For Jews, a pioneering base of immigrants from Britain going back to the First Fleet seems to have set liberalising guidelines for later European migrants of more orthodox practice. The early and continued preponderance of single males entering the country meant that many marriages were outside of the faith, and dispersal throughout the community at large frequently resulted in insufficient numbers in any one place for the formation of religious groups. Even with the growing centres of Jewish settlement in Sydney and Melbourne, the tendency was towards mixed ethnic districts rather than ghettos as such. All this, plus the subtle but relentless pressures to conformity along Anglo-Protestant lines, meant a considerable degree of invisibility for a group that is still only something like 0.6 per cent of the total Australian population. Much the same can be said of New Zealand.

For all that, there has been a consistent and important Jewish presence in the life of the two nations, especially in civic and intellectual areas. As this collection makes clear, the director of the New Zealand Company and some of the early leaders of Wellington local government and business were all Jews, and due tribute is paid to Charles Brasch, founder of the highly influential journal of arts and letters, Landfall, and a major New Zealand poet.

In Australia, the locally-born first writer of fiction, John Lang, was the offspring of a Jewish convict turned policeman. The same family produced a Governor-General (Lord Casey), while another Jewish line gave Australia one of its most famous military leaders, Sir John Monash. Australian literature has been enriched by a host of writers and scholars who acknowledge connections both loose and intimate with a Jewish identity. Beyond this circle, we have only to look at, say, Ruth Park’s depiction of Surrey Hills life in The Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange, or at Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot to see reflected aspects of a Jewish presence in Australian society.

The book we have here provides us with historical essays, poetry and short-stories to make clear to us the significant extent and the particular nature of the Jewish contribution to Australian and New Zealand literature. It owes an obvious debt to Nancy Keesing’s collection of stories, Shalom (Collins 1978, reprinted by Penguin), but extends the scope of that work with help from Shmuel Gorr and Serge Liberman. All the obvious names – Judah Waten, Fay Zwicky, Morris Lurie, Brasch, Liberman – are included, and there are a good number of others not previously known to this reader, many of which. are well worth attention. I wonder if New Zealand cannot produce more writers of Jewish background than are evident here, but the proportion, judging from the relative Anglo-centricity and populations of the two countries, seems fair.

Having said this, I must point out some of the limitations of the collection. It is a low-budget production aimed at a specialist American readership. Number four in a series of anthologies of world Jewish writing (the others deal with Latin America, South Africa and ‘Contemporary Jewish Voices’), this book will be bought either by Jews with a self-conscious awareness of global ethnic identity or by students of college courses in ‘Ethnic Studies’. As the editors’ preface states:

Jewish Writing from Down Under is the fourth in a series of anthologies intended to discover and to express themes and experiences common to Jews everywhere; hence, they are both literary and sociological.

The emphasis on commonality is reflected in the attempt to organise its contents into themes: ‘Founding the Community’, ‘Memory and Redemption’, but the material resists such an easy pigeonholing and the editors are forced to introduce “faces you can’t find again” and “seven poets” as catch-all sections.

The overall impression from the selection is of a variety that at times is either particularly ‘Jewish’ (in its preoccupation with the Holocaust, with Yiddish, with opposition from a hostile land), in which case it is not especially indicative of what it is like to be Down Under Jewish, or it is concerned with aspects of local society and therefore less particularly Jewish. We should all be grateful for the variety, but it does tend to work against the editors’ thesis that “Jews relate with a totality of responsiveness to the land and climate, people and language they find themselves in”. Morris Lurie’s story of a drifter in North Africa could apply to anyone anywhere, and argues a lack of response. Some of the other stories show more of a turning inwards to self-definition in terms of family and the past rather than engagement with the new home.

Of course, sociological factors influence the writing. Much of it, like any migrant writing, is personal and biographical, reflecting the drive to consolidate identity in order to sustain change. The difference between long-term settlers such as the Anglo-Jewish Keesings and the established German-Jewish gentry of the Brasch family on the one hand, and the first-generation European Yiddish-speaking writers on the other, is quite apparent. In the latter group the dominance of Polish Jews is also evident. Then there are anomalies such as Karl Wolfskehl whose residence in New Zealand late in life seems not to have influenced his writing at all, his attention being given first to German literature and then to mystical pan-Israel themes. Allen Afterman, raised in the US and living in Israel happened to spend some years in Australia and New Zealand in between and, apart from passing references to rabbits, is more responsive to East Asian literature than to ‘Down Under’.

If the material defies ready categorisation, it does have a considerable vitality of its own. Serge Liberman’s history of Yiddish theatre in Melbourne is most interesting, and makes an appropriate positive companion-piece to Herz Bergner’s more gloomy and rather ponderous story about an ageing and exiled actor. It would have been perhaps fairer to the translated contributions had the editors printed them in the original languages. Given the accent on ethnic identity behind most of the works and the collection itself, this ought not to have been a barrier to the intended readership. But then, for all the impression of a writing which looks to Europe or to Jerusalem, there is not a lot that isn’t originally in English. Indeed, some of the most impressive writing, both for its underlying self-confidence and its literary skills, comes from the second- and third-generation writers who are bringing together a sense of origins with the antipodean world that is their own.

There is some evidence of a rather casual approach to accuracy of detail and the provision of bibliographical information. Landfall appears at least twice as ‘Landfalls’, and Lord Casey (in a passage otherwise lifted almost directly from Keesing’s introduction to Shalom) is wrongly made the grandson of John Lang’s convict father. Proofing errors are avoided in the actual contents by having the originals photo-reproduced, but there are several mistakes in other parts of the book. It would not have required much effort on the part of the editors – especially since they had Australian contacts – to provide the reader with a properly organised selected bibliography so that he/she could follow up on special interests.

With the reservations mentioned, then, Jewish Writing from Down Under is a worthwhile effort, and contains some good writing – which I suppose is the major criterion for judging any anthology.