Jewels and Ashes

by Arnold Zable

In a memoir of a Jewish man's search for his roots, the son of Holocaust survivors returns to his parents' homeland in Poland to rediscover the former glory of East European Jewry.

Genres: Nonfiction, Holocaust, Australia, Memoir, 20th Century, Jewish, World War II

210 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Zable was born on 10 January 1947 in Wellington, New Zealand to Polish-Jewish refugee parents. They moved early in his life to Australia and he grew up in Carlton, Victoria.

Zable is known as a storyteller - through his memoirs, short stories and novels. Australian critic Susan Varga says that Zable's award-winning memoir, Jewels and Ashes, "was a ground-breaking book in Australia, one of the first of what has since become a distinct auto/biographical genre: a second-generation writer returns to the scene of unspeakable crimes to try to understand a fraught and complex legacy, and, in so doing, embarks on a journey into the self.

In an interview Zable explained that the rights and experiences of refugees and asylum seekers underpins his work:

"The current generation of refugees are experiencing the intense challenges faced by previous generations. We tend to forget, or fail to imagine, how difficult it is to start life anew far from the homeland. We forget also that nostalgia, the longing for the return to homeland, is a deep and enduring aspect of the refugee experience."

In the same interview he said about his language that "I am drawn to the quirky sayings and observations that define a person or a culture".

Reviews

[Lyn Elliott]

Jewels and Ashes by Arnold Zable

I read this immediately after I had read Cafe Scheherazade, the novel that followed this family memoir, and wish now that I had read them in the reverse order because this is the background story for the Jewish refugees whose stories Zabel has fictionalised in Scheherazade.

Zable grew up in Melbourne with his parents and other members of the Bialystok Jewish community who had managed to escape from Poland to Australia sometime during the 1930s or, miraculously, some who had survived into the 1940s.

The new, Australian life was vastly different from their homeland. Memories of the old world, the old life, infused the lives of his parents and their friends, affecting their present lives in different ways.
"Do you ever think about those you left behind? I ask father.
"Not often," he says. "Such memories are a luxury I can't afford."

This brief piece about the book is from Zable’s website:
First his parents made a journey to the New World. It was the 1930s, and Europe was seething. As he grew up, Arnold Zable heard tales, songs, fragments of the world they had left behind. He had inherited a fractured, vibrant past which both fascinated and disturbed him. Finally, he had to confront the mystery: he had to travel back to the Old World, to his parents' home, to his grandparents' birthplace, and to a land pervaded by ancestral ghosts.
Jewels and Ashes is the result of that journey of discovery. Moving effortlessly between centuries and continents, and across inner and outer landscapes, it is an astonishing achievement. … (from Zable’s own website https://www.arnoldzable.com.au/books/...).

For me, it’s this exploring the inner and outer landscapes of people and their places that makes Jewels And Ashes a standout in memoirs of Eastern European Jewish life before and after the Catastrophe.

It won five literary awards in the year it was published (1991), recognising both the quality of the writing and what was then the originality of a second-generation Holocaust survivor seeking to understand his parents’ world and his own place in it. Zable tried to find people who remembered the Jewish families from the towns and villages where his parents and their ancestors had lived, and he visited the places where his relatives and their communities were murdered – in the ghettoes, in mass graves in the countryside and in concentration camps.
The publisher’s website says that … ‘since it was published, Jewels And Ashes has become a classic, a book that has stood the test of time.
Compelled by the momentum of memory, the unsettling fragments of ancestral stories told him as a child, Arnold Zable travels to the Eastern European countryside of his parents’ remembrance, the terrain of his dreams and imagination, where he retraces the steps of the generations before him. Miraculously, it is this journey to the past that allows Zable to understand the present — the inner lives of those who, like his parents, survived the hatred but lost every trace of his family and former lives.
Arnold Zable has articulated, exquisitely, the haunted consciousness of the next generation. An astonishing achievement, this is a lyrical, transcendent, luminous work’. https://scribepublications.com.au/boo...)


'Romance and terror, light and shadow, replicas and originals, hover side by side, seeking reconciliation, while within me there is a sense of awe and a silent refrain: I am here, at last I am here; and it is far more beautiful than I had imagined. And far more devastating. Yet, somehow, never have I felt so much at peace'.

[Nadia]

"We were born in the wake of Annihilation. We were children of dreams and shadows."

'Jewels and Ashes' is a beautiful, sorrowful and painfully haunting book about the author's journey to his ancestral home in Bialystok. What he meets is a changed landscape—Judenrein—where only a handful of Jews still live in the streets and houses of a town that once housed a thriving Jewish community. It is a quest for understanding and an ode to survival, an attempt to reconstruct a piece of the Old world that is now forever lost to us.

[Ben]

A deeply heart-wrenching account of the author's retracing of his family's past in their native Poland prior to and during the Holocaust, or as he calls it, the Annihilation, Mr. Zable brings the formerly bustling towns of Poland and their fateful terrors to life with beautifully haunting prose.

While the numbers of survivors are currently dwindling fast, the shared burden of the Holocaust still clearly weighs heavily upon the shoulders of second or third generation immigrants such as Mr. Zable or myself. I can only imagine that this book, which was written shortly after I was born (and shortly before the collapse of the USSR), foreshadows my own travels to Europe to retrace the footsteps of my father and his family as they fled Europe.

I don't remember having known the numbers before, but apparently the pre-war Jewish population of Poland was 3.3 million or 10% of the total population. After, the population was 300,000 Jews, or only 9% of the original Jewish population. That's insanity.

Every human has a story and is part of a story. Though all of us are culminations of forces beyond our control, we can still try to control where our stories end. And hopefully that is a place nearer to light than to darkness. I loved Mr. Zable's reference to his father's love for words and the power they can have. It is evident that his father surely would have found his son's work to be a jewel among the ashes.

Edit:
I have also found this book to have a strong lingering effect as I ponder my own story and such questions as what's worth keeping, what's worth throwing away, and what's worth building on? Although I am myself, if the Holocaust or WWII had never happened, I would likely not be the "me" that is currently me. Either there would be no "I" or "I" would be in some other "me" without the same perspective I hold now. As such, I can't help but feel somehow charged with responsibility in protecting my story and helping others write better stories for the future.

Lastly, I definitely don't mean to put this book in a box. It is a story of terror and survival. The story of the refugee is a universal one in the wider human story. While so few people have ever been kings or queens and a little more than them have died fighting for the right, I think most of us alive today have at least a little refugee blood coursing through our veins. Although it has been theorized that most of us come from the progeny of great, prolific kings (e.g. most Europeans are supposedly descendants of Charlemagne), did Damocles not wish to escape the sword constantly dangling above him? But besides the triflings of elites, I can't help but feel it is so important to learn and appreciate the stories of refugees so that we're all a little more kind to those around us and more mindful to the suffering of others.

[Tim Turnbull]

The book Jewels and Ashes is both a beautiful and sad memoir of the author’s journey to Poland to come to terms with and better understand his parent’s Jewish heritage. In doing so, Arnold Zable has created an amazing account of his own journey to understand how his parents came to both survive the holocaust by travelling to the New World and deal with resulting emotions of grief, guilt, and hope.

[Hazel Edwards]

A thoughtful personal history moving across cultures and times.

[Ann Tonks]

I've had this sitting on the shelf for a long time. I dipped in and out of it and then finally was in the mood to finish it. It's a beautiful, sad, rich, deep story of Jewish life in Poland and in the diaspora.The phrase that keeps ringing out is "this landscape is Judenrein". Free of Jews. Hundreds, thousands of years of community living wiped out - and recreated by Mr Zable.

[Christina Sanantonio]

Second reading. Lovely. One of the best.

[Emma]

I'm in no mood for this. I like his voice, and I'm interested in the content, but it's too disjointed for me right now. Think I need a meaty story.