Cirrus@Austlit

This collection of essays resulted from a workshop convened at the Centre for European Studies, Australian National University in 2013. Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams writes that the event was organised in part to counter 'the under-representation of writers of Eastern European origin amongst Australian minority writers'.

Many scholars argue today that the memory of the Holocaust has become transnational, travelling to locations and cultures worldwide. This phenomenon has been explored in relation to technological developments, but thus far little scholarly attention has been paid to the interconnection between Holocaust memory and the post-war migration of survivors. In this article, I redress this critical oversight and examine how memory and migration shape the work of Maria Lewitt, a Polish-born Jewish Holocaust survivor who emigrated to Australia. Come Spring (1980) portrays her survival in Europe and No Snow in December (1985) her Australian migrant life; together, the two autobiographical novels recount ‘a whole life’, both over time and synchronically, as Lewitt connects private experiences to global historical events. In the 1980s, a time when Australia was increasingly embracing the diversity arising from its migrant population, the texts inserted Lewitt's personal memories into the public discourse in her new home country. I argue that Lewitt combined her memories of survival and migration in order to add her voice as a Jewish Australian to this new ‘multiculturalism’. This positioning suggests that we require an approach to Holocaust literature that dedicates attention to sociocultural environments. Such an interpretive viewpoint would allow the investigation of transnational movements of memory from individual perspectives, while acknowledging them as bound within certain national contexts and specific memory cultures. [Author's abstract]

Krystyna Wanda Jackiewicz (1920–1977) and Liliana Rydzyńska (1938–2005) were two Polish-born women poets who emigrated to Australia in the postwar period, Jackiewicz as a ‘Displaced Person’ arriving from India in 1947, Rydzyńska choosing to move here from France in 1969. Their poems could not be more different. Rydzyńska's apparently autobiographical poetry represents Australians as severely emotionally repressed, and her move to Australia as ‘one great mistake’ (‘Martwa natura z Australią’ [Still Life with Australia]). This perspective contrasts markedly with Jackiewicz's embrace of Australia in poems like ‘Druga Miłosć’ (A Second Love), about her home city of Lwów (L'viv) and her new home of Tasmania, where the speaker's affection for her adopted country is as palpable as her attachment to her lost homeland. Through a discussion of some poems by each author, in translation, I compare their perspectives as women writers belonging to different generations of migration from Poland, and explore the extent to which one can fruitfully read their work through the concept of gender. [Author's abstract]

This paper draws upon findings from a project undertaken to interview writers who came to Australia as ‘Displaced Persons’ (DPs) after the Second World War, and examines the literary cultures within their communities. The focus is on four women writers, who exemplify the talent, resourcefulness, and contribution these immigrants made to literary and cultural life in Australia, and who significantly contribute to establishing alternative histories of Australian literature. The writers are Elena Jonaitis, originally from Lithuania; Helen Boris from Ukraine; Elga Rodze-Kisele from Latvia; and Pavla Gruden from Slovenia. The four women reveal how ethno-cultural identity and national attachments are an important aspect of these literary cultures. Their work also shows how their personal experience of immigration and the specificities of the DP experience impacts on literary production. These writers have had work published in their ethno-cultural community in Australia, their wider international diaspora and their original homeland. They have also established literary and cultural networks within their local community, and managed to engage a wider Australian audience. [Author's abstract]

The paper examines life narratives of women of Polish background who migrated to Australia as displaced persons after the Second World War and whose memories and testimonies are collected in three volumes: Polish Migrants’ Stories/Życiorysy Polskich Emigrantów (2006), Lest we forget/Ocalić od zapomnienia (2004) and Wyrwane Drzewa: wspomnienia Polek emigrantek [Uprooted Trees: Memoirs of Polish Women Immigrants] (2000). The paper challenges the notions of vulnerability and victimhood usually associated with women migrants and their narratives, and throws light on diversity of gender roles, behaviours and attitudes that emerge from the memories of war, experiences of living in transit, within and outside refugee and migrant camps, by referring to the ways the authors present themselves, their achievements, autonomy and agency in their life narratives. Reaching beyond victim stories, yet being informed by them, the paper suggests how post-war life stories—in which women narrate themselves as active agents, able to manage the achievement of belonging, and exploit their power to act as well as to represent—can be incorporated into an understanding of migration. [Author's abstract]

My Ukrainian grandparents Nadia and Petro Olijnyk arrived in Australia as post-war refugees in 1949. Petro died in 2005 and Nadia in 2009, each in their mid-90s. My grandfather loved telling stories and holding an audience. Nadia would sit with him, listening, but Petro would never allow her to take over. However, when he was not with her she would sometimes tell her own stories and I was struck by how different they were from his. This paper focuses not on Nadia's storytelling but her story writing, something she began to do in her late 80s for the first time in her life. Always a voracious reader (in Russian, Ukrainian and English), she also wrote fluently, mostly in English. Nadia wrote several hundreds of pages of notes, including many of her stories, in various notebooks—in the nursing home where she was immobile and totally bedridden for her last 10 years. Many people in the latter part of life communicate their early experiences through an unexplained feat of memory that brings back vivid details, but the motivation for Nadia to recall early experiences was much stronger than is usual. Her desire to recollect and to re-store her experiences was a kind of holding on to life, and claiming and asserting it as valuable and meaningful. [Author's abstract]

The common view of migrants assisted to move to Australia in the first decades after the Second World War is that they were factory fodder. They were labourers whose prosperity lay in improved life chances for their children. Such an assessment denies the life stories of individuals who were able to use their new circumstances and autonomy to develop lives of achievement for themselves. This paper focuses on two life stories of women from the 114 included in the first party of 843 Displaced Persons selected by the Australian Government for resettlement from Germany in 1947. Helgi Nirk was orphaned as a teenager in Estonia, gained legal control of her affairs from her uncles and installed share-farmers on the family farm while she studied agricultural science at Tartu University but was denied graduation by the 1944 Soviet invasion. In Australia, she developed a method of hybridisation between plants that would not cross-fertilise naturally. She developed many new tomato varieties during her working life, then retired to start a commercial plant nursery. Irina Vasins was able to graduate in theology and start work as a teacher before the 1944 invasion had her and her family fleeing to Germany. In Australia, she retrained as a nurse and rose to the position of Deputy Matron. More individual life histories of refugee women will reveal the nuances within any given mass movement of people in flight or those seeking a better economic life. [Author's abstract]