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.

The research process drew on family testimony, survivor memoirs, archival materials, and a remarkable resource: his father, now in his 90s, whose memory Kanat described as “extraordinary.”

Much of what emerged from those conversations was new to him. “I was struck by how much I was hearing for the first time,” he admitted.

Archival records, including displaced persons registration documents, migration papers, and materials from institutions such as the Australian National Archives and the Arolsen Archives, helped Kanat reconstruct the journey from wartime Poland through displaced persons camps in Europe, to Australia in 1947.

What struck the author most, though, wasn’t the documents. It was the accumulation of small, decisive acts that made survival possible. It was the stories of strangers who appeared briefly and changed everything. One such figure was a man from Elwood, referred to only as Mr Taylor, who paid for Miriam and her aunt Frania’s passage to Australia.

“It was an act of quiet generosity from someone who entered their lives momentarily and yet changed their trajectory entirely,” Kanat explained.

Frania’s role in Miriam’s survival is perhaps the book’s emotional centre. She hid and protected Miriam at enormous personal cost, ultimately enduring permanent estrangement from her only remaining family member.

“The hidden truth of that relationship was devastating,” Kanat said, “yet it reflects a profoundly selfless act of love.”

Miriam herself rarely spoke directly about antisemitism. She offered hints instead, explaining that it had not disappeared after the Holocaust but rather persisted behind closed doors. Kanat said that his mother certainly wouldn’t have been surprised by more recent moments when, as he puts it, “those closed doors have seemed to open again more visibly.”

Now that Miriam’s Light is out, Kanat describes feeling relieved, yet vulnerable.

He wrote, he says, with his mother sitting on his right shoulder, urging restraint. His father, meanwhile, offered stories that were “unfiltered, generous, and expansive.”

That tension between restraint and completeness, he says, was constant, and meaningful.

“In many ways, that tenderness is the love and beauty at the heart of my mother’s legacy.”

Miriam’s Light is available to purchase on Amazon.