This sharp focus has meant that literary critics have not overlooked Australian Jewish autobiography. (Mary Besemeres’s Translating One’s Self [2002] and Rosamund Dalziell’s Shameful Autobiographies [1999] both engage with Australian Jewish autobiographers as part of a wider study of autobiography.) To date, however, Australian Jewish autobiography has not been studied as a subject in its own right. All this is set to change with Richard Freadman’s This Crazy Thing a Life: Australian Jewish Autobiography. Freadman’s volume provides a comprehensive introduction to this group of works, several fine readings of well-known autobiographies, and a selection of extracts from some little-known autobiographies, a selection which is likely to whet the appetite for further reading.

The opening section of Freadman’s volume gives an overview of the scope of Australian Jewish autobiography and an introduction to the many scholarly controversies surrounding it. One of Freadman’s valuable contributions here is to map the extent of this sub-genre (around 300 published volumes of autobiography, with another 400 or so essay-length pieces), as well as the more notable demographic trends (only one of these volumes was published before the twentieth century). Freadman refers briefly to many scholarly debates in this overview, to questions of the self and identity, truth and historical reference, as well as to the conflicts around the definition of Jewishness. These debates are not just academic: arguments about whether we can refer to historical truth, for instance, take on a sharper edge in reference to the Holocaust.

Australian Jewish autobiography, however, is not only concerned with the Holocaust: a number of autobiographers have taken as their focus the strains of immigration and assimilation, often played out in intergenerational conflict. In the second section of his volume, Freadman gives a series of fine and nuanced readings of major Australian Jewish autobiographies. His own prose is illuminated by the phrases he selects to illustrate the power of their work. Discussing Jacob Rosenberg’s East of Time (2005) and Sunrise West (2007), he writes:

In the world of his prose a quiet place is one ‘where silence listened to the wind’[EOT, p. 62]; someone has a ‘voice like a spider’s footfall’ [SW, p. 77]; a woman about to enter the Lodz ghetto with her family and a cartload of possessions stands desolate, ‘her face a tapestry of murdered dreams’ [EOT, p. 117].

Among the works that Freadman discusses are those of Andrew Riemer, Susan Varga, Lily Brett and Arnold Zable; he then turns away from individual authors to focus on a community project, the Makor Jewish community library’s ‘Write Your Story’ project. This project offers assistance to Jews of all ages and backgrounds in telling their life stories, through small classes that are aided by a facilitator. The Makor project has given rise to a remarkable series of narratives, and extracts from some of these appear in the third and final section of Freadman’s volume, along with extracts from other autobiographies.

The final section of Freadman’s volume is the one that may hold the most interest for many readers: it is a selection of short passages from a wide range of Australian Jewish autobiographies. Many of them are little known, but all of them are fascinating. Freadman orders these autographical fragments by theme: the first theme concerns the autobiographer’s evocation of ‘old worlds’, the worlds of their childhood. These evocations are vivid rather than simply idyllic: one autobiographer relates her explorations of the family tannery and her recurrent fear that she would fall into a vat and become a small tanned hide.

The theme of the Holocaust produces writing so strong that it can throw the other extracts into shadow. In an extract from Hania’s War (2000), Hania Ajzner writes:

I walk up to the wall, look down, and I am struck speechless. The low wall encloses a pit which contains a mound of white ashes. Among the ashes there are bones, pieces of skulls, and teeth. This is the final resting place of eighteen thousand people, inmates of this charnel-house, were shot, buried, and then disinterred and cremated here … I am actually looking down on my father’s ashes. He had been stripped naked, had walked to a previously dug ditch, was ordered to climb down among the corpses already lying there, to lie on top on them, and he was then shot. This mound, and my memories of him, are all that remains of him today.

Especially memorable, in this collection of extracts, are those episodes where German soldiers show a special venom towards Jewish babies and children: ‘They can burn in hell’, says a Belsen guard, rejecting an appeal from some terrified children, ensuring that they will burn in a hell on earth.

Survivors of these experiences find them impossible to leave behind. In an extract from Memories of War (1995), Kalman Katz writes:

I would not call it ‘normal’ life. To me it was living a ‘double’ life. I have tried to have a happy, normal life and enjoy my family; yet today, when I look at my granddaughter, she reminds me of my younger sister who was the same age when she and the rest of my family were hacked to death ...

For the younger generation, the effect of their elders’ stories of survival is immense, but also unpredictable. Georges Rich writes that ‘imagination cannot cross the bridge to reality’. Others would disagree, and Rich’s own writing, where he sees ‘a wiry, back-lit silhouette, contrasting perversely with the playful sparkle of sun and sea’, is itself an exploration of the ways in which art can respond to the Holocaust. Other extracts explore a variety of themes including Australian and Jewish culture and identity, intergenerational relationships and migration.

Freadman’s volume will undoubtedly encourage more study of Australian Jewish autobiography as a significant subject in its own right. Perhaps more importantly, however, this book opens a doorway, encouraging readers to explore these autobiographies. Ultimately, this volume adds its own strength to what is the quintessential project of Australian Jewish autobiography: that of witnessing.