Who, many will be wondering, is Jacob Rosenberg, and why does he warrant a book of essays written by literary luminaries? Singing for All He’s Worth answers these questions and, in so doing, reveals a remarkable man.

Rosenberg was born in 1922 to a working-class Jewish family in the Polish city of Lodz. When the Nazis marched into Poland, he was just seventeen. Within a short time, Lodz’s large Jewish community was herded into a ghetto. Space was a memory, a bread loaf was a banquet, disease was rife, death was rampant – but not so rampant as the brutality of the masters. These were terrible times, so terrible that no one could believe that worse was still to come.

Late in 1942 the ‘resettlements’ began. Thousands of Jews were sent to a destination where, they were told, work would be available, food plentiful, and housing adequate. It was some time before the rumours reached those remaining in the ghetto; death camps and the names Auschwitz and Chelmo circulated. In 1944 the Lodz ghetto was ‘liquidated’ – Nazis were emperors of euphemisms – and the remaining inhabitants were transported to Auschwitz. On the train platform at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Rosenberg’s parents, his sister, Ida, and two young nieces were immediately sent to the gas chambers. Two days later Jacob witnessed his other sister, Pola, fling herself at the electric fence.

Rosenberg survived the war and in 1948, together with his wife Esther, whose entire family had also been killed, arrived in Melbourne. They worked in factories, like so many of the new immigrants. They lived first in inner-city Brunswick, then in bayside St Kilda. Their only child, Marcia, was born in 1953.

Rosenberg’s first language was Yiddish; he also spoke Polish. Once he arrived in Australia, he added English. Yiddish was the language of central and eastern European Jews. A hybrid language (it borrows from German, Czech, Polish, Russian, and a swag of Slavic and Romance languages) it is rich, lusty, expressive. Before World War II there were an estimated eleven million Yiddish speakers worldwide. Major cities in the English-speaking world, including Melbourne, had thriving Yiddish-speaking communities, supported by Yiddish newspapers, magazines, music, and theatre.

During the 1920s there was an efflorescence of translations into Yiddish. Rosenberg, a prodigious reader from an early age, first read the classics – Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Orwell – in Yiddish. Rosenberg was steeped in Yiddishkeit – a state of being that encompasses both Yiddish language and literature, as well as the history and culture of Yiddish-speaking people.

Since boyhood, Rosenberg had kept a diary and written poetry. When he arrived in Australia he continued to write in Yiddish – poetry and prose about the lost world of his youth and the horrors of the Nazi years. The poet Geoff Page, in his essay exploring Rosenberg’s three volumes of poetry written in English (‘A Hard-won Mastery’), quotes an early poem, ‘To Be Remembered’:

Please
don’t close the album,
yet
please
it’s so good
it’s so good
to be remembered.

Remembering was essential for Rosenberg; it propelled his writing. ‘The Touchstone of [my] reminiscences – their informing spirit,’ Rosenberg writes, ‘is the desire and determination of an entire community to remain human, even at the last frontier of life.’

Rosenberg was wedded to Yiddish; he believed that if the language were left to wither and die, as was the wish of some Jews committed to Anglo-Australian life, the world of European Jewry that Hitler had done so much to destroy would indeed be lost. Over time, the number of Yiddish readers in the English-speaking world dwindled. Danielle Charak, the renowned Yiddishist, writes in her essay that Yiddish was at the very heart of Rosenberg’s identity; that ‘he fought for Yiddish with all the tools at hand’. In an interview she conducted with him in 2001, he said, ‘I feel that I’m the poet who walks behind the hearse of his own language.’ Like all writers, Rosenberg wanted to be read. In 1992, at the age of seventy, he decided to write in English, an agonising decision for a man whose history, whose joys and sufferings, whose notions of truth and justice, whose love of literature, had been embedded in Yiddish.

Between 1994 and his death in 2008, Rosenberg wrote seven books. Alex Skovron edited all of Rosenberg’s English-language books. These include three books of poetry, a collection of short stories, a novel, The Hollow Tree (published in 2009, the year following his death), and the two great memoirs. It was the first of these, East of Time (2005), that brought Rosenberg to national attention. It attracted several shortlistings and won the 2006 New South Wales Premier’s Award for non-fiction and the 2007 National Biography Award. It was followed in 2007 by Sunrise West. (Peter Steele and Peter Rose reviewed them in ABR in September 2005 and October 2007, respectively.)

In East of Time, Rosenberg recalls family, friends, neighbours, teachers, and tradespeople who comprised the richness of life in Jewish Lodz. This first volume finishes in 1944 with the departure of the Rosenberg family in a train headed for Auschwitz. Raimond Gaita writes that Rosenberg, in East of Time, ‘gave us a spiritual treasure, one that will nourish our souls because it is the work of unsparingly truthful love’. And this ‘god-intoxicated agnostic’ was a man of profound spirit, beautifully evoked by poet and Jesuit Peter Steele in his contribution to this collection, a poem entitled ‘Man Singing by Candlelight’.

The second memoir, Sunrise West, documents Rosenberg’s wartime and postwar experiences, his marriage to Esther Laufer, and their arrival in Melbourne. Both volumes are constructed in short vignettes that weave memory, imagination, dream, fable, and allegory to create worlds that have been lost, or seriously challenge the imagination. These writings reveal a sharp wisdom, a poetic soul, and an unsentimental compassion and humanism. They have a rhythm that is redolent of great Yiddish writers such as Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and a quality both magical and mystical that transforms the quotidian into something compelling and extraordinary. They have, in short, the aromas of Yiddish, even though they are written in English.

Most of the contributors to the collection met Rosenberg in the last ten to fifteen years of his life – the English period. Each developed a unique and valued connection with him, and each adds to the portrait of a man who was passionately engaged with life, literature, love, freedom, justice, truth, a man with a great gift for friendship. Descartes named wonder as the first of the passions. Rosenberg knew wonder, and it infuses his writing.

Alex Skovron opens the collection with an overview of Rosenberg – his friend – and the work. He writes: ‘Jacob Rosenberg, never at a loss for a word, a man with such faith in the power and necessity of words, also well understood the traps and limitations of language … and the necessity for the kind of silence that only art might hope to penetrate.’ Art was Rosenberg’s mission.

Morag Fraser aptly describes Rosenberg’s world as ‘a moral patchwork’. She poses the question that many people would ask about him: ‘How could such manifest grace survive what he had seen, what his life had dictated?’ Rosenberg refused to be a victim. Survival brought moral responsibility, and language and writing afforded him the tools for remembering and truth-telling.

Richard Freadman focuses on the ethos of gentleness in East of Time and Sunrise West. He quotes Rosenberg (‘Once you’ve been tortured, you’re forever tortured’) but also notes that ‘in the autobiographies, [there is] an intimation of possibility, of possible re-enchantment even’. It is this quality that draws the reader into the memoirs: there is a current, a fuel, an energy of hope. Helen Garner recognises in Rosenberg’s work ‘a kind of mercy for the reader’. His empathy for the people he recreates is passed on to the reader. In writing of individuals, not millions, he humanises the past.

Arnold Zable, who knew Rosenberg from his earliest years, explores the early Yiddish works. While highlighting the anger in them, he reveals Rosenberg’s ‘enduring zest for life, and love of Eros, his desperate efforts to rescue that which is human from the rubble’. Zable’s essay has a twofold effect: it explores the Yiddish-speaking Rosenberg and mourns the demise of a rich and lyrical language.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe, in a wide-ranging, delightfully jaunty essay, describes Rosenberg as a ‘wisdom-writer’, while Alex Miller provides a fine appraisal of the prose works in English, what he describes as Rosenberg’s ‘epic four-volume celebration and memorial to his own generation and people’. Rosenberg was a man of great generosity, and Miller writes about the Yiddish writers and thinkers whom he ‘gifted’ to him.

Marcia Jacob’s essay, ‘Threads’, concludes the collection. It is a moving and personal tribute to a remarkable man, all the more extraordinary in its range and perspective, given that this man was her father.

You cannot read Jacob Rosenberg’s work and remain unchanged. This collection of essays is a worthy tribute to him. Most importantly, it will take readers back to the work of a man who never forgot his own father’s advice always to keep alive his ‘inner sense of freedom’, even when enslaved and oppressed.