The Fig Tree Read Free Page A

he was entranced by the poets. And in this he was far from alone.
    Can you imagine it? Poets with a mass following? Travelling bards reciting their works in provincial towns where they were welcomed as heroes? Writers intoxicated by the power of the word, and the nips of whisky that helped stoke their literary fires?
    They wrote of impending revolution and private love. They waxed lyrical about the scent of resin, the lure of the forest, the melodic flow of the Dnieper River. Others dreamed of the rivers of Babylon, and wrote of their longing for Jerusalem. Often enough their poems were set to music or incorporated into the repertoires of theatrical troupes who transported them the length and breadth of Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe.
    As for Meier, he preferred to retreat to the edge of the forests, alone, to sit with his back to the city, while he absorbed the works of his idols. He preferred silent communion to the tumult, although he too was sometimes swept up by the upheavals of the times.
    It was an era of prophets and preachers, wide-eyed fanatics and inspired teachers who took their rival manifestos to the streets. It was a time of fervour and ferment; yet it was also a time of chronic poverty and pogroms, of war or the continual threat of war. Tsarist soldiers rampaged through the Jewish quarters of Bialystok in the year Meier was born. Twelve months later, Tsarist police escorted bands of hooligans armed with crowbars and axes as they looted shops and houses, and slaughtered at random over eighty Bialystok Jews.
    Indeed, a pogrom took place in the Polish town of Przytyk at the outset of 1936, just days before Meier’s departure from the country of his birth. The folk poet, Mordekhai Gebirtig, a carpenter by trade, captured the growing mood of unease in his prophetic song, ‘ Es Brent ’. ‘It Is Burning’. Written in the wake of the Przytyk pogrom, it was as if in a flash he saw thousands of potential Przytyks:
    It’s burning, brothers, it’s burning.
    Our poor village is burning.
    Bitter winds are fanning higher,
    Leaping tongues of flame and fire.
    Stronger now the flames are leaping,
    As through our town the fire is sweeping.
    And you stand and look on helpless, with your folded arms
    And you stand and look on helpless, as our shtetl burns.
    Meier was one of the fortunate. He left on the eve of the Annihilation. All who had been near and dear, his entire family, his comrades and friends, were wiped out. There was no going back. There was nothing to go back to. The future was Wellington, New Zealand, where two of his three sons were born immediately after the war and, after 1948, a single-fronted terrace in Carlton. The future was the new world, for better or worse.
    And, increasingly, it was for the better. At least this is how Meier came to see it. In his final years he was grateful for the absence of that undertow of menace he had felt in Bialystok. He came to see his later life as graced by a sense of freedom. In his ageing he revelled in a playground of gardens and parks, nature strips and squares, and the poplars and palms that greeted him every morning as he sat down by the front window to read the works of his lifelong companions.
    Yet there was a price to pay for this freedom; and, in the wake of his death, as I reflect on his legacy, I begin to see how high this price may have been. I see the detour he was forced to take from his natural calling. I see the years of frustration in which he was denied the practice of his craft. I see the fragmented journey, the unfinished works, the aborted melody of a poet in an alien world.
    It began at an early age, Meier’s first attempts, as he put it, ‘to take the bow in my own hands and play the violin of poetry’. I set out the files of his writings on the desk in the front room, his bedroom study. I sat here every morning in the days after Meier’s death, so that, in a fashion, I was observing the traditional Jewish