For Howard Freeman: 'Dad was an irresistible force in our lives', by son Jeremy Freeman - 2022

22 May 2022, Temple Beth Israel, St Kilda, Melbourne , Australia

Many of you were at the funeral and will have heard Rabbi Morgan’s eulogy. On behalf of mum and the rest of the family, I want to thank you Rabbi for your words and your compassion.

So, I’m not going to attempt to recount the life and times of Howard Freeman, OAM, or as he would have said, Oliver Sholom. And he would have said it just like that, as though it was two first names, often abbreviated simply to Oliver.

Dad was an irresistible force in our lives. He set the direction. He led by example. When the seas were choppy, he steadied the ship and got on with the job. Apart from that one time when we went sailing for the day and he spent the homeward journey throwing up overboard.

As you know, he was a Collins Street dentist with a reputation for fine crown and bridge work. He might have been a plumber if not for Headmaster Brigadier Langley at Melbourne High School, who saw that he was good at woodwork and recommended dentistry. When we were little kids and went into town to see him, we thought he owned the T&G building, which he told us stood for the tooth and gum building. I remember enjoying going to see him at work because he was so delighted to see us and show us around, and then clean our teeth, after which we were given a sticker. He had a roll of stickers that had a smiley-faced tooth on them and the words ‘my dentist loves me’. You couldn’t give those stickers out these days.
In those days he was very hard working, but we used to eat dinner together every weeknight. We listened to the 7 o’clock news on 3LO in complete silence while we ate, and then we talked, or mostly he did. And then after dinner if there wasn’t homework then there was TV which we watched together. Four Corners, Fawlty Towers, a movie with adult themes, the children trying to feign indifference during the racy scenes.
We went on pretty good holidays, sometimes to Queensland and often to Mount Buffalo for a week in the summer, where we went on bush walks and rock-climbing adventures with other families, most notably the Cohens and the Mushins. Dad loved Mount Buffalo and the Chalet, including the 3-course meals served on Victorian Railways crockery with proper silverware, and having smoked cod for breakfast. Later, mum and dad would go on many overseas trips including walking tours in Europe and Japan.

Dad and mum loved to entertain, and dad was a gregarious host. He and mum were part of a book group for over 40 years, and I remember book group dinner parties in Prospect Hill Road and later at Cleeve Court as being particularly raucous. Dad was a big fan of cheese fondue when that was a thing, and I think he was disappointed when it wasn’t any more.

Dad was keen on cars and fancied himself as a good driver. After his Rover 3500 fell apart on the way to Mount Buffalo one year, and after the battle with Rover over the cost of repairs, he only ever drove Mercedes Benz cars, and they seemed to get sportier over the years. He also had a knack of parking illegally without getting booked and would prefer to park illegally rather than somewhere legal a little farther away. If he could, he would leave one of us kids in the car with strict instructions not to let the parking inspector give him a ticket. You couldn’t do that these days either.

Dad was a huge fan of classical music and had a large record collection which he would whistle along to in perfect tune. He would play classical music and whistle in the car when driving, and always when our friends were in the car. He and mum would go to the MSO red series concerts and later, when they moved to the Melburnian, the Arts Centre and precinct was on their doorstep.

And as you know, dad was fascinated by history and Australian Jewish History in particular. He would often tell us about the latest aspect he was reading for or from the journal, about the life or achievements of a famous Jewish Australian, or some scandalous thing that had happened at a synagogue. And then there were the excursions that he led us on, around the city of Melbourne, holding a microphone and hauling a portable loudspeaker. Nowadays you can download a tour from the app store and explore by yourself, but it was more fun with dad and his boundless enthusiasm for teaching the history that he loved.

He was honoured to receive the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2007 for service to the Jewish community, particularly through the preservation of historical documents. And yet my memory is also of the effort he put into nominating his Historical Society colleagues and others in the Jewish community for an award, and the thrill he got when one of his nominees received one. He would sometimes hint that someone we knew might be up for a ‘gong’ in the week leading up to Australia day or the Queen’s Birthday.

I don’t recall him ever not being the President of the Australian Jewish Historical Society Victoria Inc., but I do recall him quipping that the 3 nicest words in the English language were ‘immediate past president.’ So, after 38 years that’s what he became.

Dad had a very strong Jewish identity and sense of belonging to an important community. He felt the weight of Jewish history and heritage. He fostered the same feeling in us kids, sending us to Jewish day schools and encouraging our involvement with Jewish youth movements, just as he was involved in Habonim and made many lifelong friends there.

Of course, I’m skirting around something that had a profound influence on his life and that of us all, the sudden unexpected death of Karen, an unspeakable tragedy that cast a long shadow over the life of a young family. And because he couldn’t bear to speak of it, it wasn’t discussed.

So, he threw himself into his work and filled his days with caring for others through dentistry, and with his interests and passion for music, history, art, theatre, literature, dining, travel, family, and friends.
And then years later, another setback, this time with mum developing a life-threatening illness, the treatment for which lasted years and had terrible side effects. And again, he soldiered on, trying not to think about the likely outcome, getting us to school and protecting us from his worst fears. He must have been scraping the bottom of the barrel when he made us a breakfast jaffle filled with baked beans and cottage cheese. Needless to say, there was a mutiny.

Thankfully, disaster was averted, and mum and dad were able to see their children get married and have children of their own.

It’s safe to say that dad’s greatest delights were his grandchildren. Firstly Ella, who arrived as a 61st birthday present, then Oscar, Zara and Yasmin, Alex and then Lucas. He was at first ridiculously silly with them, pulling faces, using rude words, and telling jokes. As they got slightly older, he and mum took them on excursions to the National Gallery of Victoria, walks through the Botanic Gardens, and sometimes to foreign films with subtitles they couldn’t read.

Later, he would tell them about various goings on in the community or in his historical work, with varied success. I’m pretty sure that Ella and Oscar could tell you all about the history of the Queen Victoria Market and the issue of unmarked Jewish graves at the Old Melbourne Cemetery which predated it.

In later years, dad appreciated the help of all those who cared for him just as he had done for others. He spoke highly of his doctors, and they were very fond of him. I don’t think he gave much thought to death or dying, he was too busy living.

For Louis Waller: "A life devoted to justice, kindness, humility", Speech at Shloshim, by Ian Waller - 2019



7 November 2019, St Kilda Hebrew Congregation, Melbourne, Australia

Speaking at a dinner in honor of my father in 2000, Justice Michael Kirby then a High Court judge said:

In a life, such as Louis Waller has lived, it is not enough to begin with his academic laurels. To understand him, and the wellsprings of his humanity, it is essential to journey back to Siedlce in Poland.

My father, Peter Louis Waller,

הריני כפרת משכבו פנחס יהודה בן יעקב דב הכהן

was born Pinchas Leib Waligora in Siedlce Poland on 9th February 1935.

His birth was registered by his father the following day, so 10th February became his official birthday.

Like many other cities in Europe, Siedlce (which is situated about 100 km east of Warsaw) had a significant Jewish population. In 1935 Jews constituted some 40% of the city's population of 30,000.

Of course, all that changed forever during the Second World War. By the end of 1942, almost every member of its Jewish population had been murdered in Treblinka.

That was the fate that befell almost all of my father’s Siedlce family.

Somehow, sensing the impending doom, Dad’s parents managed to leave Poland with their 3 year old son in 1938 and made their way by sea to Melbourne.

Dad’s parents had both been raised in orthodox hassidic homes. Indeed, the sandek at Dad’s bris in 1935 (given the honor of holding Dad while he was circumcised) was the Biale Rebbe. There were also strong family connections on my grandmother’s side to the Alexander Rebbe.

Dad’s father had received a cheder and yeshiva education in Siedlce, but at the age of 18 he was conscripted into the Polish army for 4 years, and thereafter became a fervent supporter of the Linke Poale Zion, the left wing Socialist Zionist movement, and the life-style associated with it. So, by the time they arrived in Melbourne in 1938 with Dad then aged 3, my grandparents’ religious observance had diminished.

But my grandparents had decided that their son would have a Jewish education and a Jewish life. They understood that while in Siedlce, yiddishkeit was all-pervasive whatever one’s personal practice, in Melbourne they had to work at being Jewish especially if they wanted to ensure that Dad would remain so.

So, in 1940, aged 5, Dad became a pupil at the St Kilda Hebrew School. And from 1942 (while his father was conscripted, this time as a “friendly alien” in the Sixth Employment Company of the Australian Army) he began walking with his mother every Shabbat morning to St Kilda Synagogue from their rented cottage in Argyle Street. From the age of 9, Dad attended services every Friday evening as well.

After the Second World War my grandfather became a regular congregant here too, and he remained so until he died in 1981.

It is therefore particularly appropriate that this Shloshim service, marking 30 days since my father left this world, is being held here at St Kilda Synagogue.

* * *

Rabbi Jacob Danglow, who led this Synagogue for more than half a century between 1905 and 1957, had a powerful impact on my grandparents and on Dad.

In a speech he delivered in 1980 on the 100th anniversary of Rabbi Danglow’s birth, Dad said that when Rabbi Danglow stood in the pulpit – this pulpit – delivering his sermons he could, as a child, imagine no other occupant.

This is how Dad described Rabbi Danglow in that speech:

...pre-eminent always...- dark; a sun-tanned face, an iron-grey moustache, black canonicals, relieved a little by the bands of white at his throat, and draped in a silk tallit with blue stripes, a tiny replica of which I and every boy in the synagogue wore in those days...

Although he could imagine no one else occupying the pulpit, as an 8 year old attending Sunday school here, on one occasion Dad was directed to go into the shule ascend the pulpit and read from the Singers Prayer Book until he was told to stop. A microphone was being installed for some occasion and the electrician wanted to test its effectiveness. Dad said:

I mounted the steps with trepidation. The view I had was breathtaking, but I was also seized by a terrible fear. What if Rabbi Danglow should at that moment come through the door and see me? He would surely thunder “Get out!” and banish me forever from the shule.

Dad celebrated his barmitzvah in this shule on 21st February 1948 (parshat Tetzaveh). He remembers standing in the Warden’s box as Rabbi Danglow implored him to conduct himself so as to be a source of pride to his parents, his family and his school.

Exactly 3 months later, on 21st May 1948, David Ben Gurion proclaimed the declaration formally establishing the State of Israel.

Dad recalls attending a special thanksgiving service in this shule after the establishment of Medinat Yisrael.

He said:

Rabbi Danglow delivered a sermon which I do remember — it was on the theme that Israel should be a Jewish state. And when the choir, which throughout the war had sung the National Anthem to end the service, concluded instead with Hatikvah, I knew that the world had changed. Whatever happened, my life and the lives of my contemporaries would thereafter in large degree, be bound up with the life and future of Israel.

Of course, Dad’s words were prescient.

Because it would be in Israel where he would fall in love with Mum in the summer of 1957.

And it would be in Israel where my brother Anthony and sister Elly would make their homes, and together with Michal and Michael would raise their families.

And it would be in Israel where we would celebrate Mum and Dad’s 60th wedding anniversary - returning to the place where it all began, but this time surrounded by their 35 children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

And it will be in Israel tomorrow that a Shloshim service will take place in Modi’in arranged by Anthony and Elly, at which a siyum mishnayot will be conducted marking the special learning that has been undertaken in Dad’s memory during the last 30 days.
* * *

Dad continued to attend this Synagogue regularly until he sailed to England to commence post graduate study at Oxford in 1956. And in later years Dad continued to attend here on those days when he could drive to shule.

So, he would return to the synagogue of his youth to celebrate the triumph of Purim and to commemorate the tragedy of Tisha B’Av and on other occasions as well.

As a boy, Dad also continued his formal Jewish education at its Hebrew school, attending classes on Shabbat mornings after shule, on Sunday mornings and on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

Dad’s life changed completely when, in March 1950, Reverend Bert Wreschner, then assistant minister of STKHC and Headmaster of the Hebrew School, appointed Dad, then aged 15, as a teacher in the Hebrew School responsible for a class of 10 and 11 year old boys and girls.

Dad said that that experience was “to light the fires of enthusiasm for Jewish learning and for teaching” in his impressionable mind.

In his matriculation exams in 1951 Dad received first class honours in Hebrew.

And in each year of his law degree, Dad continued his studies in Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic at Melbourne University in the Department of Semitic Studies under the renowned Professor Maurice David Goldman.

* * *

While Dad received his formal Jewish education at St Kilda Hebrew School, his informal Jewish education was probably more influential.

Of course, it came primarily from his home, from his mother and from his father who as a young boy had been a Talmudic prodigy and was well versed in Jewish law and practice.

Dad recalls being taught by his father to read Rashi script and, together with him, studying the biblical commentaries on the weekly Torah portion. His father also taught him how to read and write Yiddish which had been Dad’s mamaloshen (his mother tongue) from the time he could speak.

Dad’s informal Jewish education also came from 2 other principal sources.

From the age of 11 until he was 14, Dad attended an informal gathering called Oyneg Shabbos organised and led by a young man named Eli Loebenstein. Meetings were held on Shabbat afternoons in the homes of some of the participants where there were stories, games, songs – as well as cake and lemonade. Eli spoke to them about the forthcoming Jewish holidays, or about an episode in the Torah reading of the week, or about tallis and tefillin, or about all manner of matters Jewish and made sure that every person in the group was regarded as an important participant.

Dad later wrote:

I didn't see Eli often after the end of Oyneg Shabbos. I remember him today with undiminished fondness, and with deep respect. What he did for me, and my Oyneg Shabbos companions, he did because he wanted to ensure that we Melbourne Jewish kids understood how wonderful was our inheritance, and how precious was each Shabbos we enjoyed.

The second major informal influence on Dad was Bnei Akiva. Between the ages of 12 and 21, a large part of Dad’s life was lived in this Religious Zionist youth movement.

As a madrich or youth leader Dad welcomed the opportunities for autonomy and independence.

And his own madrichim left indelible impressions on him, particularly Arnold Bloch ע׳ה who showed Dad that Jewish learning and secular studies not only could, but should, merit equal attention and that the insights from one could illuminate the other.

The seeds of Jewish life and learning that were planted in Dad as a boy took root and flourished, imbuing his life with a spiritual dimension that permeated everything he did thereafter.

* * *

Dad returned to Melbourne in 1959 having obtained a BCL with first class honours from Oxford, but more importantly having met and married Mum.

Their first home was a flat in Glenhuntly Road Elwood. So from about June 1959 until October 1962 Dad davened at Elwood TTC. Dad especially enjoyed the davening of Chazan Adler who he described as “a superb ba'al tefila, and free of prima-donnaish characteristics”.

In 1962, Mum and Dad moved to Hartley Ave, Caulfield and Dad began a life-long association with another, very different, sort of synagogue.

In fact, in name not a synagogue or Bet Knesset, but a Bet Midrash (a house of learning) - the Caulfield Beth HaMedrash, colloquially known to many as Katanga.

Interestingly, Dad rarely if ever used that appellation, referring to it simply as “the Beis Medrash”.

It had no ornate sanctuary, no imposing dome, no Anglo-Jewish heritage, indeed no official rabbi.

Instead it comprised devout and learned Holocaust survivors whose mother tongue was Yiddish. Dad enjoyed its simplicity and authenticity and forged close personal relationships with generations of its mitpallelim.

For at least the last 20 years Dad would speak on Shabbat afternoons twice a year - on Parshat Mishpatim and Parshat Shoftim whose Torah readings dealt with legal matters.

Dad, the public teacher of law, enjoyed preparing and delivering these intimate lectures in which he would skilfully weave his own experiences, insights and reflections into the biblical text.

He delivered his last such talk just 2 months ago.

Dad’s final appearance at his beloved Beis Medrash was on Rosh Hashana the Jewish New Year - less than 6 weeks ago.

His last public pronouncement that day was his recitation of the Birkat Kohanim – the Priestly Blessing – which he always did with pride and more importantly be’ahava with love.

The memory of that day will stay with me forever.

Dad’s affiliation with, and attraction to, these very different places of worship – to St Kilda Hebrew Congregation and to the Caulfield Beth HaMedrash - speaks to his openness to different forms of Orthodox Jewish expression.

Dad understood the need for fidelity to tradition, to halacha, but accepted that there were “shivim panim letorah” many ways of expressing that connection.

That openness to different outlooks and approaches characterized Dad’s involvement with a vast range of Jewish organisations during his life - in education, in welfare, and in communal life.

With Bert Wreschner, Dad assisted the newly established Moriah College which we attended in the 1960’s. Later, when we moved to Mount Scopus College, Dad chaired its Education Committee.

He helped establish programs to enhance tertiary Jewish studies at both Monash University and the University of Melbourne.

Dad served as Chairman of the Advisory Committee of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University which is dedicated to teaching about the evolution of Jewish civilisation and its contribution to the world.
He also served on the Board of Governors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and of Tel Aviv University. And he was instrumental in the development of the Hillel Foundation in Victoria promoting Jewish life on university campuses and the establishment of Australian Academics for Peace in the Middle East.
Together with Mum he was actively involved with Bnai Brith for decades and more recently also with Courage to Care, the Makor Library and Jewish Care.

Throughout his life, Dad’s love of learning never ceased, his study overflowing with books, especially of Jewish law and lore (L.O.R.E. as Dad would say) spilling into bookshelves in every room of their home.
In recent years Dad rekindled his love of Yiddish, topping the State in VCE Yiddish and attending weekly conversation classes.
* * *
In a recently published book by Susan Bartie on Pioneering Australian Legal Scholars, she writes that as a law teacher, together with Peter Brett, Dad’s goal was not simply to produce competent legal practitioners, but to foster a sense of moral awareness in their students and to impress upon them the onerous moral responsibilities lawyers faced.

In teaching criminal law Dad would introduce his first lecture with Rv Dudley & Stevens the famous case involving human cannibalism on the high seas to illustrate the tension that exists between law and morality. That lesson and the issues it raised have remained with Dad’s students throughout their lives.

And as a pioneering law reformer, much of Dad’s work concerned the beginning and the end of life. Dad had to grapple with the most difficult legal, social and ethical dilemmas thrown up by scientific and medical advances in IVF and assisted reproduction technology.

A feature article in the Age in June 1982 stated:
The professor’s respect for human life is informed by his religious belief.
It quoted Dad as saying : “I am Jewish; it is part of the fabric of my life”.

And so it was.

In everything that he was, and in everything that he did.

* * *


In his study of Biblical Hebrew at University, and in the years since, Dad read the famous verse in the Book of Michah, where the Prophet says:

He has told you, O man, what is good, and what the Lord demands of you;
Only that you do justice,
love kindness,
and walk Humbly with your God.

הִגִּ֥יד לְךָ֛ אָדָ֖ם מַה־טּ֑וֹב וּמָה ה דּוֹרֵ֣שׁ מִמְּךָ֗ כִּ֣י אִם־עֲשׂ֚וֹת מִשְׁפָּט֙ וְאַ֣הֲבַת חֶ֔סֶד וְהַצְנֵ֥עַ לֶ֖כֶת עִם־אֱלֹקיךָ:

That simple yet profound verse encapsulates so beautifully Dad’s life.

A life devoted to justice – to teaching generations of lawyers, judges and legislators that the law must be an instrument of justice, to reforming the law so that it achieved that end, and to living a life of personal integrity

A life infused with kindness – in his lifelong relationships and in his daily interactions.

And – despite his enormous achievements - a life characterized by humility.

To have been so close to someone who embodied these qualities is a privilege that Adina and I and our children and our grandchildren will always cherish.

And a constant reminder to us of what we should strive to be.

* * *

In the speech he gave about Rabbi Danglow, Dad recalls a final memory.

It is Yom Kippur. The day of Atonement.
The shule is full, and almost still, darkened by approaching night.
It is Neilah, the final service on this holiest of holy days.
On the bimah, enveloped in white kittel and woollen tallit stands the rabbi.

In Dad’s description:

The limpid words of the liturgical poem capture the scene and fix the atmosphere:

Hayom yifneh,
hashemesh yavo v’yifneh
Navo’ah sh’arecha

The day is passing,
The sun is low, the day is growing late.
O – let us come into Thy gates at last.

So let me conclude with my final memory of my father.

It is Yom Kippur. The Day of Atonement.
Night has fallen.
It is Kol Nidrei, the first service on this holiest of holy days.
But we are not in shule.
We are gathered around Dad’s hospital bed.
Enveloped in white kittel and woollen tallit, we sing the haunting melodies that have resonated with our people for centuries and which Dad loved.
Then, we begin to recite our silent devotion.
As we symbolically beat our chests in confession - we see that Dad’s chest is now still.

The day has now passed,
the sun has now set
And Dad’s soul is about to enter Thy gates at last.

Yehi zichro baruch

May his memory be a blessing

For Johnny Baker: 'Do we have anything to talk about?' by Mark Baker - 2017

30 October 2017, Melbourne, Australia

About three days before Johnny died, as his physical strength was waning, he signalled with his hands that he wanted to talk to me alone. Everyone left the room and we closed the door to his study. I sat on the leather chair on his side, his body perforated with contraptions called butterflies, from which drivers and needles could easily be injected to ease the unbearable pain caused by the cancer that was rapidly burrowing through his bones. What did he want to say? He just looked at me, his eyes already hollow but strangely sparkling with that look I’d come to recognise over the past ten months—a mixture of bewilderment, of bemusement, of bereavement, the latter less for his oncoming fate than for his family and especially for my parents.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Do we have anything to talk about?’

Umm, I thought to myself. How do you answer that question?

‘Talk to me,’ he urged.  ‘What do you think?’ His voice was croaky from the primary cancer in his lower oesophagus which miraculously never affected his appetite; if anything, it enlarged it, and summonsed meals from Ilona Staller to his hospital bed be it in Cabrini, Prahran hospice or his study.

In that one second before I answered him, I looked at him lying there, and then at the framed picture behind the bed of Johnny standing with our great-Uncle Wiociou, an old behatted man, younger in the photo than our Dad, who brought Mum out to Australia after the war, and our lives flashed past me in that proverbial way. Just as his bodywas being eaten particle by particle, so too did I see our lives cell by cell, not the grand legacy of his brilliance and larger-than-life character, but the minutiae, the myriad memories of a life shared and lived, as TS Elliot says, measured by coffee spoons, until the last sip more than the last supper.

And I realised that above all, what shaped us as brothers over the 62 years of his life, was that for me the filmic reel of our lives, unedited and continuous, began five years before I was born. One of Johnny’s most annoying habits was that he loved to test waiters about this fact and ask who was older. Wasn’t it obvious, that I, who inexplicably retained my hair, was the younger one? Yet sometimes he got the answer that he wanted, or that might have actually appeared to be true because he had such a young smooth face like Yossl’s.  If I was to write a book, and I can assure you I won’t, I’d call it not Thirty Days but Five Years, because it was the theme that governed and shaped our relationship and differences.

My Dad came to Australia in '48, my mother in '51. Maybe Johnny had a better knack for languages as he did for music, but it partly explains why Johnny was able to hold a fluent Yiddish conversation because by the time I was born my Dad learned to speak a poyfect English from interacting with all the migrants in his factory in Brunswick. When Johnny and Iwere videoed chatting a few days before that last conversation, I was trying to dig for my earliest memories. But that was the wrong question. His were the earliest memories, something so obvious I’d never realised it. He told me that he remembers when I was nine months old and was rushed to the hospital for an emergency tracheotomy. He recalled the panic in the house as I lay in hospital in an oxygen tent for weeks. He would have been six years old at the time so of course he remembers but I never thought about that. My mother likes to say that was the start of her depression, not the Holocaust, not losing her mother straight after the war, but almost losing her secondson. Now that’s a heavy load to carry, but talking to Johnny I think he carried the load more.

We both recall going to Hayman Island with friends who are here in this room (Joe says it was in 66; Les says, a few days after August 27, 1967. Johnny for sure would have known the exact date), but of our parents only Dad came, he in his larrikin spirit, dressed in one photograph as Carmen Miranda and parading with a bottle of champagne like Maura from Transparent. Where was Mum? I didn’t know. But I think Johnny who was already eleven did, and he always knew after and experienced more than me the effects that apparently the near loss of a son brought into the household.

It’s usually the first son who is the spoiled one but perhaps that early incident set the tone for our relationship. My parents don’t hesitate to repeat the story of how I would walk into Franks toy shop, then located next to Las Chicas, and say, ‘now what haven’t I got?’ Johnny wasn’t spoiled in the same way. When I cried Mum would say, ‘Give in to your brother Johnny,’ to which I would learn the refrain from an early age, ‘Johnny give in to me. Let me have it.’

So, it comes as no surprise that over the past month, moving home, I was searching cupboards, and amongst the treasures I discovered were records with Johnny’s name on the cover, and books inscribed with Johnny’s signature. And amongst it all, I found this one object, something I opened and believed was mine. A collection of 78 records in brown paper album sleeves, with songs that I remember. I remember singing them with Johnny while he was in the bath, and I—this might be my earliest memory—would dance to, still dripping water on the tiles. Peter Ponsil and his Tonsil – those words ring in my ears but not the tune, but I certainly remember my favourite, How much is that Doggy in the window/The one with the waggly tail, to which we would both bark, Woof woof. Yet two nights ago when I retrieved the maroon album, I was shocked to open it and discover that my mother had written in her florid hand-script that never changed: ‘For my—The my crossed out and replaced by our—darling Johnny. From Mummy and Daddy.’Across the top was the address, 22 Malvern Grove, to which was added Melbourne, Australia in case someone might find it and think to return it to Poland, meaning Johnny was given this precious gift when he was four or five, before I was born.

Now I wish I could give you back those records Johnny and woof together like little children, but I can’t. I want to keep them for myself but they belong to your family, so that they can play the songs to Rudy and Addy, and to the grandchildren I know you wanted more than anything else to live to see.

Most of our earliest memories revolve around music. I drove you crazy with that record player I kept on the desk in Edinburgh Avenue behind my bed. It was shaped like a brief case with a clip, a mottled grey colour, on which I would continuously play Mary Poppins. Where did that record player go? And we both remembered going to Ciociou and Wiociu’s house in Elwood, our surrogate grandparents, which smelled of gefilte fish, Ciocius arms wobbling like the gulleh—calves foot jelly—she made, and playing soccer with Max, who introduced us to Fiddler on the Roof in 1966 just before he went off to Israel and was killed in El Arish during the Six Day War.

Or perhaps an even earlier memory is of us on a holiday in Rye, where I had the mumps, looking out the window and seeing you playing with a soccer ball. I was always the sick one and you were always the healthy one, and could never tolerate illness. You were always one step ahead—five years ahead—it was because of you when I came to Scopus Mum moved me to Mrs Traegar’s class because you were the star student, and so if I followed in your footsteps, some of it would rub off.

But I wasn’t the only pampered one. You told me last week how Dzadzi would have to roll his car out of the driveway when he left for work early, so as not to wake you up, a feat that almost matches me warming my school socks against the blow heater. We were spoiled by a doting mother who will always remind us how she lay on the floor while we studied for exams—in primary school, not to mention HSC, despite receiving her schooling in a DP camp in Germany. We can’t forget the constant holidays to Lakes Entrance and Surfers where we stayed at Island in the Sun and then the Chevron, Mr Kisch’s apartment and Surfside Six where the Nebyls stayed and formed a bond with our family before we became family.

And then there was the time soon after the Six Day War you vanished with Mum and Dad to Israel, and I was left with Aunti Dzunka and Uncle Boruch without prior warning. You stayed with Charlie, or Yechiel as he later became, at the Hilton hotel, yours and Anita’s happy place. But on that early stay in that iconic concrete block when you were barely barmitzvahed, Mum and Dad chuffed off to Europe, and you were left alone in a hotel room with Charlie, from where the two of you booked day tours on Dan buses.

No wonder we always had a string of live-ins—Rula, Lucy, and Katarina, and in later years, Que- Jenny, to spoil us.

There was only one time you were sick, Johnny, but that story has been passed down as one of heroic stamina, not unlike what we witnessed these past months. It was on your barmitzvah day. It goes without saying you had the longest parsha, not just a long one but a double one, Vayakhel-Pekudei, which satisfied Mum, whereas mine was so short that she asked Mr Caspi to change it to Bereishit, perhaps establishing that playful rivalry between us in those subtle maternalgestures. You were so sick with the flu, you almost didn’t make it, but like a true warrior you walked the distance from Caulfield to Elwood, stood on the bimah, and recited the whole shebang perfectly. Auspiciously, when we opened Shira Hadasha, it was your barmitvah recitation that launched it, and only you had the capacity to bring to a shul that was spurned by Mizrachi and had a brick thrown through it, the likes of Mark Leibler. I never asked who wrote yourbarmi speech – probably you – but when it came to mine, your September holiday in Surfers was spent under duress from Mum to write my speech, who also enlisted Joe Gersh to the task. By then, you were a teenager, long haired, while mine was ungainly and curly. As Mum will attest, you had girls galore. I won’t name them. I still remember as a little boy being shocked when Mum stormed into your room and like a sniffer at the airport, screamed, I smell druks. I smell druks. And you pleaded it was just scented candles. I never asked you, which was it? The pool was always awash with your friends, but in the end, as from the start, it was Anita who captured your teenage heart.

And then in my first form, everything changed. You went to Israel for a year, and got caught up in the ‘73 war, and I don’t mean the war with Mum about dropping out of medicine.  I’ll never forget Dad’s terrorand how he wanted to fly to rescue you as if he was on an Entebbe mission. I still remember the screaming match at home when you returned from Israel and dropped out of medicine for a second time, and then— and this is the heart of it for me— you disappeared. You went to live in Israel and from that moment, I became an only child. My life took a different course. Those were the formative years of my teenager-hood, when I was spoiled and went on family holidays to Ekelpekel as the men innocently pronouncedAcapulco, but without you.

And one of the things I told you in your last days at your bedside, is that even though you weren’t there, and perhaps I resented it a little, you were my hero, my older brother of five years, who showed me what it is to live a life of purpose, who instilled in me my love of Israel, and who planted in me my left-wing Israeli politics. And so,when I went to Israel for my gap year and escaped Yeshiva, it was to your home, in Beit Hakerem, that I gravited, treated by Anita as a son, and by the Nebyl clan on Habanai and Hechalutz as family, and greeted each time by Boyce, who reminded us later of our Spoodles.My passion for Jewish education came from you, Johnny, my rejection of law was inspired out of a desire to return to Israel like you, and then when I got to Israel with Kerryn after Oxford, we played trading places, and I moved into your apartment in Beit Hakerem where Gabe was born.

How is it that as you lay dying, I found myself staring at your bookshelves, and recognising almost every book as one that I also possessed? How is it that we both shopped in the same places, and had the same taste for designer labels? We were so close, our homes diagonally across the road, that it felt as brothers we were in each other’s pockets after so many years apart. At times, it was tight in that fraternal pocket, and so we found ourselves arguing over the one percent that differentiated us, how to characterise the occupation, sparring over ideas but sharing the same worldview, and love of wine and food at our regular Knesset gatherings.

But Johnny, did you have to go so far and mirror what had happened in my life only one year earlier by getting cancer. No one could have arranged our tight enmeshment as brothersmorepoignantly than the fact that Kerryn was buried on your birthday, and that you died and were buried on hers. Such is the tragic circularity of life, the unscripted coherence that transcends the chaotic banality of our days, or what one friend called the bewildering mindfuckery of life. And so we bonded in a new way. Having delegated the tasks of caring for the pragmatic things in life to Kerryn and Johnny, I was dumped with a new kind of responsibility. Johnny was surrounded by a network of medical friends who all went to the greatest lengths to help and comfort him, but for some reason, he turned to me, alongside his family, to be with him at every appointment—from that first PET scan, back to the rooms of the same oncologist where I was tempted to imitate Jack Nicholson’s terrifying line from The Shining, Here’s Johnny.

Being a medical cancer expert, or rather an expert googler unafraid to read the scientific gobbledydook on Google Scholar, I knew that once again we were faced with an ordeal that would last approximately ten months. I knew your care was palliative, the most fateful charade, that would extend Johnny’s life to give him the chance to prepare himself and family for death. And Johnny, as we all know, did it his way, with fanfare, using his skills as a genealogical botanist who knew every branch of every family tree, exactly like our father, to invite everyone into his life using black humour around his dying, hobnobbing and literally hobbling on crutches with politicians in the Hilton lounge to your own lounge at Aroona, right until the last day, when we brought the songs of the Seder table into the room where your very own Von Trapp family sang your favourite songs in harmony. You even flirted with the medical staff, and when you were well, gave copies of my memoirs to the nurses, many of whom remembered me, and who read it with one eye on you, reduced to physical immobility but never once losing your remarkable mental agility. And the reason the nurses could afford to sit back is because, angelic wonders that they are, the hard work was being executed by the family. I admit, I was sceptical. How would they manage? But manage they did. And boy did Johnny know it, even as he issued instructions while on substances we wished we could steal from his kit. I will never forget the images of the kids sitting in the study as though they were characters in Breaking Bad, filling needles, tapping on syringes, and ultimately easing Johnny’s unbearable pain with the alchemy of methadone and devotion.

There is so much to grieve for, but none of you—Timnah, Nadav, Mayan, Gilad, Karni, together with your partners who adored Johnny, can ever feel guilt for a second that you weren’t there, by your father’s side giving him exactly what he wanted, until those final seconds when you wrapped him in his final resting garb.

And then there was Anita—Anita who began by repeatingthe mantra, I’m going to throw myself into his grave. How can I live without Johnny?We all worried for her, and we still do, but in a different way. Anita turned into Wonderwoman, as if she’d been supercharged by a dark sun, and literally ran from one end of the house to the other servicing Johnny’s needs, injecting him, gathering blankets, emptying catheters, maintaining his dignity in moments where only love could cover up the indignity caused by his immense pain. Johnny might have been the hero who never complained about his illness, even as some of us sat in the lounge room blocking our ears and flopping our heads on our laps to drown out the sound of his agonising yelping when being showered. But Anita, with the help of one of the kids, or a nurse, did it all, with so much strength that she replaced the refrain of despair into one of defiance and inspirational strength. Right down to those last days, when she became a foetal ball, curled over him in love, crying for Johnny as though they were back at school, as though time had dissolved and joined the beginning with the end.

And so, when Johnny asked me, do we have anything to talk about, I knew what to say. I told Johnny the simplest truth. That everything will be OK. Starting with him, that you Johnny will be OK, that while you’re being robbed of years, no, of decades, you’ve lived a good life, a wonderful life, and that once you’re gone, you won’t be asking questions anymore. And then I assured him that everyone else will be OK. Anita, because she’s shown him how strong she can be. I went through each of his kids, and said that every one of them will find happiness, exactly as he would want, and that I would always be there for them, as would their other aunties and uncles, Lani, Nay, Chezy, Sylvia, Gid and Shelley, and brood of closely-knit cousins as well as friends, including Caron and Ralph, Lorraine and Simmy, who were in the foreground and background from beginning to end.

Johnny was also worried about me, and asked how I was coping and so many times he told me how happy he was that I’d started a new life with Michelle, or Mooshes as Anita has always affectionately called her. He wanted to see photos of our new apartment in St Kilda opposite Luna Park. He asked it selflessly, and I think it brought him comfort that I had found my way back to life, and that my kids, Gabe, Sarah and Rachel, who adored him as their Uncle, and who Johnny showered with praise and love along with their partners, were managing to balance their irrevocable loss with a life of happiness.

But most of all, he was worried about our parents, Buba and Zaida, for whom he put on an academy award winning performance each time they entered the house, reserving his waning energy for zestful greetings to put them at ease. Johnny and I always joked that we had good genes and would live till an old age. We also internalised the legend that our parents taught us, how to dance in the darkness of sorrow, as they did at the annual Buchenwald Ball. But we were no longer so sure, how they could take another loss in their life, and endure such immeasurable tragedy. To be honest, I didn’t think they could do it, but now, in these past few days, seeing what I’ve seen, my one regret is that I didn’t say to Johnny that Mum and Dad will also be OK. Shattered forever, weeping tears and sharing broken Valium tablets, but all things considered, meaning you can’t turn shit into gold, they will be OK like the rest of us. We saw it in the way Mum, after screaming her own refrain, Take me, Take me, would sit in his study while her son was dying, 57 years after she almost lost me, and kiss his kepelehand then hold his fingers and call them piano fingers, such beautiful fingers he has, and kiss each one, those fingers that she had created. It’s time to leave the room, we would say, but like a baby she shook her head and said to one of the grandchildren, I’m as close to him as you, my dear, and then add: ‘If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be here.’

And how could Dad survive, we all wondered, when he stumbled into the room, and each time knew to lean over Johnny, and whisper the right words into his ear. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll look after the children,’ weeping and then repeating the words again, ‘I’ll look after the children.’

At the funeral, despite or because of their hysteria, Mum once again found the strength to do what she had done for Kerryn. She stood up from her chair, and demanded a shovel, and cast spadefulsof earth over her son’s grave, saying ‘I should be the one in there.’ And then she turned to her Yossl, and gestured that it was his turn to face the bitter truth, for which they will always weep but also—I know it Johnny—stand and survive.

We know how much you loved life Johnny. Those words, Mi Haish, Who is the person, were written for you—hechafetz chayim – who yearns for life, ohev yamim, loved his days, right to the last. ‘If I could bottle this time, I would,’ he said, notwithstanding his suffering. And now we promise you—who began life as recorded on your birth certificate in 1955 as Gollini Bekiermaszyn, and over 62 years filled that bottle with memories as vast as the oceans, that all of us will be OK, and that in the celebrations to come that will span generations, od yishama, ‘once more will be heard’ the sound of gladness and joy.

Woof Woof.

We love you Johnny Baker.

For Kerryn Baker: 'She will soar as high as we allow her to ascend', by Mark Baker - 2016

16 March 2016, Shira Melbourne, Caulfield, Australia

The video of this hesped /eulogy may be viewed here. from 30 mins

When Kerryn gave her stupendously brave speech at Gabe’s engagement she practised it on me several times so that she could drain herself of the emotion. I’ve only had one chance of reading mine to her and I don’t think I’m ready to get through it - but I’ll do my best (and if I fall asleep or slur it’s because I’m on sedatives, which are on steady tap from my father). You’ll have to excuse me that I have my back to Kerryn but she has heard this eulogy a few days ago. I was given the stamp of approval through her smiles, though she did warn me that she was undeserving of my words and that it was too long. I haven’t changed any of the praise but I’ve cut the words in half, and it’s still too long. So bear with me but brevity feels like an injustice to our darling Kerryn:

Nine months ago on a Thursday night Kerryn and I were eating dinner at one of our favourite haunts, Ilona Staller. It was part of our privileged life, meeting an array of interesting overseas visitors. This time it was dinner with Sergio Della Pergola, the world’s foremost Jewish demographer whose job it is to count every Jew and project how many of us would exist in the future. I never bothered to ask how he accounted for the randomness of life - the calculus that can reduce his figures by a singular one - an infinite one - simply because life catches a person out with unexpected happenings. It was a fascinating dinner, full of laughter and lively conversation, and also my favourite pasta which is a permanent item on the cash register. Kerryn indulged herself with chips and later that night woke groaning to regret her choice of fatty food. Only in the morning did she admit to me she’d been kept up the night before by similar discomfort.

It was from such delights - a charmed life of exciting encounters, travels, dinners, augmented by anticipation of a summer of planned trips to Rwanda and Zanzibar - that prompted Kerryn to check in with a doctor. The doctors were quick to make the diagnosis and by Monday we got the ominous call as Kerryn was exiting what was to become our second home at Cabrini hospital. ‘Come immediately to our office,’ she was told, X-rays at hand. Pause. ‘And can you bring your husband Mark with you.’

We met outside the clinic and and walked through the doors in a numb state, aware that Kerryn’s self-diagnosis of gallstones was more malevolent than anything we could imagine. The doctor broke the news gently with the quizzical words, Linitis Plastica, quickly adding ‘And don’t ask any questions that you don’t want the answers to.’

That in itself was the answer we dreaded most and what followed was a string of phone calls and appointments which landed us in this surreal world that literally turned our lives upside down. The images of that week will always stay with us - poor Gabe, our older son, who believed that by sheer will and love he could fix things and to his credit, his outpouring of tears was almost enough to convince the doctors to alter their diagnosis. Rachel who was the only one living with us in Aroona at the time, in the midst of exams, lifting our spirits with her can-do anything hands - cooking, shopping, comforting. And Sarah, who walked in the house from work and expressed the the only words that could adequately sum up our feelings. Falling into Kerryn’s arms, our doctor intern cried, ‘What the fuck!’

Indeed, that word was used more than once, not as an obscenity, not as an accusation with an accusing or belligerent finger held up, for Kerryn never once let go of her equanimity or expressed anger, but something deeper, an acknowledgment of the bewildering mystery of life.

In one such moment when Kerryn was violently vomiting, she was leaning forward on a hospital bed, her back being gently stroked by a nurse who despite her experience on the oncology ward felt a surplus of empathy for Kerryn’s suffering. Soothing her patient lovingly, she whispered gently to Kerryn the only words she could offer in the face of the futility of medicinal healing. ‘We have to pray together,’ she said. ‘Do you pray?’ Kerryn mid-vomit played along. ‘Yes. Sometimes I pray.’ And in perfect poise that ruptured our image of Kerryn’s gentle manner, added: ‘And sometimes I just say Fuck.’

That’s right. Like Primo Levi in the camps who acknowledged that ordinary language like hunger and cold no long make sense to the suffering, Kerryn had to reach deep into a jarring vocabulary to articulate something that expressed our entry into a parallel planet of anguish and apocalyptic eruptions. For our idyllic world was spinning out of control at rapid pace. From that healthy meal on Carlisle Street - not just a meal - from a healthy and vibrant life of work as a family counsellor and doctor, of travel, as an engaged mother, sister, daughter in law, auntie, friend - Kerryn found herself gripped by a dybbuk that was taking over her body. Within days of the diagnosis, she could no longer lift her left leg. After one of a battery of tests on a Friday she insisted to the nurse that she would have to leave early because she had her regular Friday night blow dry at Hollywood Cutters. She made it on time, but as I watched her in the maze of mirrors, I saw her writhe in pain. Where was this monstrous alien coming from and what was it doing it to her?

The weeks ahead that culminated in her first chemotherapy, felt like a war, a metaphor that often accompanies cancer with its reference to patients as warriors and treatments as second and third line battle positions. That day, two weeks after the era that divided time into BC - Before Cancer - to AC - After Cancer - we brought Kerryn home. The family troops all did their bit. Ann came in with supermarket trolleys of fattening food, delivered lovingly to rescue Kerryn. The entrance to our home that greeted us was a shrine of flowers fit for Princess Diana. Baskets of food and kugelhoff were left at the door. We settled Kerryn on the couch to watch Masterchef and within an hour the toxic fluids erupted. Sarah with her medical training came to the rescue, washing towels and helping Kerryn through the throes of nausea. A flash of memory struck me that moment, one of many moments of history repeating itself. Kerryn had been an intern when her own mother was suffering cancer. She had injected her mother with morphine, a fateful act which impacted to some measure on Kerryn’s career choices. I vowed that I would never let Sarah be Kerryn’s doctor - only her daughter - but not before we let Sarah clean up the mess.

My job came at 3 am, the fulfilment of a craving for something totally unprecedented that could only be got from the supermarket. Teddy Bear Biscuits. The cravings recalled an earlier time, when Kerryn, pregnant with Gabe in Jerusalem, sent me on regular missions for blintzes, the best of which came from the terrace of the King David hotel. The mission accomplished yielded nothing more appetising than an ear Kerryn nibbled on, the rest of the teddy bear left forlornly on a plate while we rushed Kerryn to ER to cope with dehydration, nausea and the creeping tumour; well, not creeping - it was more like a rearguard blitz that took at least ten days to quash.

After the seventh day on the fourth floor of Cabrini hospital we were transferred to the remarkable Prahran palliative hospice - on the surface, a cosy B & B populated by angelic legions. ‘We’re not ready,’ I wanted to scream. That was when I had my first death nightmare, sleeping in a low pull out sofa alongside Kerryn. In my dream, I was driving in the dark to Norwood Rd, our first marital home. From behind the front door, near the piano that Kerryn had bought though no one really played it, there was a shadowy intruder. I woke shouting for help in the hospital, my heart racing from the terror of the figure that could only be the angel of death, and woke Kerryn who in her traditional role, comforted me when it was I who was supposed to comfort Kerryn.

That night someone died in the adjacent room, and we sat with the door sealed, our heads bowed and ears capped against the sounds of death - the ziplock bag, the muttering of prayers. It was no dream but a premonition of how our time would inexorably end, as it did literally yesterday, when me and my kids wrapped Kerryn up in a traumatic image that will never leave us.

It took Kerryn another 8 months to have her first death dream. Though I often saw her agitated at night, she woke one night in a sweat. It was after Gabe’s engagement party, in the lead-up to the race to get to the chuppa. She was crying.

Marky, she said. I dreamed we were at the airport at the gate ready to go overseas to America. Just as the gate opened I turned but it wasn’t your face anymore. It was my father Paul. By the time the doors closed I realised I didn’t have insurance. I panicked. I would never be able to get back to you. Days later she had another dream - she was on a train searching for her real father. Rachel was with her and they were being assaulted by a gang of rogues. One of the men unmasked himself behind a white veil. Kerryn was alone to fight the angel. She woke before the train reached its destination, terrified, unable to find her father. Days before her death she would say to me, don’t worry, I’m only going to America - you will find me.

When Kerryn got home after ten days in that first month, alive, though surely a contender for the Guinness book of records for answering all those loving text messages, she was offered all sorts of services from the Palliative care team. Never one to give up a deal, she accepted the offer of a biographer. The biographer would come for 6 sessions, write her life, and then compile it into a book.

I was skeptical from the outset, and made sure that the sessions were conducted in my study next to copies of The Fiftieth Gate. I think I was jealous - who was this stranger who would write my wife’s life?

Despite the most professional and compassionate efforts of the biographer, it was a disaster. Kerryn spent the first session answering one question - when were you born, and just cried and cried. She spent the second session talking about her parents, and barely got past pronouncing their names Sally and Paul. By the third she was despairing. My life is so boring, she would plead, there’s nothing to say.

And yet - Kerryn’s life was the stuff of high tragedy, a life so worth telling that the Shakespearean dramatics of it concealed from her the ability to speak of its significance and enduring impact.

Kerryn was born on 27 October 1960 into a new decade, the hippy era, but she was more of a 70s and 80s child in her dance style which I could never match. Her favourite film which she watched several times in the last months was The Big Chill, for it had all the ingredients for her - an opening scene with a funeral, a reunion of friends, lives full of unfulfilled promise, and more important than anything - great music. When I asked her what she wanted for her funeral she said a song.

A niggun you mean.
No, a song.
And she hummed it for me.
You can’t always get what you want.

Kerryn at the end of her life didn’t get what she wanted, a yearning repeated from an earlier stage of her youth. For this is the theme of her story - what she didn’t get in her life she dedicated herself to giving to others, mostly our children but also me. For a long time, she never spoke about her childhood - it was too painful, and for many it made her a closed book. Only with her cancer, and as a reaction to the silence that shrouded the divorce of her parents Sally and Paul, and the early losses of her youth, did she talk - publicly proclaiming at Gabe’s engagement the difficulties of her adolescence.

The memories of her family home in Miliara Grove with Ann, Bradley and Glenn were filled with happy stories - Kerryn recently reminded Bradley that despite the layers of bitterness that later overlaid their childhood, she remembers good times - Bradley pushing her on a swing in the park, triggering in him a deep love which had him calling his sister my angel in her final months; with Ann, her protector who would always carry her younger sister if she was upset — and of course with their baby brother Glenn. Yet those halcyon years where they worked in Fairways on Elizabeth St selling jeans, where marred by a bitter divorce that in Kerryn’s public words, made the War of the Roses look like a Garden party.

Let me say something at this point about me and Kerryn because it is part of the first act of her life. If family ties and the same school weren’t enough to link us in Grade 2, our classroom teacher might have sealed the deal. In the battle for pushy interventionist parents, of which Sally and my mother Genia were bantamweight matches, my mother got in first and refused my placement in Kerryn’s class with Mrs Yaxley, or Yackabom as we called her. That set off a domino effect where Kerryn went through a different trail of desks and to this day earned the distinction of being able to cite by rote Mrs Fuzy’s catechisms about the Renaissance and weather systems.

It was only in Form 12, as we called it then, that fate reunited us in Nana Newman’s biology class, again because of the intervention of my mother who insisted that a boy with half a brain must be educated in the sciences. Kerryn, was naturally gifted at these things, annoyed by my prankishness, and to my everlasting pride proved that in an era of gender discrimination girls at Scopus could show their mettle by topping HSC general maths. This of course marks the cerebral divide in my family - Kerryn balanced between left and right, and me fuzzy in some other spaced out zone.

Another moment of union took place in a photograph that Kerryn’s school friend Dianne recently brought us. We were visiting Mt Martha in 1977 and sharing a beach towel. I would like to tell my kids that this was the moment of adolescent passion but the reason I had forgotten that moment with Kerryn is that my eyes were fixated on the white bikini of another girl who I fancied at the time. After that, we parted ways - Kerryn starting medicine at Melbourne University, and me off for a year to Yeshiva where my hair was shorn, but grew back to Afro length in the second half of the year after I rebelled and became a Habo boy like her father.
I still recall Kerryn visiting Israel on Academy, the shorter version of the gap year away, and meeting her in a large hall. I approached her with interest - more than just the curiosity of a school reunion. There was something enigmatic about Kerryn even before she started wearing her modest outfits of every shade and cut of black - I associated her at the time with two of the books we had read in the same English class - The French Lieutenants Woman, and Marion from the Go-Between, women who harboured secrets and deep-seated, exotic, almost erotic mystery. This was around the time when I was discovering my own black box of secrets as a second generation Holocaust survivor - a collective story of myths and legends. Her black box of secrets were personal, visceral, something that she found difficult sharing with anyone.
For in addition to the divorce that had so embittered her life, her mother Sally had contracted breast cancer, a tumour that thankfully is totally unrelated to the randomness of Kerryn’s illness. This was the era when cancer was a secret disease, unspoken about. It was an awkward and foreign scene I encountered - something that our gorgeous Ralph and nurturing Tami had known from the outset but which for me was hard to decipher. Who was this Mr Young who had married Sally and was constantly baking apple cakes? Why didn’t anyone talk about the divorce? How was this woman living with cancer? Was she wearing a wig or was it her real hair?

In one of the many ironies, the man who supplied Kerryn with a wig before her first chemo had not only provided the same service for Kerryn’s Mum, but had even dated her once.
I met Kerryn again at a party I gatecrashed, and though my ego likes to say it was she who chased me, it was I who was smitten by her wit, her intelligence, and a poetic side whose output is lost somewhere in a drawer I am determined to uncover. We moved from friendship to love as her mother’s illness progressed.

There are so many memories I would like to recall - the late nights on Fitzroy street talking over pizza, parking the car on St Kilda beach and listening to cassette tapes of Steven Bishop singing Never Letting Go which I played to her only yesterday, and Jim Croce’s Time in a Bottle - how I wish I could get hold of that magic bottle now - and most vividly, racing passionately up a stairwell to the emergency fire exit in the penthouse where I crept past her mother’s sick bed into Kerryn’s bedroom. Kerryn’s Buba, a fierce matriarch, was kept in the dark about many things, including the premarital holiday we took to Noosa, allegedly with her girlfriends.
Like her parents, we never formally proposed, I remember sitting in a car outside Edinburgh and it was just decided. We went into my parents' bedroom and told them, and they were delighted not only that Kerryn was to be their daughter in law, but that I was marrying into a fine family. As for me, the son in law, I know that Sally loved me, but she didn’t quite know what to make of her daughter marrying an Arts student with a miniature crocheted kippa who dreamed of making aliyah. With her powers, she convinced me to see a psychologist - not as therapy, but with someone who might convince me to pursue a more practical career. I obliged for one semester out of obedience and a measure of self doubt, until I abandoned the experimental rats and returned to my set vocation.

Sally fought to make it to our chuppa in November 1982 but ended up in hospital soon after and almost died, only to recover by the sheer force of her will to make it months later to the birth of her first grandchild, Elliot. The story is legendary - she was here for the Friday night shalom zachor serving bobbes, but by the bris she was in hospital and died soon after.
Eleven months later Paul, newly married, strong, with a deep voice that could scare his beloved Carlton players to kick winning goals, had a mild heart attack. He recovered from the elective surgery but after our first visit to the hospital we were called back to be told that he had bled internally and died. Within the space of a year of mourning, Kerryn, Ann, Brad and Glenn were orphaned.

Glenn was tossed from house to house - cared for by Ann and Ralph who parented him lovingly. When finally time permitted Kerryn to take a break from her final year of med - we went on our dream honeymoon with a chaperone - Glenn. Glenn proved to be great company through Vienna where we will always remember asking the waitress what Speck is, to which we were told as though we were unwelcome Jews who had wandered back to reclaim the city, Speck is Speck. Glenn, 8 years younger than me, also trained me for my UMAT test for entry into university, using his logical powers on the back of a Euro train to help me understand what happens if X sits next to Y in a rowboat and Z sits two seats across, who is sitting in the middle seat?

We returned from that trip for the continuation of a Machievallian drama - a fight over a will that I’d prefer not to talk about now, but which formed so much of the drama of Kerryn’s life. The result was a prolonged court case of QC’s, but our real shield then, as always, was Ann - fierce and protective of Kerryn, and Ralph, whose bond with Kerryn is so deep that we have spent many conversations on the phone crying in inappropriate places such as the Coles supermarket. I know, and you know, that Kerryn and I are forever grateful for your mature protection, and for introducing us in our Oxford days to the concept of a fax machine, which could only be found in a post office in far away Reading.

I’m not sure exactly where this long first Act ends - in a courtroom drama, in the loss of two parents - but Victor Hugo would have made much of it in the Wein version of Les Miserables.
I am only partially going to credit myself with Act 2 - the redemption of Kerryn, who in her own right became an accomplished doctor, yet was still locked in an unresolved drama. The key to our escape was to find refuge in another world. That world was fuelled by 1980s fantasies screened on our television sets such as The jewel in the Crown, from which we named our family company Mayapore because it sounded so exotic, and Brideshead Revisited. Guilt ridden Catholics we weren’t, but when faced with the choice of universities, we opted not for America but for Sebastian’s Oxford playground, which is maybe the source of the teddy bear fixation. I went ahead for a term whose name didn’t appear in my shtetl lexicon - Michaelmas - and left Kerryn for a semester at Caulfield hospital where she formed that special bond with my mother. Every lunch, she would go there and smoke cigarettes, or inhale hers passively, and at night she slept in Edinburgh in my brother Johnny’s room, perhaps fulfilling my mother’s dream of a doctor in the house.

I was only reminded of that episode by Kerryn recently, for one of the terrors I’ve had of losing Kerryn, is that I have delegated my memory to her much sharper mind. She is constantly reminding me of events I have forgotten, which I must now scribble down, such as the photographs on our wedding day being ruined and having to pose in full regalia the next day, or the 21st surprise party I organised for her on the banks of the Yarra. Amongst the 60s floral wallpaper in our family kitchen, my mother and Kerryn formed a bond which only strengthened through time, and though my mother will always say that a mother-in-law can never replace a mother, my mother was more than a mother-in-law and Kerryn more than a daughter. One can only weep at the tragic loss of my mother, a theme repeated from her own childhood, who though supported by Johnny and Anita whom she loves and love her, has lost - in her words - her best friend and lifeline to old age.

Act 2 opens on the train to Oxford, our first view of the spires and the Sheldonian Theatre, our entry into our new home at Wolfson college. Kerryn enrolled at Lincoln College and took up a research position at the Radcliffe infirmary, writing a paper with a distinguished scientist on inflammatory bowel disease. She was rewarded with a research trip to Basle, which I thought I deserved because it was the site of the first Zionist congress, and then she took an even better trip with our new found Canadian friends on a cordon bleu cooking class in Paris well before reality TV chefs become the rage. The lifelong friendship was recently reciprocated when our friends the Fish’s visited us and were blown away by how Melbourne breakfast culinary skills outdo bad Parisian coffee.

It was a crazy time for us, a mad hatters tea party from a period novel - punting on the Isis, dressing for drunken balls, Shakespeare performances in the college gardens, starring our Shylock friend Mark then Philips now Brozel, and trips to northern England where the colours of our school pencils dazzled us in their reflection between water and sky. During those times, we travelled extensively to London where we scoured the Camden Lock markets for furniture, even though we didn’t have a permanent residence, and then further afield with Kerryn’s best friends, Buba and Zaida.

A cruise to the Baltic states was cancelled because of the hazards of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, so we substituted it for a holiday to Marbella, where a band of Basque teerrorists decided to blow up our hotel, sending my dad into a pre 9/11 frenzy that landed us in the safer zone of Monte Carlo and Lake Lugano. Apparently Mark Brozel, who shared a room with us, recalls me and Kerryn having our one and only fight, though I do recall that in our early years of marriage Kerryn would often use her foot to kick me under the table, until she either tired of training me, or my behaviour changed, or she just got used to the man she married.

We actually contemplated a life in idyllic Oxford, where we would send our unborn children to the prestigious Dragon School, Oxfords answer to Eton, before ideology beckoned and we set off with our newly conceived son to fulfil the dream of a different aliyah. I always like to tell my kids that we look back on those travels as landmark chapters in the story of our lives - without them our life story would be one flat line.

So our next chapter was Israel, Rehov Shahar adjacent to a wadi that overlooks the Hebrew University where I would walk each day to research my doctorate. Kerryn had many talents, but an agility for language was not one of them and for all the years we spent in Israel she never did her Scopus Hebrew teachers proud. I remember us spending many nights watching Dallas on TV, and LA Law, making new friends, and Kerryn rushing to sew a dressing gown in time for Gabe’s birth, prompting my mother to kvell her refrain – ‘What can’t our Kerrnyu do!’

I can’t keep you here with every detail of our lives, but while the sum of a life is all of its parts, it is the overall effect that I want to convey of a period lasting decades of significant transitions.
Gabe’s birth was in Jerusalem’s oldest hospital, Misgav Ladakh, where my mother ran up and down the stone corridors declaiming in a Hebrew she learned in a DP camp in Germany, Lesavta me-Oystralia yesh neched, ‘the Buba from Australia has a grandson,’ to which the nurses lallallallad in celebration.

The lure of family ties, and a job for me, ended our aliyah dash, and we returned home to Norwood Rd, where over the next five years Kerryn gave birth to our golden Sarah, who resembles her mother in more ways than one. My mother will always remind us that as tough as Sarah is, she was always a Mummy’s girl, and cost her a fortune when she was whisked away on a holiday to Surfers, but took every opportunity while Buba went for a smoke on the balcony to call home and cry, ‘I want my Mummy, I want my Mummy.’ Sarah, for all her passion and zeal, not only resembles Kerryn, but still cries for her mother all the time.

Then there is Rachel, our chandelier, pragmatic, present, social in life and on social media, capable, health conscious, and always our moondust baby with a maturity beyond her years, who played their song to Kerryn in her last hours, Close to You, hoping she could still hear it.
How blessed we are to have three children who care for each other, and who we trust to make decisions that will lead them on exciting adventures.

Then there was the transition to a different kind of work - from a hiatus as a doctor, Kerryn retrained as a family therapist and went on to work at the Alma Rd clinic. Kerryn increasingly developed an interest in couples therapy and attachment theory, and spent many nights trying to explain to me and our kids what it all meant, though it was clear she could lay claim to being the primary attachment for all three of our kids. It was very hard for her to give up this work - and her patients wrote her the most loving notes about how she had transformed their lives. There was a period of two days recently when former patients kept popping out of nowhere, like TV plants for a commercial to express gratitude. They would reveal themselves to me and the kids, saying your mother is the best, and as our kids will attest, she must have been for Kerryn had patience - infinite patience especially for listening and for old people, and a wisdom that could cut through a person’s life with deep empathy.

Our holidays also transitioned in these decades - from Club Med to our annual retreats to Noosa, which climaxed on News Years Day when we celebrated Rachel’s birthday by enlisting all the kids on the beach to make her a giant sand cake. While there were always more places to travel to - Kerryn always wanted to go to Japan - we were more than satisfied with our journeys to fill a myriad of bucket lists - the mohitas and salsa dancing in Cuba, the trips to India north and south, the safaris to Kenya where Kerryn broke her foot and almost drowned in the waters of Llamu. Skiing holidays to Vermont where we almost lost Sarah on a chairlift in the fog of night; a trek through the Moroccan desert where Rachel celebrated her birthday in a tent with the best present of all - a Freddo Frog and a can of coke; trips to Vietnam where I got drunk one night on a bus, New Zealand adventures where we crazily went canalling, very sunburned summers on the Gutman’s boat on the Hawkesbury, and more recently a trip to St Petersburg and Sweden where Kerryn fell in love with the stylish fashion of the tall Viking men. We stayed up all night to watch the same white nights that Dostoevsky and Nabokov must have witnessed, and ate food in a restaurant named for Pushkin. These holidays - excursions to every part of the world - were so special to us - and formed peak landmarks in our life where Kerryn always returned with a wooden tchotchke - a souvenir that frustrated me because it always extended our time in the customs line on our return home. At Positano we made friends with a new honeymoon couple who turned out to be Katie Lowe from Scandal, and recently I took Kerryn to the holiday of holiday destinations - Auschwitz with our friends, where we stood in all the spots that generations of Bakers have claimed as their memorial of resilient survival.

But in recent times our travel became more purposeful, and Kerryn became an indispensable part of our university student trips to sites of trauma, replacing our beach holidays. Over the course of several years we took students to South Africa and Rwanda, Europe to study the Holocaust, and Israel and Palestine to solve the conflict, an item that is high up on my bucket list. The students all turned to Kerryn for psychological guidance as they navigated their way through these conflict zones. On our last trip to Europe the students formed a train of honour and lifted Kerryn like a bride into the elevator as a gesture of gratitude and affection. In the message book they wrote for her, they thanked her for being the figure of motherly love they all needed. I know that I could never do these trips without her support and feel so gratified that our paths over time intersected, and that our professional interests dovetailed so perfectly.

Religion was also a marker of transition. While Kerryn did spend a day or two toying with religious observance after Year 10 Counterpoint, she came from a secular traditional home. At first when we had kids I would stay at home on my own on Shabbes while she would take them to Prahran market on a merry go round. You can guess whose practices were more exciting for the kids. It was only after our second trip to Israel in 1995 that things began to change. Kerryn out of her own volition enrolled in a Beit Midrash for women and the two of us shared Talmud classes at our apartment which had once belonged to the first Sephardi Chief rabbi of Israel. One festival our friend, who was later tragically killed in a car accident, encouraged Kerryn to get an aliyah from the Torah. She was reluctant; it felt strange but she went along and from thereon embraced Orthodox feminism. Returning home a year later to more conservative circles at Mizrachi, she found herself at the centre of a storm dancing with a Torah on Simchat Torah only to have it wrested from her arm by a panicked rabbi like a Cossack from the Ukraine. From there we shared the journey through our religious evolution - she always rescuing me from my extreme tendencies, anchoring me and always giggling with the Tamirs at the charlatan rabbis who managed to twist an ancient text into a lewd sexual innuendo. She knew better - and I have to say, that my mother was right that Kerryn has always been the one who saved me from myself.

It was from there that we together found peace and a community home at Shira, though Kerryn never relinquished the hat from her Mizrachi days. For ten years Kerryn made her famous cholnt there, delivering it herself, and helping many people through a crisis in her discreet way. Shira was our shared venture, a coming together of 30 plus years of marriage to discover deep meaning and common values. Kerryn’s new found skill at leyning extended to Purim and Simchat Torah, where she chanted the last portion of the Torah, VeZot Habracha, This is the Blessing, and while the Torah was rolled back, I would take up on the first portion of Bereishit, which I had only merited because my mother, like all her other school interventions, demanded for me because it contained the seminal story of creation.

And so our stories were joined in the scroll of life, from beginning to end, and climaxed one year when Shira honoured us with the role of Bride and Groom of the Torah. Thirty years after our marriage we unpacked our wedding gear stored in boxes on top of a cupboard. The wedding dress fit with some effort; sadly had we done it recently the white gown would have been oversized. I still wore pyjamas under my itchy suit and together we mock married each other again before the Torah.

There are so many other things I could list here in this Act - not just transformations, but friendships that stretch back a long way, of steadfastness, loyalty and also fluidity. My kids like to say that I went through two phases Mark 1 and Mark 2 - but Kerryn all along was the rock and anchor for our family, managing the kids, being there for them always, as a sister, sister in law and as a daughter in law. I could read you Kerryn’s CV but that wouldn’t do justice to the way life is lived - the flesh and blood moments of a life. Perhaps Andre Shwartz Bart had it right that the only way we can memorialise a person is to say their name over and over - to see in the repetition of the name the choreography of a whole life, lived moment by moment. Yisgadal. Kerryn Veysikdadah. Kerryn. Shmei. Kerryn.

Which leads me to Act 3 of Kerryn’s life, an unexpected dark curtain that suddenly descended on our lives, giving her a wristband, with its in-built internet code, that turned her into Patient 1232983. Perhaps more than any time this was the moment when the story of Kerryn revealed itself, when the threads of her life came together. How I wish they could have found other ways to express themselves, ways that would have found meaning through the routines of a life lived for another 30 or 40 years to allow us to reap the naches of becoming grandparents. If there is one silver lining, as Kerryn said, she can safely delete the Lumosity app from her iPhone, though her daily crosswords and Sudoku puzzles have continued with more consistency than anything else, her head bent over the kitchen table in flowing hair, then flowing wig, then cancer cap.

How blessed have our years been. That is our consolation. When Kerryn cried tears for her unwritten life what she couldn’t see was that in her narrative was a story of love and relationships, of dedication and service. And if there is one value we must cherish, its not the ambition driven by ego, the things we do, but its the grace, the chen, the eidelkeit or delicacy, the humility, the patience for people, the listening ear, the wise tongue, the mediator, the love she elicited from her family, the overwhelming sense of grief that she has generated in this community, a steady outpouring of love.

There is a torn family scattered across this cemetery - her father Paul on one end far away, her mother at the entrance with Buba Esther and Zaida Moishe, and now Kerryn here with us. You were always a peacemaker Kerryn, and in your middle place of eternal rest where I shall one day lie alongside you in the position of our bed - me to the right, you to the left - you will continue after death to bring reconciliation to our shattered souls.

We talked a lot about death during the past months. We were on the same page. Don’t go looking for me on a ouija board, she told our kids in her last hours. For me and Kerryn, the afterlife has only one address. It resides in the souls of the living and will cradle Kerryn deep inside each of us. As she said to each of us in her final words of consolation, ‘Don’t worry, I will always be inside you.’ Kerryn will be watching over our every simcha because the doors of our souls will never shut her out. She will soar as high as we allow her to ascend. That is the most powerful afterlife I can imagine, or at least its the only one I can believe in. Kerryn is listening to every word - I am listening to her voice now and I know what she is thinking. Why do I deserve this love? I’m so sorry, she is saying for making you - my children and husband - suffer, when we should be begging forgiveness from you.

And then there is that other thing. Last year she was initiated into the Buchenwald club, transcending her prewar Flinders Lane origins to make it to the Holocaust survivor club. She as much as anyone absorbed the lessons of my family who she adored. She almost singlehandedly organised the 70th anniversary of the ball, and learned the lesson that the boys taught - trauma does not silence you but we dance through it. I have repeatedly told my kids that. As Gabe before his engagement lay on our bed holding his mother, he said, I’ll never be happy again, I’ll never dance again. And Kerryn said, you will. Dad will show you how and you did and you will one day soon on your wedding, as will your sisters.

Kerryn used to say, I don’t believe there is only one person you are destined to marry but she never regretted marrying me - I think - and she was certainly more than happy to count Gabi as a new daughter and repeatedly expressed confidence in the choices that Sarah and Rachel will one day make. For more than anything, she loved her kids. It became a refrain. The kids would say, I love you Mum and she would answer, I love you more. She meant it because her love was boundless and she wanted you all to know not only how she loved you, but that her love will sustain you forever. Those were her last words, and even when she was unconscious, her eyes would sparkle with a tear when we flooded her with expressions of our devotion to her. She never wanted any of you to build a tombstone of rock for her but a living fluid monument that would become our lives. And our lives, she knew would be a dance. How fitting that for Gabe and Gabi’s wedding she wanted Buba and Zaida to dance Rock around the Clock. There is no year to that clock, there is just the endless turning of the clock around and around, in a circle dance, where the seasons come and go, and we’re lost, all of us, in a circle game of time.

There is an astonishing line at the end of one of my favourite Holocaust memoirs, Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz, where after everything he endured upon returning home he expresses nostalgia for the camps. I shall never be nostalgic for the things Kerryn endured - not the pain, the constant discomfort in her stomach, the existential angst that she suffered, the fear of the operations, but one thing I will forever remember and long for. Cancer, for one day only, is a gift. The taste of black milk gives you the gift of living life to its fullest because you know it will one day be robbed from you, it restores the buried layers of love that are encrusted in the routines of a marriage and life, it forces you to confront one another with honesty and to admit to the question that Tevye asks Golde in Fiddler on the Roof - Do you Love Me? It would help if we could all ask that question of one another without the shadow of death hanging above us, but cancer forces an honest and truthful answer. And if you’re lucky enough to know that after 25 years, in our case 32 years, there is love, then the ability to put everything aside and just be present - to say Omm as I have recently learned through yoga with my children - that is the most sublime gift you can have.

But for now, we must be gravediggers, cartographers of Kerryn’s soul travelling the orbits of our journeys with her. Our hearts are heavy but our hearts, as Kerryn showed us, are infinite, and they will awaken our stifled souls to choose life. We have grieved a lot, but you know, you can’t always get what you want - and in life, let’s admit it, we had a lot. Not quite the number of verses of Dayenu we all yearn to sing, but so many measures of satisfaction we can count. For me and Kerryn, 32 wonderful years, for the kids a lifetime of love to set you up as the most wonderful adults, a sister who adored her, a brother who regards her an angel, another brother whose whole world is shattered yet has the comfort of twins and a barmitzvah we will celebrate this year, in-laws and nieces and nephews who adored her and shared their secrets with her. And you - our friends - our dear dear friends who have nurtured us, dined with us, holidayed with us, lived life to the fullest with us, schmoozed and laughed hysterically with us, offered expert medical counsel at any hour of the night- you know who you are - you are our blessing.

No, You can’t always get what you want, and you can’t always finish what you start, but I want us to know that there is nothing piteous about Kerryn’s life or ours. We are amongst the blessed and let this blessing sustain us, sheheyanu and let it bring us life - vekimanu - and hold us together - on this day, on this present sublime moment that is a time for tears.
For too many months, I have been holding onto the plaits of hair cut off from Kerryn after her first chemo. Now I must pay heed to my own words and not turn her into a material monument. Like in Paul Celan’s poem Todesfugue, I must return to the grave that which belongs to my wife, and begin the process of growing accustomed to an empty pillow, and a life filled with the spirit of one who we will all bear in our living souls for the remainder of our finite days.

Kerryn's beautiful speech for Gabe and Gabi's engagement is also on Speakola, delivered less than three months before she died.