To celebrate our 75th birthday, we’re presenting exceptional works from Meanjin’s past that have defined and challenged Australian literary culture.
‘Mr Zagursky ran a factory of infant prodigies, a factory of Jewish dwarfs in lace collars and patent-leather pumps. He hunted them out in the slums of Molitvanka, in the evil smelling courtyards of the Old Market…. My father decided that I should emulate them…. I was fettered to the instruments of my torture, and dragged them about with me…. One day I left home laden like a beast of burden with violin-case, violin, music, and twelve roubles in cash-payment for a month’s tuition. I was going along Nezhin Street; to get to Zagursky’s I should have turned into Dvoryanskaya but instead of that I…. found myself at the harbour…. So began my liberation.’
—ISAAC BABEL; Awakening
I
Just try to cast a piano
In the sea
Romantically.
Take it from me,
You’ll never make it.
I tried it once
Or twice. My
Polished albatross
Kicked me as we
Sank through
Coral gardens
And rose, rosewood
Bird and I,
Buoyed by
Bubbling spirals past
The emerald gills,
The darting purple fins,
Up through the silent
Gardens beckoning
In dappled solar tracks
To break
The limpid bounds of an
Elysium aquamarine.
II
What happened when you left
That day? A day of frozen
Lakes and weighted birches,
Fleeing mittenless
The fond solicitude
That sealed your case
And thrust you talentless
Upon Zagursky’s stoop to
Sit among the drooping
Ugly boys, your eyes
Intent upon their
Bruised necks, their neat
Dolls’ feet; Anchises’ tadpoles
In withered velvet suits
Bearing their father, theotokoi,
Upon their bows to
101st street, East, the
Summerhearted phoenix land.
You’d seen your father
Touch his cap and bow
While Cossacks tore
His store apart.
Meanwhile your heart
Quickened with Dumas,
Stopped with Turgenev
(Disguised by Sevcik
On the stand). It was your
Judashand that flung
The fiddle, spent the rouble
For Zagursky’s care into
Odessa’s sandbar—whose voice
Did you obey that day
You sounded out the waterfront?
Hydrophobic shoot of land-locked
Scholars, febrile storekeepers
And gaunt Iberian rabbis in their caves.
The milling port that
Catapulted Heifetz, Elman,
From the Tsarevitch’s sight
Kept you, boy and man apart,
Heir to a single
Season of the heart.
You had no need to join
A brutal company;
(The world’s a cossack haunt
In any case—Turgenev
Might have told you that),
What did you prove,
Master of silence? That you
Could pass the test
Your father failed, autumnal friend?
The silent salty wastes
Await us. These (and they)
Will get us in the end—meantime
The tendrils of the sea
Most tenderly embrace the
Adamantine gloss,
Time’s rivulets are filtered,
Harmless, through each curled eyelet,
Every key is stilled.
The final feathered clamp
And suck of blind anemones
Rock the ancestral fate to jar
A host of ghostly swimmers,
Measuring their buoyant gravity
Beyond Odessa’s black sandbar.
Meanjin Volume 31 Issue 2 1972
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