My first reading in Melbourne was at Readings Bookshop in Acland...

My first reading in Melbourne was at Readings Bookshop in Acland Street, St Kilda. I arrived already feeling very emotional. Acland Street was at the heart of all of the 40 years of my life in Australia. Particularly Scheherezade, the Jewis…
h restaurant/cafe where you could eat cholent, chicken schnitzel, borscht and the best apple cake in the universe- my younger daughter, the family foodie, has been, unsuccessfully, trying for years to get the recipe for that Scheherzade apple cake.
I sat down at the table I would shortly be reading at and looked up. There in the front row were Avram and Masha Zeleznikov, Scheherezade’s former owners. I was quite overwhelmed. I hadn’t seen them for so long. Masha came rushing up to me to say hello. “I can’t believe it, you look just like your mother,” she said to me. I almost lost it. My throat choked up, something you want to avoid just before a reading. Avram Zeleznikov joined us. “You were at the cafe nearly every day” he said. “You wrote some of your poems in the cafe”. He was right. I had three young children and was always scribbling notes for something whenever I could. “Remember that big argument you had with your father, one day?” Avram Zeleznikov said.”It was about your mother’s English.” By now, the people in the first few rows of the audience at the Readings reading were looking more than interested. “I remember” I said. By the time my father and I had finished that particularly heated discussion the usually noisy Scheherezade had become very quiet. Several of the regulars could be heard saying “Look at how she speaks to her father” to which my father, who was still agitated, replied. “She is a very good daughter. She is a better daughter than many other people’s daughters I know.” While I was still digesting and relishing the memory of my father’s outrage that anyone other than he himself should feel free enough to criticize me, Gideon, the owner of the Monarch Cake Shop in Acland Street, which since 1934 has been at the epicentre of Jewish life in Melbourne, came up and presented me with a box of assorted Monarch cakes. These were the cakes of my childhood and the cakes of my dreams. Monarch, which my father and half the Jews in Melbourne pronounced, Monarch, pronouncing the ch as in the word arch, was my haven. It was where I fled whenever the latest diet I was on became too much or, possibly, too little, for me.
That night after the reading and the book signing, I opened the Monarch box in my hotel room and ate the best piece of cheesecake I’ve had in years. It was so delicious. I didn’t even feel any guilt. Besides which, I’d already splurged and had a slice of a shockingly high lemon meringue pie, in Sydney.