Giving his mother’s story a voice

There are stories that are passed down not through words but through habits, values, and traditions. For Melbourne author Jonathan Kanat, he has always felt this was the case. For Kanat, the decision to finally give his mother’s story a proper shape was about the responsibility he felt to ensure it didn’t end with him.

“I didn’t feel compelled so much as entrusted,” Kanat said of writing Miriam’s Light, which traces the life of his mother, Miriam, a child survivor of the Holocaust. The catalyst came unexpectedly. A failed Polish passport application, rejected because all original family documents had been destroyed.

“I was struck by the realisation that, formally speaking, the story could end with me.”

That thought changed everything. “Writing the book became less about telling a story and more about refusing that ending.”

Miriam’s story had always existed in fragments within the family. It was told in brief recollections and in the way certain things were and weren’t spoken about. A short story she published in Heirloom: second anthology of the Melbourne Child Survivors of the Holocaust (2006) provided what Kanat described as “an essential anchor”. It was her own voice, shaped by her own choices about what to say and how to say it.