The same relative easier-going and liberal Australian ambience enabled me to indulge a second vocation (or obsession, if you will, or taste for masochism) – that of writing, of creating, if not of the adolescently envisaged sweeping Tolstoyan-Melvillean-­Homeric epics, then at least of work sufficiently competent to attract something of an audience.

From all this emerges a motif that I cannot help but return to in a number of my stories.

For my part, had there been no World War II; had my parents not left Poland where each was to lose all that there were of their respective families; had they not later left Russia; had we still lived in France where I should have turned military age at the time of French embroilment in Algeria or lived in Israel where l should have been, old enough to serve (and survive or fall) in at least two of its wars; had we in fact settled anywhere else, or, having come to Australia, opted for a city other than Melbourne or for another neighbourhood where friends, contacts and teachers would have been different, as also the influences, opportunities and experiences; had…; had…; had any of the teeming variables acting upon myself been different, even slightly, I may today not have been a doctor or a writer or married to that girl who became my wife or father to precisely those children that are mine or held the ideas and beliefs I hold nurtured the tastes I possess or be moved by those moods to which I may be given or be haunted even by this thought - the imponderable distance between that which is and which might have been, as also between that which is and might not have been.

Stated so baldly, all this is nothing if not obvious. But there is another dimension to this motif, one thrown up precisely by my medical training, itself the outcome of the Brownian in­terplay of choice, determinism and chance.

The doctor, the scientist, the biologist in me tells me that my actions, my beliefs, my emotions, as also my very existence and autonomous bodily function, are at the most basic operative level of my being expressions of the configuration of my chemistry, that crucible of volatile interacting molecules - nucleic acids, proteins, carbohydrates, lipids - whose ebb and flow are catalysed and directed by the unceasing input of my senses, by my genetic endowments, previous experiences, continuing influences, newer immediate impressions, as also by those internal mediators - hormones and cerebral electrical circuits - which integrate them all, many of the specific ingredients making up ,that chemistry having been entered into it at random. As much as man maybe a social or political animal, he is also very much a chemical one.

Given the validity of this construct (and I do accept its validity), to what extent, then, can I consciously and effectively bridle my chemistry, knowing that even such bridling is an act mediated through the agency of that very chemistry as is this very knowledge itself? In the light of this, what is choice? And as a corollary, what be­comes of accountability? And morality? And sainthood? Bigotry? Goodness? Evil? And of punishment and reward? Or of God’s purported role in matters humanly tellurian, quite apart from his imputed role in the cosmos whose functioning (as possibly its very origin) may in time be confidently accounted for by other similarly scientific means?

If these seem rather esoteric literary themes, less so are others, these also stemming from my own experience and observations; for example, the vagaries of being a migrant or the child of migrants in an alien land, with the consequent issues of adjustment and alienation; or of being the surviving son of a recently-smitten people as also of a historic and biblically chosen one, alert both to the burdens and the obligations which such chosenness carries (chosenness here being a charge to exemplary moral, creative and holy living and having nothing to do with spurious notions and mis­guided allegations of self-assumed superiority).

I stated at the outset that I call myself lucky. I state it again. Events have so evolved that I can jive content in a country of relative peace and relative ease and occupy myself with a profession and a vocation that nourish each other, and, within the comfort of my study and at my level of comprehension, however sapient, however pedestrian, ponder over questions that more directly agonised another genera­tion and that, the world ,being what it is, every day, somewhere - in South Africa, Asia, the Soviet Union, the Middle East - agonise others in the wake of famine, genocide, race riots, cynicism, terror, homelessness and war. While appearing complacent about my own lot - and how many of this favoured nation's folk are not? - I am mindful of those wider evils abroad as also of the real, if lesser, ones within this very country itself. No Panglossian delusion do I entertain that would hold that all here is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Without in any way retracting my earlier expressed belief in the freedom, egalitarianism and mobility that characterise Australian society, I do believe - no gratuitousness intended - that there still remains considerable room for improvement. Utopia alone could ever boast of an absence of poverty, iniquity underprivilege, ignorance, pettifoggery, humbug, self­-destructiveness, small-mindedness and sheer obtuseness such as afflict more than one veritable and not-so-veritable group or individual between Broome and Bega, Cape York and Port Arthur.

What is buoying, however, is the fact that Australia has youth, time, inordinate spaciousness and resources on its side. While all this may sound comfortably theoretical and perhaps nicely rhetorical, I shall, having gone this far, be presumptuous enough to suggest more practical measures that may help the country in its ascent.

People being what they are often function best where there is prospect for reward. Let there, then, be greater rewards - or awards or enlivening in­centives - (and visibly so) to those many individuals who advance technology, science and the arts. Expand the number of recipients, extend the sums allocated. I, for one, would dearly wish to see even half of the sums at present lavished upon, say, sportsmen directed to the many, if less publicised, less spotlighted devotees and practitioners of literature, art, music, film and dance and to the patient researchers in their out of the limelight, underequipped, under­financed electronics, chemical and biomedical laboratories.

In other words, I should wish to see the same attention and regard paid to our philosophers as to our proverbial kings and to the true captains and creators of our society as to its over-paid over-adulated jesters.

And, while acknowledging the contributions made by a number of concerns, I should wish too to see still more involvement by industry and commerce and individual moneyed patrons in supporting almost till it hurts all forms of creative activity, of productive as distinct from the more pervading spectator/consumer activity in Australia, I would argue that one Nobel Prize is worth a dozen Olympic gold medals at this stage of the nation's history and development.

One last thing. I do not believe in the likelihood, let alone in the possibility of perfection (pace Moses, Mark, Machiavelli, More, Marx., Mao). However, this does not mean that I do not believe in betterment. Benjamin Disraeli wrote: ‘Think ever that you are born to perform great duties’; and an earlier Jewish sage once said: ‘It is not incumbent upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to exempt yourself from it’.

Each may with benefit to himself and to others interpret. and adapt these words in the light of his own gifts, predilections and dimensions. If it is given to adage to attain the status or force of credo, then, without being too evangelical or breast-thumping about it, and knowing that I can only live but once, as credo do I accept it: in this world to do and contribute my bit – as doctor, writer, migrant, citizen, human being, Jew.