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HOW DID A NON-JEWISH writer come to write
two novels about a Jewish family, The First
Book of Samuel and its sequel, Theodora’s
Gift?
I never set out to write a novel about a
Jewish family or indeed with a Jewish theme. I never
really set out to write anything, that’s not the way I
work. But looking back I can trace the sometimes
twisted flights of steps that led me to write these books.
The trail begins with my perhaps perversely pursued
interest in ancient languages, beginning at school where
I learned Latin, continuing at university, where I studied
more Latin and took up Classical Greek—with no great
distinction, I hasten to add, but plenty of affection. After
I graduated I got a job in Canberra in the public service.
Feeling bored in the evenings, I was looking for something
to do and saw an advertisement for beginners’
classes in biblical Hebrew. Now people who do Latin
and Greek frequently turn to Hebrew next, and then
Sanskrit and so on through the ancient languages. So I
enrolled.
The class was taught by an Israeli man of European
origin called George Stern, who was also a public servant.
We met once a week, and three nights of the month
we did biblical Hebrew, and then on the fourth week
modern Hebrew. It was a very enjoyable class and I
remember the other people in the class well—probably
all united by a certain eccentricity in studying biblical
Hebrew after a hard day’s work at the clerical desk.
Some of my fellow students were Jewish but several
like myself were not.
Eventually a girl of my age turned up to the class,
Louise Katz, who also became a writer. She’d just
returned from Israel where she’d been staying on her
uncle’s kibbutz. Her modern Hebrew was a bit
advanced for us but we’d go and have a drink afterwards
where she’d tell me all about life on a kibbutz,
and compared to dull old Canberra it all sounded
wonderful.
She laid particular emphasis, I remember, on the
endless availability of white cheese and honey in a glass
and soda water on tap. Admittedly she mentioned a few
other alarming details, like getting up at five o’clock to
pick grapefruit in the dark, and sharing a room with
three strangers who didn’t speak the same language—
but these I was sure were exaggerations. Louise was
also pretty convincing on the theme that learning
Hebrew at night in Canberra was a dead loss, whereas if
I went to a kibbutz with an ulpan, a state-sponsored
system where you learnt the language several hours a
day, it would all take off. Forthwith I decided to leave
my job, and go to Israel to live on a kibbutz.
I should say that really I knew nothing about Israel.
It may be hard for Jewish people here to understand
how a reasonably well-educated twenty-two-year-old
Australian girl could know almost nothing about Israel,
but there it is, and I don’t think I was unusual. In any
case, ignorance of Israel was just one of a million ignorances,
if that’s any consolation.
BEFORE I LEFT AUSTRALIA, I managed to make
contact through the consulate here with a kibbutz
in northern Israel, Kibbutz Mizra, who
were willing to take me in and enrol me in
their ulpan. So there I turned up, on a rather cold
January day, with my little bag, ready for my adventure.
I soon discovered that everything Louise had told me
about the kibbutz was true—the flowing white cheese
and honey, the fountain of soda water, as well as the five
o’clock starts in the tractor and the small bedroom
crowded with strangers from every country on earth, it
seemed. I was both charmed and appalled. I joined the
ulpan, four hours of language class a day, either before
or after the fruit picking, or dishwashing or weeding or
laundry folding and in the way of things grew used to it.
I more than grew used it, actually, I loved it, and I loved
Israel, the mythic landscape, the constant noise of history,
the terrible comedy and courage of daily life. I
ended by staying a year, and I probably would have
stayed forever if I could have.
After I competed the beginners’ Hebrew class, I
moved up to the next level. In this class there were only
five students: me, a girl from Brazil, a Swiss girl, a
Moroccan boy and a girl from Chile. Our teacher was a
man in his early sixties, Yehuda Artzi, to whom I dedicated
The First Book of Samuel. Yehuda had spent his
childhood in Munich, where his grandfather was a
rabbi. He was an only child—his parents were divorced,
and he was brought up by his mother, his grandfather
and his mother’s second husband. He was sent at the age
of sixteen with a youth group to Palestine in the late
1930s, after his stepfather was briefly arrested at work,
and had lived at Kibbutz Mizra essentially ever since,
where he married and had four children. He did not see
his family in Germany again.
Yehuda was a published poet in Israel and a gifted
teacher. He spoke no English in the class, only Hebrew,
and the occasional word in German as a concession for
the Swiss girl. He used no textbooks, but had his own
system worked out over many years for teaching
Hebrew, and it was staggering how much we learnt in
such a short time. His method was precise and rigorous,
with fairly demanding homework requirements, but also involved the
telling of stories in Hebrew using that
day’s vocab list. These were stories told with the clarity
and urgency of a natural storyteller,
of his childhood, his family, the beginning
of the kibbutz, the devastating
silence from Europe when the letters
from his mother simply stopped coming,
the slow realisation of that universal
bereavement, the war of independence,
the various dramas and tragedies of the
growing kibbutz and the new state. He
sang to us as well, Yiddish songs of his
childhood and youth. Although he had
been raised in a religiously observant household, he was
himself an atheist and he spoke of his reasons for that.
We developed a close friendship of a kind, Yehuda
and I, in that short time, despite obvious differences. He
told me he thought I was destined to be a writer. He
based this belief on the daily sentences we had to write
in Hebrew for homework, ten sentences a day, using
words from the new vocab list. It was a lesson for me in
how much subtlety, humour and humanity it is indeed
possible to express with essentially very few words and
very little language, which I’m sure has affected me as
a writer for children.
I met my Argentinian husband on the kibbutz, and
when we came back to Australia Yehuda and I continued
our friendship in letters, writing to each other, in
cursive Hebrew, at least once a month. I’ve kept all
these letters, meticulously neat on thin kibbutz paper.
But after about four years there were no more letters,
until after several months’ silence I received one in
English from his daughter-in-law, telling me Yehuda
had died, at the age of sixty-four. As his daughter-in-law
put it rather grimly, “his long life of over work and self-indulgence
finally took its toll”.
YEHUDA IS THE INSPIRATION for the figure of
Samuel’s grandfather Elias in The First Book
of Samuel. But although I was very moved
and affected by his death, and indeed his life,
I never consciously thought in terms of “putting” him
into a book. The book came, like all my books, in a way
that seems at least natural and unplanned. When my
daughter was about five or six, I happened to be reading
to her from a children’s Bible, the story of the childhood
of Samuel at the beginning of the first book of
Samuel.
Now this story had always been a particular
favourite of mine as a child, I think probably because
it’s about the only Bible story with a child in it. I used
to go to a Congregational Sunday school—it had a
rather melancholy atmosphere—just me
and the minister’s son, a very pale boy
named Paul, in a class taught by the
minister’s wife in a cold church hall.
But I liked it, and I remember on the
wall a dark blue and gold painting of the
boy Samuel at night in the temple with
Eli, when he hears the voice of God
calling him, that was undoubtedly
unsettling and impressive.
Years later I read the story to my
daughter as a piece of nostalgia, I suppose.
But then I found myself utterly
engaged by it, the whole of what film
people call the “backstory” to Samuel’s
life—Elkanah and his two wives, one of
whom has so many children and the other who has no
children and is sad and miserable and refuses to eat.
Then of course the miraculous conception of the
beloved child Samuel. It still seems odd to me how real
and close the dilemmas of this ancient family struck
me, so distant in time and culture from anything I might
have experienced. Why was it so compelling?
I decided I wanted to write about them, but as if this
family was living not in Israel thousands of years ago,
but in Sydney in the 1990s. That’s how it began. Even
then I did not at once think it would be a story of a
Jewish family. But as I began with the name of the
father, Elkanah, I realised with such a typically Jewish
name it needed to be a Jewish family. I’d come across
the name Elkanah in Israel of course, and in particular
remembered a conversation I’d listened to where some
people were discussing a man named Elkanah who they
all agreed was an ebullient, extraordinary, difficult,
charismatic and exasperating person. I never saw or met
this fellow, but these associations with the name were so
strong that’s how the personality of my Elkanah rose up
before me—backed up, I must say, by the personality of
the biblical Elkanah, who memorably replies, when
Hannah tells him she is sad because she has no children:
“What do you want children for? Aren’t I as good as ten
children?” And I’ll just add here that my Elkanah is an
opera singer, simply because at the time I met an opera
singer at a children’s birthday party, and I decided that
this would be a perfect profession for him.
The book essentially follows the biblical story,
although the readers need not know this and I’m sure in
most cases don’t. Elkanah has two wives, Pearl, with
lots of children (my Elkanah is actually divorced from
Pearl, as I felt two wives at once even in our modern
age might be pushing things a bit) and Hannah with
none and so on. The only idea I had as to the direction
of the story was that at the climax Samuel would be in
a darkened room with an old man very dear to him, and
would have some kind of perhaps religious vision, as
happens in the Bible. Still at this stage my friend
Yehuda had not entered my writing mind, but he crept
in by himself, with the creation of the grandfather character,
Elias. And this character brought with him, again
very naturally, soberly and indeed inevitably, the experience
and consciousness of the Holocaust.
In terms of the portrait of family relationships in this
novel and its sequel Theodora’s Gift, because my husband
is Jewish, I suppose I’ve had a fairly close and
uncontrived exposure to certain kinds of Jewish family
life both in Israel and Argentina. But additionally I’m
gratefully aware that the books were very influenced by
my own observation of Jewish families with whom we
are friends, and who over the years have so generously
invited my family to their homes on many occasions
and for many moving family events. I don’t believe any
of these friends would recognise themselves at all in
any of the characters in the novel and that is because
they are not in it, as the characters are inventions, but I
think they would recognise other things—moments,
moods, details.
THE FIRST BOOK OF SAMUEL was very successful,
one of my most successful, and is taught in
many schools, Jewish and non-Jewish, in about
Year 7 or 8. I get quite a lot of letters from children,
teachers, parents and other readers about the book
and the clearly deep emotions it can evoke. It’s beautiful
to have these responses, I think particularly because
I was not aware of the power of the story as I was writing
it. Something that seems to touch people is the relationship
between the grandfather and the grandson, one
from the old world, and the other so much from the
new, and the bond between them that is both painful and
enormously enriching.
Over the years letter writers also often mentioned
Theodora, Samuel’s half-sister, the compulsive diary
keeper, and would say, could you write another book
about Theodora? We want to know what happens to
Theodora. I’m probably not a natural sequel writer, so I
didn’t take it seriously but after a while and more letters
I started to think perhaps I should, there is something
unfinished here. So I sat down and began to write
Theodora’s Gift. I was quite anxious about it though.
Could I recapture the voice of the first book? Could I
find a story for Theodora that was as powerful?
It was a difficult book to write, but I am so glad I
did. I think I did recapture the voice, but it’s ten years
later and I’m a different person, and it’s a different
world we live in, so it has changed too. There was a
mystical element in The First Book of Samuel but I
think Theodora’s Gift is probably more mystical—mystical
and mysterious.
I did get stuck in the middle of it. There seemed to
be so many strands, so many elements I wanted to fit in,
I felt it was getting lost somewhere. I needed some
strong, deep guiding story, as I’d had in The First Book
of Samuel, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Then, miraculously,
in casual conversation with my brother-in-law,
he happened to mention the marvellous terrifying story
from the biblical book of Daniel, of Belshazzar’s Feast,
the apparition of the moving finger writing messages on
the wall in the middle of a riotous feast. I knew that this
was what I had been looking for. As indeed it was. With
a kind of subconscious knowledge of that story binding
all the elements together, I was able to get on and finish
it.
So that is some sort of explanation of how I came to
write these two books of contemporary Jewish
Australian family life. In the back of my mind I have a
thought of a third book, about that third child, and that
third childhood not in Australia but in Munich. But that
is a mighty task and I’m not at all sure how I would set
about writing it. But hopefully in the next ten or even
twenty years, should I live that long, I’ll think of a way
to finish this trilogy, a final tribute to a terrible time and
a most remarkable generation.
Ursula Dubosarsky is a prolific writer of fiction for
young people. The First Book of Samuel and
Theodora’s Gift are published by Penguin.
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