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Aug. 29th, 2008 01:20 pmMy head was supposed to explode many years ago, apparently. Except that it's not that simple. I don't argue it, though, because then I have to get into why I wasn't trained to think in a stereotypically Jewish leftish manner and why my second language is French and not Yiddish and why my Latin is better than my Hebrew. Categories are a bother, even nice new shiny versions that break down old mindtraps.
My family has its own form of discourse on the nature of local Jewish culture and history going on right now. From the moment I was picked up at the airport the other day, I entered an ongoing conversation between old and young. It was full of sentences being finished a day after they started and references to new shared knowledge. I wasn't quite up to it at the time, but now I'm fascinated by it on a whole bunch of levels.
Let me give you the simple subject of the strange discourse and you can take it where you will. I want to leave my family alone to explore it, because I think they're learning a lot about our own particular variety of Judaism by working through this odd conversation and I'm learning by being a fly-on-the-wall, but I so want to know more about the subject!
Sir Isaac Isaacs, Australia's first locally-produced Governor-General (the King didn't want him at first because he knew him not) had a sister-in-law who was, as a study by Stephen Smith has recently announced, a well-known 'vexatious litigant.' Then it gets interesting.
Elsa Davis (or Edna Frances Isaacs, [Isaacs - 1st husband] [Laszloffy - 2nd husband], 1921-1989) was just as Jewish as Isaac Isaacs, but not anything near as establishment in the way she acted. She was also two generations younger.
She, and her singing dog "Napoleon Bonaparte" worked for a living. One of the stray comments in my direction in the car coming back from the airport implied she played the piano for silent pictures, or entertained during the interval. The only thing that really stuck (let's face it, I was not well at the time) was that the Governor-General had a sister-in-law who earned a living with the help of a singing dog.
The Isaacs marriage did not last, and, given the parties were Jewish, divorce was an option. The Isaacs family was no longer related to Elsa Davis or had a claim on the singing dog. Isaac died in 1948 and the question was doubly moot.
My family's discussion is on the details and the chronology and what it actually meant to everyone else in the small and close Jewish community in Melbourne at the time: the Melbourne community was small enough even in the 1960s that everyone knew everyone and exactly how they were related and to what degree.
What did it mean to the people I knew who would have known all parties? We worked out I probably knew at least one of Davis' peers and possibly one of her friends. The generation I knew was - oddly - at least twenty years older than the lady herself, so I bet I met her and never knew. What a wasted opportunity.
What did it mean to the whole community during the 1930s-1940s in particular? Did the fact that Edna was so much younger than the GG (who was no longer GG by the time she joined the family) make any difference? It certainly affected Sir Isaac Isaacs' propriety, surely? But did it have any effect on the rest of the community? A double worry was that Davis kept up correspondences with the Pope and the Queen (apparently - this is all on what my family remembers of talking to the researcher), though, so Sir Isaac Isaacs may never have entirely reclaimed his dignity after his brother's divorce. Then again, he was elderly and much respected and, of course, he died. The date overlap between the two might be enticing, but it wasn't lengthy. Maybe it's Isaacs' brother I should be curious about.
Elsa Davis was way more than a vaudeville entertainer and musician. She composed national songs at a time when national songs were currency to respect. Her most famous song was to Phar Lap, but my favourite title has to be "Underneath the satellite with you, ode to Yuri
Gagarin in the Sputnik" (the title was reported in my mother's synagogue newsletter).
I don't know anything more than this: I wish I did. I'll be spending some time with my folks soon, though, and I shall pay close attention to what they say and what they know. For me, the interest is in how they are using Elsa Davis as a way of trying to discover more about what it means to be Australian and Jewish. She's such a fascinating person, though, that if I get a better biography, I'll report it.
If only my cousin Linda had not died at the unduly young age one one hundred and something. This is the sort of thing we used to talk about. I know other people who would have the answers, but I'm shy of them - I'll just rely on family discourse, I think. Yes, I'm a bad historian.
My family has its own form of discourse on the nature of local Jewish culture and history going on right now. From the moment I was picked up at the airport the other day, I entered an ongoing conversation between old and young. It was full of sentences being finished a day after they started and references to new shared knowledge. I wasn't quite up to it at the time, but now I'm fascinated by it on a whole bunch of levels.
Let me give you the simple subject of the strange discourse and you can take it where you will. I want to leave my family alone to explore it, because I think they're learning a lot about our own particular variety of Judaism by working through this odd conversation and I'm learning by being a fly-on-the-wall, but I so want to know more about the subject!
Sir Isaac Isaacs, Australia's first locally-produced Governor-General (the King didn't want him at first because he knew him not) had a sister-in-law who was, as a study by Stephen Smith has recently announced, a well-known 'vexatious litigant.' Then it gets interesting.
Elsa Davis (or Edna Frances Isaacs, [Isaacs - 1st husband] [Laszloffy - 2nd husband], 1921-1989) was just as Jewish as Isaac Isaacs, but not anything near as establishment in the way she acted. She was also two generations younger.
She, and her singing dog "Napoleon Bonaparte" worked for a living. One of the stray comments in my direction in the car coming back from the airport implied she played the piano for silent pictures, or entertained during the interval. The only thing that really stuck (let's face it, I was not well at the time) was that the Governor-General had a sister-in-law who earned a living with the help of a singing dog.
The Isaacs marriage did not last, and, given the parties were Jewish, divorce was an option. The Isaacs family was no longer related to Elsa Davis or had a claim on the singing dog. Isaac died in 1948 and the question was doubly moot.
My family's discussion is on the details and the chronology and what it actually meant to everyone else in the small and close Jewish community in Melbourne at the time: the Melbourne community was small enough even in the 1960s that everyone knew everyone and exactly how they were related and to what degree.
What did it mean to the people I knew who would have known all parties? We worked out I probably knew at least one of Davis' peers and possibly one of her friends. The generation I knew was - oddly - at least twenty years older than the lady herself, so I bet I met her and never knew. What a wasted opportunity.
What did it mean to the whole community during the 1930s-1940s in particular? Did the fact that Edna was so much younger than the GG (who was no longer GG by the time she joined the family) make any difference? It certainly affected Sir Isaac Isaacs' propriety, surely? But did it have any effect on the rest of the community? A double worry was that Davis kept up correspondences with the Pope and the Queen (apparently - this is all on what my family remembers of talking to the researcher), though, so Sir Isaac Isaacs may never have entirely reclaimed his dignity after his brother's divorce. Then again, he was elderly and much respected and, of course, he died. The date overlap between the two might be enticing, but it wasn't lengthy. Maybe it's Isaacs' brother I should be curious about.
Elsa Davis was way more than a vaudeville entertainer and musician. She composed national songs at a time when national songs were currency to respect. Her most famous song was to Phar Lap, but my favourite title has to be "Underneath the satellite with you, ode to Yuri
Gagarin in the Sputnik" (the title was reported in my mother's synagogue newsletter).
I don't know anything more than this: I wish I did. I'll be spending some time with my folks soon, though, and I shall pay close attention to what they say and what they know. For me, the interest is in how they are using Elsa Davis as a way of trying to discover more about what it means to be Australian and Jewish. She's such a fascinating person, though, that if I get a better biography, I'll report it.
If only my cousin Linda had not died at the unduly young age one one hundred and something. This is the sort of thing we used to talk about. I know other people who would have the answers, but I'm shy of them - I'll just rely on family discourse, I think. Yes, I'm a bad historian.