Survival stories strike a chord

MUSIC plays an important part in the series of spellbinding stories about migrants that Arnold Zable explores in his new book, Violin Lessons, based around personal memories, meetings and events spanning the past 40 years.

“When you are writing a story, whether with a Jewish character, a Greek character or an Arabic one, it has a specific cultural theme and the art is to honour that,” explains the author, who lives in Carlton.

“There is also a universality about the issue of displacement – no culture has a monopoly on displacement and the story of the refugee and displacement can take many forms.

“That’s the paradox that I love exploring, and [it] is the heart of what I do – I call it the humanising power of story.”

Zable says the art of storytelling comes to the fore in Violin Lessons, which has just been published and features a variety of stories that had their origins in places ranging from Baghdad in the 1940s to Venice in World War II.

Zable stresses that he has written about true stories, but in some cases he has used literary licence to combine characters and events.

“In some of the stories I was not able to contact the people involved, so in order to tell the story that I wanted to tell, I have combined certain events and characters.”

Zable says that to be a good storyteller it is important to be a good listener. “You listen to the way it is told as well as the story itself. When I write my books, I look at what’s the best way to tell the story. Sometimes the best way is to transform it into fiction (such as Cafe Scheherazade and Sea of Many Returns), while at other times I transform it into creative non-fiction (such as The Fig Tree and Jewels and Ashes),” he says.

“The question I always face is what’s the best way to tell this story, and sometimes this is to transform it into fiction.

“What crosses the boundary between fiction and non-fiction is the art of the storyteller, and to construct and weave a story where the various strands come together to form a compelling story that holds the reader.”

In the opening chapter of Violin Lessons, Zable writes about Naji Cohen, an Iraqi Jew who became a well-known musician in Baghdad after World War II. However, when Israel achieved statehood in 1949, it sparked demonstrations in the streets of Baghdad, so Cohen fled to Israel and in 1964 migrated to Melbourne, where he started a new life without his treasured violin – a separation that was to last almost 40 years.

“A great source of his frustration was that he could never be what he once was – he ends up in a milk bar,” Zable explains.

“My father was similar. He was a Yiddish poet who had to work in factories and the market. It was a common theme among immigrants who had to start a new life here.”

Another story is set in Venice about Signor Marcello, whose father was manager of a hotel on the Grand Canal when the Nazis invaded in 1943.

“His father had an extraordinary story – he was Jewish but converted to Catholicism after the Nazi commandant took a liking to him and offered to spare his life if he converted,” explains Zable.

One of the most powerful stories in the book is the final chapter, titled “The Ancient Mariner”, that is set around the story of Amal Hassan Basry, an Iraqi woman who survived the Siev X disaster in 2001 when 353 refugees drowned on their way to Australia. Zable dedicates Violin Lessons to Basry and the 353 passengers who perished.

“When Amal came to Australia seven months later, I wrote about her story and we became good friends. In a cruel irony she died of cancer in 2006,” says Zable.

“Amal felt an extraordinary obligation to bear witness to what she had seen in the ocean and to the people who had drowned on the Siev X.

“It is the most courageous act of witnessing that I have every come across. I have never felt, in any story or book that I have written, such a sense of obligation to get it right as I did with her story in ‘The Ancient Mariner’.”

Violin Lessons is published by Text Publishing. $29.95 (rrp).

REPORT by Danny Gocs
PHOTO of Arnold Zable taken by Peter Haskin