Larry Schwartz
THE LETTER from Shanghai was dated March 31, 1939. Spidery, blue lines on flimsy paper from a man named David Steiner. “Esteemed Mr Silbinger,” it began.
Steiner and his family had arrived in China from Vienna a little more than a month earlier. “The first days were terrible,” he wrote. “But now we are somewhat accustomed to it.”
Steiner wanted to know about the chances of finding work for his 18-year-old son, a “first-rate violinist” and apprentice orthopedic shoemaker. And he worried about the prospects for his daughter, 15 and “very strong”, who had done courses in cooking, patisserie and floral decoration. He wanted help in bringing them to settle in Australia.
“I would love you to do this for all of us, but I don’t want to be greedy,” Steiner wrote. “Perhaps she could go to a family or an institution. Both children speak good English. But please don’t worry if you can’t arrange anything …”
Melbourne artist Eleanor Hart has no idea what became of Steiner and his children. She suspects they might have been the lone survivors among the 200 Viennese Jews who wrote to her refugee parents asking for help early in the war. Grandparents and aunts, family friends, associates and strangers, a network of fearful people who had been given their address, wrote letters filled with mundane details of everyday life. But the subtext was the urgent need to get away.
Hart came upon the letters a few years back among her parents’ papers. She opened a plastic bag and was unnerved to find a swastika on one of several documents also in the package. It turned out to be a certificate issued to confirm prospective migrants had no outstanding tax payments. “I think most chilling was that stamp with the swastika,” Hart says. “I didn’t know what it was and it looked so horrid.”
The letters remained elusive for a while. They were written in a form of German she did not understand, one favored in Vienna when her parents were growing up, but no longer common. “The contents are everyday stories,” Hart says. “What I did today and what was going on in my family.” And that need to get away.
Hart has chosen 20 letters to feature in an exhibition alongside some of her paintings. Though the project has generated some interest, plans for a display at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Sydney, have fallen through and she is on the lookout for an appropriate venue.
Hart has been incorporating words from the letters in some of the striking oil paintings that grace her turn-of-the-century weatherboard home in suburban Melbourne. The subdued lettering she uses is partly a way of honoring the past. It reminds her, too, of a shared predicament. “I think it’s relevant not just for me,” she says. “… It’s a human experience rather than just one’s own family.”
Not only has Hart incorporated quotes from letters in her work, but her sense of Vienna has been skewed by association. In her work you will find traces of her perspective on the Austrian city she visited briefly in the mid-1980s, “a sense of place and non-place,” as she puts it, “a sort of broken, fragmented place.”
Austria resisted reunification with Germany until it was seized in 1938. Her parents fled separately, and her mother spent six months in England before coming to Australia. They were married in Melbourne.
Both are long dead. Even if they were alive they might not know, or say, what became of the letter writers. Hart is confident they would have done what they could. But they never told her.
She lives in a long narrow house with sloped ceilings. The rooms are crammed with paintings. The studio is off the main hallway, next to the kitchen. Twisted paint tubes abound.
The colors in her paintings are so striking that the black and white sketches with which she begins seem starkly appealing in contrast. Here’s one that features a staircase. It goes nowhere, she says.
In her home, growing up, the past was barely acknowledged. “It was unspoken and it was painful … I didn’t ask my parents because I knew it would be painful for them. It was never discussed.”
Of their families, they alone had made it to safety. Her father, who had changed his surname from Silbinger to the Anglicised Selby, found work in the clothing industry. Hart remembers accompanying him to work in the old garment district in Flinders Lane.
In a sense, the 200 letters she has had translated into English are a tenuous link with a past with which they could not acquaint her. Her family had few reminders of their previous life. A slender scrapbook houses her handful of family photographs. “All I’ve got is this tiny photo album,” she says.
We flip it open and turn the pages of black-and-white snapshots of people who lived here, or died over there.
Hart admits to some confusion about identities. “What I thought was my grandmother would turn out to be an aunt. I’ve got hardly any records at all. So I know not what people look like,” she says.
Growing up, she remembers a feeling of difference. She went to a school attended by just one other Jewish student. “I remember at primary school I used to have herring sandwiches. I longed to have peanut butter like everyone else. I didn’t have white bread. I had rye. Everything was different. The whole milieu. You knew it was a different culture.”
She has a stack of hardboard covers, each containing a batch of 78rpm records, Dvorak’s New World symphony number 5 in E minor, opus 95, among them. “I’ve even got some single-sided Bakelite recordings,” Hart says. Fragments that connect with her parents and the world they knew.
Her mother had studied piano at a celebrated conservatorium. Her father had attended the Vienna Opera “something like six nights a week”. He’d play the records loud but he would not sing.
Hart’s mother would occasionally play piano at others’ homes. The family did not acquire an instrument. These were pleasures that conjured the past too vividly. It pained them to dwell on it. Nor did they encourage their daughter to learn an instrument.
“It was not an option,” Hart says. “But to me it’s always been visual. I remember very early on, drawing twigs and the veins in the leaves and things like that. I remember looking and wanting to draw.”
Her parents knew from an early age that she was good. She was only 11 when her father took her to see painter Louis Kahan and gallery owner George Mora, “to see if there really was talent there”.
“He didn’t know until someone else pronounced it,” Hart says. “I remember George Mora saying, `Don’t go to art school, they’ll ruin you’.”
Mora had a restaurant at the time. Hart wonders if he was not among the first here to serve real coffee. “My father introduced me. Then he waited outside. I had the percolated coffee in a coffee cup and I didn’t know what to do with it. So I just looked …”
Kahan told her he had drawn for 10 years before using color “and he said, yes, there was talent and I should go on …”
SHE went on to study fine art at RMIT and has exhibited extensively. Hart was recently among 20 top Australian artists to paint cellos for a touring exhibition that also included work by the likes of John Perceval, Judy Cassab, Howard Arkley and Malcolm Jagamarra. Her cello design was inspired by the celebrated British player Jacqueline Du Pre, whose troubled life was recalled in the recent film Hilary and Jackie.
Hart favors large oils that reflect a strong interest in architecture. She also sometimes does portraits. She once entered paintings of writer Barry Dickins and film maker Paul Cox in the Archibald Prize. Cox featured 43 of her paintings in his film Touch Me, based on a script he and Dickins had written.
Hart took time off from her artwork 15 years ago in a Paris studio run by the Art Gallery of NSW and headed for her parents’ birthplace. “Oh, I remember looking up the address of the street …” she says. “We had coffee and went walking and I asked this woman to tell me where the Jewish quarter is. And she said, `You don’t want to go there’ … Then she understood why I wanted to go there and she just ran. Just ran.
“I got to this street not far from the marketplace and I just sort of felt it was around this area. And I just burst into tears. I just couldn’t go there for a while.”
Now Hart focuses on her painting. Aside from the old records, photos and letters from strangers, she has little to connect her with the past. “When you paint – it sounds corny – but you sort of become part of the painting,” Hart says. “You put yourself into it. Maybe it’s a way of constructing a place. Maybe that’s it.”
Larry Schwartz Writer 