Nechama's Story

Nechama Werdiger

Description

‘For some, especially those who’ve been born in the twenty-first century, the accounts of my early years may seem like the reports from a planet in a different galaxy. If so, I cannot altogether blame them. There are times when I feel just the same.

‘But I hope, as they read about my inter-planetary travel, and as perhaps some of my friends and Nosson’s join them for the journey, they’ll be able to share the adventure. For that is what life with Nosson was: a marvellous and thrilling adventure … I know what a blessing it is to have friends and family. Life has been good to me. I try to do whatever I can the best way I know how.’
Nechama Werdiger has had a long and fascinating life. Growing up under the Soviet Union’s harsh antisemitism, she endured the war years as a child in Uzbekistan where thousands of Jews sought refuge from the Holocaust. She and her family managed to escape to Poland and France before arriving in 1949 in Australia. Through hard work, a strong sense of family and unswerving faith, she and her husband Nossom built a successful new life in Melbourne. Generous, wise, kind and caring, Nechama will inspire you with her life story.

Sujets

• Jewish
• Biography
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Hybrid Publishers
• Date de parution: 01 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781922768025
• Langue: English

Extrait

Published by Hybrid Publishers
Melbourne Victoria Australia
Nechama Werdiger 2022
This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to the Publisher, Hybrid Publishers, PO Box 52, Ormond, Victoria, Australia 3204.
www.hybridpublishers.com.au
First published 2022

ISBN: 9781922768018 (p)
9781922768025 (e)
Cover design: Gittus Graphics
Contents
Preface
1 A family tree grows in Kharkov
2 Charades on Shabbos and Reading Biggles
3 It s a long long way to Tashkent
4 Samarkand, city of refuge and dreams
5 The great escape and the Polish option
6 I ll always have Paris
7 To the ends of the earth
8 A timber hut in Shepparton
9 Once upon a time in Carlton
10 The full box of chocolates
11 Burwood Highway and Bondi Beach
12 Building the right home
13 When Fred James came to town
14 Time to build, time to mourn
15 A view from the penthouse
16 A Tiger Mother in search of balance
17 The man who was, and did great things
18 Art, community and legacy
19 A final chapter
Acknowledgements
Glossary
Preface
W HEN I WAS SIX , I lay in a hospital bed in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. I was suffering from scarlet fever, and hovering between life and death.
My mother, Brocha, had left me there in my aunt s care to rush to Samarkand, a day s railway travel away. She was desperate to find my father, Yehoshua Shneur Zalman.
It was January 1942. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were at war. Millions were dying on the battlefronts. My mother hadn t seen my father, who was serving in the Soviet Army, for nearly two years. She didn t know if he was alive or dead, but she d heard a rumour that the army had released some soldiers in Samarkand.
So, hoping against hope that my father might somehow be among them, yet torn with guilt at leaving me behind in hospital, she took my grandmother and two brothers with her on the train to search for my father.
As I recall that faraway time and place more than seven decades later, the hospital memories are vivid. I see the doctors and nurses. I hear the spoken Russian of my childhood. I smell the antiseptic in the crowded ward. And I feel the injection needle as I received the blood transfusion which saved my life.
It was my Mume (Aunt) Golda Shemtov s blood. How aptly named she was: Golda. My golden aunt. And Shemtov: A good name in Hebrew. Which, our tradition teaches us, matters profoundly.
In Pirkei Avot , we learn that Keser shem tov - The crown of a good name - represents the highest level of the human spirit s legacy. And elsewhere in the Mishnah we learn that Whosoever saves a life, saves an entire world.
Looking back to that hospital bed in Tashkent, I see Aunt Golda s gift of life in the world she saved. In my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They are the ones who ve asked me to tell my story. And, in telling it, I recognise God s kindness to me and to them, and I m deeply grateful for His protection throughout my life.
As King David writes: He shall cover you with his feathers, and beneath His wings you shall find refuge . (Psalms 91:4).
During the recollections which have come together to form the basis for this memoir, it occurred to me that I ve really lived two lives, divided by time and space. I think of them as BM and AM - Before Melbourne , and After arriving in Melbourne .
In Before Melbourne , as I ve tried to reconstruct my childhood in the 1930s and 40s, it s the story of growing up under the Soviet Union s harsh antisemitism, and enduring the war years in Uzbekistan s two cities of refuge from the Holocaust for thousands of Jews, Tashkent and Samarkand. Then it was escaping in fear to Poland, and from there, with my parents and my two brothers, arriving in Paris as refugees, which could have been where my family settled, and which would have meant a very different Nechama s Story .
But in 1949, I came to Australia. And at Station Pier, the Melbourne story began. Here, three years after my arrival, in the city where I ve lived the greater bulk of my life, I was blessed to find my Bashert , my soulmate, my life partner, Nosson. We were married for sixty-three happy and treasured years, until his passing in 2015. Together we built a family, which became a tribe, and with God s help, is on its way to becoming a dynasty.
This memoir is for them. With very few exceptions, all of them were born in Melbourne, grew up in its Jewish community and created their own families here. I am proud of them all, and I thank God for the naches , the profound joy, which my children and their children s children, bring me every day.
For some, especially those who ve been born in the twenty-first century, the accounts of my early years may seem like the reports from a planet in a different galaxy. I cannot altogether blame them. There are times when I feel just the same.
But I hope, as they read about my inter-planetary travel, and as perhaps some of Nosson s and my friends join them for the journey, they ll be able to share the adventure. For that was life with Nosson: a marvellous and thrilling adventure.
At its heart was our family, the world of Chabad/Lubavitch and the Yeshivah Centre, and the wider Australian Jewish community with its warmth and good causes, which we had the great privilege to support, and as hosts to many memorable events; where we welcomed not only our dearest friends around our Shabbos dinner table, but some of the best and brightest in every sphere of Jewish and Australian life.
We also experienced the excitement of developing a successful business in the worlds of fashion and investment, travelling to the world s great cities, and wondering in awe, amazement and gratitude every time we visited Israel, the reborn home of the Jewish people in our time.
Welcome to the adventure.
Nechama Werdiger
Melbourne, Australia 2022
1
A family tree grows in Kharkov
W HERE DO I BEGIN my story? Perhaps with my name: Nechama.
Names matter, and for Chasidim especially so. In her beautiful poem and song Lechol Ish Yesh Shem , Each of Us Has a Name , the great Hebrew poet, Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky, reminds us that our names are the keys to who we are.
I feel a special kinship with Zelda, as she became known and beloved in Israel. Her father was the great-great-grandson of the third Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Tzemach Tzedek. My grandfather, Menachem Mendel, was named after the Tzemach Tzedek. And like me, although twenty-one years earlier, Zelda was born in Ukraine.
The first lines of her haunting poem begin:
Each of us has a name
given by God
and given by our parents
My parents, Yehoshua Schneur Zalman Serebryanski and Brocha Serebryanski (n e Futerfas), gave me the name Nechama to honour my paternal grandmother, Nechama Serebryanski (n e Gluskin). She had died just before I was born in Kharkov, the second-largest city in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, on 3 May, 1935.
My two brothers (now deceased) had preceded me: Chaim in 1929, now deceased, and Arel in 1932, who died in April 2019. My maternal grandmother was Maryasha Badana Futerfas, and her mother was Rochel Leah Shagalovich.
My parents, my brothers, my two grandmothers and me. That was our immediate family when I arrived.
In 1935, Kharkov was an industrial centre with a population of about 700,000. It was 650 kilometres from Moscow and the Kremlin, from where Stalin ruled the police state that was the Soviet Union with brutality and purges. Until 1934, Kharkov had been Ukraine s capital, subsequently moved to Kiev. Kharkov s Jewish population of about 11,000 before World War I had grown significantly to over 130,000 by the early 1930s.
As for our family, we lived in an unremarkable two-storey apartment block in an unremarkable neighbourhood. Our top floor apartment had a dining room and a bedroom. That was it. The seven of us lived, ate and slept in the available space; my parents, my two brothers and me, my grandmother Maryasha and my great-grandmother Rochel. There was no toilet and no bathroom. The toilet was outside the apartment. We had to share it, in all kinds of weather, with all the other families in the apartment block.
When it came to having a bath or shower, that happened only once a week on Thursday nights. We were washed in a large basin on the dining room table as we prepared for Shabbos (Sabbath). And as we didn t know any different, it never occurred to me or my brothers that we were missing out on a real bathroom.
Much the same applies to my wider recollection of how I felt about growing up poor, at least by today s standards in Australia. Except that I didn t quite see it that way. As a child, I was certainly aware that my parents struggled to make ends meet, and I knew that food was always in short supply. But, thinking back to those earliest years, I never went really hungry. It s a reminder that poverty and wealth are relative notions, depending on the time and the place.
In the 1930s in Ukraine, my father s income was shaky and unpredictable. After he and my mother married in 1928, he took over a kosher wine factory which Brocha s grandmother Rochel Leah had started many years earlier. But by the time father came into the business, there weren t many Jewish customers left for kosher wine. So he began producing wine for the wider market. He was successful enough to be able to support his family until 1933, when the Soviet government nationalised all private enterprises.
With the loss of his small wine business, Tate (Father) had to scramble for an income. Luckily, he won a permit to run a railway station kiosk. Moreover, as he was the only employee, it meant he could close down on Friday afternoon and keep Shabbos without fear of retribution from the authorities. But the kiosk didn t earn enough to