Readings.com.au: Arnold Zable

Violin Lessons

From the songs of Arab diva Umm Khultum on the banks of the Tigris to the strains of a young boy playing the violin for his mother in Melbourne, to the swing jazz of the nightclubs and cabarets of 1940s Baghdad, a fisherman playing a flute on the banks of the Mekong, and Paganini in the borderlands of eastern Poland…

Music weaves its way through each of these spellbinding stories. Each tale, each fragment of music, leads to Amal, the woman who saved her life by clinging to a corpse for twenty hours alone in the sea.

Arnold Zable takes the reader on an intimate journey into the lives of people he met on travels over the last forty years. These are tales aching to be told. Tales of hardship, of yearning and of celebration. Tales that span the globe, and bring us back to Melbourne to the powerful and heartbreaking story of Amal—her flight from Baghdad, her fears boarding the unseaworthy SIEV X, her survival when it went down, and her desire to have her story told.

Scraps Of Heaven

It's 1958 and Australia is becoming a different place. The Melbourne working-class suburb of Carlton is now home to many immigrant families trying to begin new lives and make sense of the old. Romek and Zofia, liberated from the camps in Poland, work hard at the local market, but their love is in ruins. Bloomfield is king and custodian of Curtin Square and is rarely absent from his post. The resplendent Valerio, stylish and soccer-mad, has just arrived from Italy. War veteran Mr Sommers sits alone on his verandah, while Yiddish actors gather at the barber's to reminisce and curse. Romek and Zofia's skinny twelve-year-old son Josh takes up boxing and becomes bewitched by the Swedish Girl. But Zofia is tormented, and as she falls further into madness, Josh wonders if she can ever be made whole again.

Scraps of Heaven is a stunning evocation of a changing world, where optimism is tinged with sorrow at the raw memories of war. Arnold Zable's irresistible storytelling becomes a celebration of survival, a reminder that all lives are to be lived and that scraps of heaven can be found everywhere.

Café Scheherazade

The legendary Queen Scheherazade told her seductive tales for a thousand and one nights. The characters in Arnold Zable's haunting book emerged from the chaos of World War II to tell their own stories of profound love and loss in the cafe by the sea. A cafe whose name will itself reveal the moving story of how its proprietors, Avram and Masha, met and fell in love.

At once fable and history, Cafi Scheherazade takes the reader on a journey which ranges from Kobe to Paris, from Vilna to Melbourne. It remains faithful to the experiences of Jewish survivors, whose lives reflect the courage of refugees everywhere, and confirms Arnold Zable's status as a master storyteller.

Sea Of Many Returns

In Sea of Many Returns, master storyteller Arnold Zable delivers a cavalcade of stories, characters and places. He takes us to the island of Ithaca, the Ionian Sea, Kalgoorlie and Melbourne, as well as Port Said, the Black Sea and Danube River ports. Mentor leaves Ithaca in 1916, a young man, and arrives in Kalgoorlie. But race riots soon see him on another journey, this time to Melbourne. Nearly ninety years later, Mentor’s Melbourne-born granddaughter Xanthe is translating Mentor’s manuscript, and making her own journey—back to Ithaca. Through Mentor’s manuscript and Xanthe’s memories, we meet many people and hear their stories, spanning more than a century. Like Homer’s Odysseus, they left Ithaca to journey to distant places. We follow the lives of two brothers, who, as teenagers in the 1930s, build a boat and ferry freight and passengers across the Ionian Sea until one brother leaves for Australia. We meet Antonios Lekatsas and learn of his partnership with architect Walter Burley Griffin to design some of Melbourne’s most creative buildings. And we hear the stories of the women who waited on Ithaca while their men sought fortune in Australia. Sea of Many Returns is a moving novel exploring the immigrant experience and our connections with place and those we love.

The Fig Tree

The Fig Tree is a tender book of true stories about family, about journeys, about home. Arnold Zable, bestselling author of Cafe Scheherazade, describes remarkable people struggling through tragic times and rejoicing in the unexpectedness of life itself.

Zable writes with wonderful feeling about the Greek villagers who made the long journey to and from Australia, about those lost in the Holocaust and postwar diaspora, about Jewish actors and writers who found new audiences in their adoptive country.

At the heart of this book is Zables understanding of our obligations to the wanderers among us, to the dispossessed and the stateless. He makes a gift of their stories in The Fig Tree, celebrating the common threads of humanity that bind us all.

Jewels And Ashes

'Do you ever think about those you left behind?', I ask father.
'Not often', he says. 'Such memories are a luxury I can't afford.'

Jewels and Ashes is the result of that journey of discovery. Moving effortlessly between centuries and continents, and across inner and outer land-scapes, it is an astonishing achievement. In one stroke, the Jewish historical experience has become a gift to the world.

First his parents made a journey to the New World. It was the 1930s, and Europe was seething. As he grew up, Arnold Zable heard tales, songs, fragments of the world they had left behind. He had inherited a fractured, vibrant past which both fascinated and disturbed him. Finally, he had to confront the mystery: he had to travel back to the Old World, to his parents' home, to his grandparents' birthplace, and to a land pervaded by ancestral ghosts.

Wanderers And Dreamers History Of The Yiddish Theatre

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