to declare that Professor Freadman's This Crazy Thing a Life is an Australian history-making literary and scholarly work, a point to which I shall return later.

But first, it merits reflecting upon, and arguably celebrating, the fact that the past twenty-five to thirty years have seen an exponential increase in autobiographical writings by Australian Jews relative to the entire two hundred years since their initial arrival as convicts with the First Fleet in 1788. These include autobiographies by politicians and political activists, businessmen and communal leaders, artists, writers and composers, and, most recently and substantially, by Holocaust survivors, their relatives, and other post-war immigrants. The greatest weight given by Professor Freadman in his book is to Holocaust-related texts which constitute the bulk of some three hundred published full-length autobiographies and four hundred shorter pieces that have appeared in assorted anthologies and journals. The numbers alone impress on account of the industriousness of Jewish autobiographers. But impressive too is Professor Freadman's command not only of this voluminous first-hand material, but also of numerous additional secondary sources encompassing Australian Jewry, literary criticism, social theory, psychological theory, and bio/autobiographical writing outside the specifically Jewish.

In structure, This Crazy Thing a Life is a triptych. The first part deals with some major issues that attend the writing of Jewish autobiography. The second contains essays that focus upon seven specific Australian Jewish writers to which is added a separate essay on Melbourne's Makor Library's "Write your Story" initiative. The third consists of extracts selected from a goodly number of the works that have passed through Freadman's hands.

The opening section is an extensive discussion of Australian Jewish autobiographical writing set against the background of Australian Jewish history, population growth, and the demographic, cultural, ideological, religious, organizational, and political changes that almost wholesale transformed the community's pre-WWII, predominantly Anglo-Saxon Jewish life through the post-war influx of Eastern and Central European Jews, many of them as refugees. These migrations, attended by loss of home and family, of uprootedness, transplantation, stateless wandering, and refugee status in an alien land gave rise to concerns about how to live in this unfamiliar diaspora, an issue rendered all the more acute by ambivalences and inner conflict with respect to questions of personal aliyah upon the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948.

Living in the diaspora has proved for many to be a complicated dilemma. The concept of diaspora has been subject to diverse definitions, some seeing it as an objective condition and others as subjective states of being. Freadman follows leading diaspora scholar Robin Cohen, author of Global Diasporas: An introduction, by defining diaspora in terms of commonly occurring characteristics, such as—among [End Page 109] others—the dispersal from one's homeland, a residual collective memory and myth about that homeland, an idealization of the supposed ancestral home, and a troubled relationship with host societies. He then discusses the Australian Jewish diaspora in the light of this definition, highlighting particularly salient aspects of its own: for example, the dynamics of change and transformation within Australian Jewry and its conflicting attitudes to the "homeland" that is Israel. Like many other authors referred to, he wrestles with that intractable long-debated issue, "What is Jewishness?"; "What is Australian Jewish autobiography?"; and where, if anywhere, is the dividing line between Australian Jews and Jewish Australians, when these are in large part defined by where individual...

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