By Daniel Ari Baker

Happily and unexpectedly, Limmud Oz took me far away from Monash Caulfield and deep into Eastern Europe; on Sunday 13 June, I rode a train with Sholem Aleichem through turn-of-the-century Ukraine with Professor Jeremy Dauber kindly acting as conductor, pointing out sights along the way and explaining the inexplicable and uncanny sights which flashed the window in my mind as Aleichem’s too-short story ‘On Account of a Hat’ flashed by.

I’ve a confession to make: before Limmud I’d never read Sholem Aleichem, and in fact had always dismissed him as irrelevant and clichéd, peddling Fiddler-on-the-Roof kitsch which was all the more unbearable for its humorously and playfully evoking a world whose loss I, though a member of the third generation, feel achingly. It was only chance – a late registration, a total lack of competence with maps – that led me to Professor Dauber’s classroom,, but I’ve come to think it was fate that pulled me there, like some ignorant street-kid from Aleichem’s Poland who stumbles upon a wise man capable of elucidating the most profound and necessary truths.

Professor Dauber’s reading of ‘On Account of a Hat’, a strange, implacable story about mistaken identity and the tragedy of Jewish Europe’s lost self, introduced me to an Aleichem I never knew existed – a dark, wickedly funny, stunningly modern writer whose work seems to me to belong with the revered oeuvres of Bruno Schulz and Franz Kafka, at once evoking a now-vanished world and prophetically, unknowingly foreshadowing the coming annihilation.

In the protagonist, Sholem Shachnah, I saw my own generation prefigured – torn between tradition and modernity. Like Shachnah we are hoping to make it home in time for Passover but losing ourselves along the way, uncomfortable with the possibilities inherent in Australian modernity. Sometimes we too are held back by memories of a world long since disappeared; for us it is not one that rests at train stations but rather in another kind of building standing alongside train-tracks throughout Europe.

In bringing to the fore the horrendous absurdity of Jewish-European civilization, Aleichem, like Kafka, speaks to us from the grave of the absurdity of our own Jewish-Australian civilization. He also reminds us that home, the warm place where we hope to arrive in time for Passover, does not and cannot exist. We might never really get off those trains which in our collective conscience keep chugging on to Auschwitz forever; but even if, like Sholem Shachnah, we manage to find the way to our front doors, the memory of that journey will be retold to us endlessly – by our spouses, the village children, our schools, Limmud Oz – and we will feel shame, longing and jealousy for a death we never did die. We will, like Sholem Shachnah, return endlessly to try, probably unsuccessfully, to wake ourselves from the deep slumber we enjoy by the side of the railway tracks, which causes us always to miss the train onwards.

At least we have Sholem Aleichem to keep us company while we wait.

Daniel Ari Baker is a fourth year LLB/BA student at the University of Melbourne.