“The stories I have heard, and am yet to hear are echoes of one refrain: Is there somewhere on Earth where I can find peace and prosper? Once the question is posed, the agony begins, the eternal dilemma: to stay or to leave? To retreat behind fortifications, or cast our fate in the wind?” (Sea of Many Returns)
Acclaimed Australian writer, novelist, storyteller, and human rights advocate, Arnold Zable delves deep into the Greek Australian migration experience in his novel Sea of Many Returns, which traces four generations of a family in Ithaca, the ancestral home of his wife, Dora Varvarigos. In this book he follows the instinctive urge of Ithacans like the mythical hero, Odysseus, to explore the seas, and new horizons. He describes the nostalgia they feel far from home, but also the ache of those who wait for news, left behind on the island.
Celebrated in the milestone edition of the Antipodes periodical, as one of the Australian philhellenes who honoured Greece through their life’s work, Zable told Neos Kosmos how his love for Greek culture goes back to his childhood, growing up in post-war Carlton, an immigrant neighbourhood in Melbourne, populated by many cultures and diverse languages.
“I became aware of Theodorakis, and rebetika in the 1960s, in the school yard… Greek families, would invite me to their house and their parties, where I saw a similar kind of passion for life, and a similar nostalgia for the places they had come from. There was a great sense of familiarity and recognition from the beginning.”
Born to Polish-Jewish refugees, Zable became acutely aware early on, of the trauma embedded in many histories. His father, a Yiddish poet, and his mother a singer of Yiddish song came from the city of Bialystok, on the Russian-Polish border, and had experienced a great tragedy.
“As a child, growing up in Carlton, I lived in two worlds. On the streets of Carlton, we were interacting with children from Greece, from Yugoslavia, from Italy, from working class Australian families. We were all living together and getting to know each other.
“But as soon as I went into my house, it was another world, another language was being spoken. Yiddish is the language of wanderers, my mother tongue.
“There were the ghosts. Photographs of people, my grandparents, uncles and aunts that I would come to realise were murdered in the Holocaust, as well as many cousins and extended family. I also grew up with people who had fought in the resistance and taken part in the Ghetto Uprisings.”
Zable says he became “acutely sensitive to these tales both from my own culture, and from other cultures as well.”
A human rights advocate, Zable refers to two Greek words that are at the core of his advocacy and his writings.
“Xenophobia, is the fear of the outsider, a fear of the stranger, but then there is philoxenia. I think much of my work has been written, performed, in the spirit of philoxenia, of welcoming the stranger and seeking him out. Because the stranger can be you and I. With one shift of the wind, you and I can become the stranger. Therefore, in honouring the stranger, we honour ourselves.”
Going back to Homer, he adds that the Odyssey is partly an exploration of how we treat strangers and how we are treated when travelling in foreign places. Before he met his Greek Australian wife, Dora Varvarigos, Zable had already travelled and worked in Greece. The first time was in 1973, during the time of the Junta.
“I lived in Athens, in Plaka, near the Acropolis, and I worked in a shipyard in Glyfada. It was at a time when the Junta was still in power, and the tragedy of the Polytechneio had taken place not long before I arrived.
“I’ll never forget one person I worked with, who said to me, ‘We have no more tears to cry…’ I was taken deep inside the tragedy of that moment.”
Zable returned to Greece by boat, a year later, in 1974, when the Junta had been overthrown. “It was like a weight had been lifted from the city. It was an exhilarating feeling.”
When he met his wife in 1981, they began to go on journeys to Greece and spend months in Ithaca every few years, especially as their son Alexander was growing up. “I also became very close to the Ithacan community here in Melbourne. Of course, Ithaca is the island of Odysseus, the island of the Great Voyager, the archetype of the traveller.”
His novel Sea of Many Returns, is based on these extended stays on the island.
“One of the key journeys I did was back in 1997, where I spent three or four months there with my wife and my son, Alexander, who was very young.”
It was during the olive picking season, and Zable would go up into the mountains with other people from the village and work, sometimes 6-7 days a week, in the olive groves.
“Dora and Alexander would come up mid-morning, with fresh bread, a little bit of cheese, tomato, olives.. the food of the gods. And then Alexander would go and play in the goat house. It was wonderful to experience that with my family.
“And I got to know the landscape, I got to know the great paradox of Ithaca and I suspect many islands, that while it is so beautiful, and people are attracted to the beauty, it’s also very harsh. I experienced Ithaca through my body. At one stage, at the end of the picking season, I would go up alone to pick up the offcuts, the pruning of the previous year’s harvest, and build fires to burn them. And it was like being a shepherd of the winds.”
“Writing the Sea of Many Returns, was a joy. All my work, regardless of whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, a lot of it comes from being present, and experiencing the life and the environment. Both the poetry and the reality come from that sort of experience. Much of what I write is drawn from the lived experience,” Zable stressed.
A lot of his writings, his reflection’s on life have come from his travels and being at the grass roots… engaging with people in their everyday life.
At the heart of it all, he concludes, we all have a story to tell.
“Carl Jung, once said, that we all have a story to tell, and the denial of that story can lead to despair. There are many people who feel that, for various reasons, they don’t have the space or the opportunity for their story to be told.
” I’m acutely aware of this, of the need to listen to the people of the street… to the people of the village and provide space to those whose voices may not be so readily heard. And to honour their stories.
“First, through the listening, but also through creating spaces for these stories to be told, such as the tales of refugees who have been coming to Australia in recent years, and have ended up in detention centres, such as Manus Island, being put away, and silenced. These are the sorts of stories I’ve been driven to explore.”
There’s a renaissance in Aboriginal culture here in in Australia, Zable adds, explaining that First Nations people are now writing their stories.
“They are great storytellers, musicians, and poets who are now telling their story and, it is our job to foster and nurture the spaces where these stories can be told.”
Recipient of the Australia Council 2021 Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, Arnold Zable has come to realise the universality of every story.
“I recall some of the many people I have met on my journeys — the street kids of war-torn Vietnam, and of New York, my hosts in rural China, and Cambodia, India and Papua New Guinea, and of Europe and Middle East — and other places I have travelled and lived in. People at the grass roots have always reminded me that sharing our stories is a basic human need, and a means of connecting, of self-understanding and of discovering what it is that unites us, as well as the differences that enrich us. We need this understanding more than ever.'”
Greek tales also feature in his collection of stories, The Fig Tree, and an award-winning CD by the same name, includes performances by beloved local Greek musicians such as Anthea Sidiropoulos, Jacob Papadopoulos, and the late Costas Tsicaderis, and a guest appearance by Maria Farantouri, who performs Theodorakis’ renowned Ballad of Mauthausen.
Arnold Zable’s work includes numerous essays, stories, features, columns, and he is the co-author of Kan Yama Kan, a play in which refugees tell their stories. His other books include Jewels and Ashes, Café Scheherazade, Scraps of Heaven, Violin Lessons, The Fighter, and most recently, The Watermill.
