My mother and I shifted to a house - bought, not rented this time, in South Caulfield in Melbourne. She had always been a loving wife, faithfully looking after her husband - cooking, cleaning and assisting with his job. She had never spoken out against him, despite the increasingly frequent rows he initiated. After my father walked out, and then when the threats started, my mother became very bitter towards him, blaming him for everything bad that had ever happened to him or to her. The stories of my mother's past before and during the war were now replaced by her telling me how she now despised my father.
We lost track of my father, hearing only the odd gossip through the network of mutual acquaintances. It seems that he travelled to Poland and Israel at least once, but maybe several times. We heard that he had re-married briefly, but that marriage had also ended in divorce.
My mother needed to find work, and she found employment at her cousin's (the Zelwer's) knitting factory, where she would work for many years as an examiner or supervisor, until an economical crisis and the destruction of Australia's manufacturing industry eventuated in her job being made redundant. I felt that was a blessing for her, since by then she was getting frail. Having a reasonable job myself I had already told my mother many times that she need not have worked any longer.
My mother became very introverted. Although she accompanied a friend and myself to shops and other places, she shunned most social contact. Oddly enough, one of the few people she did get on with was a Polish lady - not Jewish - the mother of a good friend of mine. My mother had no hatred for the Poles, nor, in fact, for the Germans. If she had any dislike, it never stopped her from chatting with any she met.
My mother was by now developing a distinct hunched back, which our doctor said was due to some inadequacy in her diet, but which my mother attributed to carrying the heavy packs of leather for my father. She was getting increasingly frail, but she persisted in cooking, washing and generally looking after our house.
I did not understand my mother's reluctance in socialising until after her passing, when a Jewish friend explained to me it is the sense of shame a Jewish woman traditionally feels on being divorced. My mother never retained her family's religiousness, but she had certainly retained some traditions...
In 1979 I married and moved with my wife into a flat not far from my mother. My mother would regularly invite us to dinner, and our presence at her house was frequent. After a few years my wife Linette and I had a daughter and we all would call on my mother often and partake of her delicious dinners. I would have thought that having her son married and being with her grandchild would be enough to please any Jewish mother, however my mother remained withdrawn. A lot of persuasion would be required to make her accompany us anywhere. She had few if any friends, her loneliness being punctuated only by the odd phone call from a sympathetic acquaintance, or a rare visit to the Cytrynowskis or the Zelwers.
In the mid 1980s Lin and I decided that my mother was too frail to remain in her South Caulfield house by herself. Her hunched back was now quite pronounced. A failed cataract operation left her with a bad vision problem and a sore eye. She never adapted to the thick pre-lens implant glasses she had to wear, and usually she would feel comfortable wearing large black sunglasses which made her look grotesque - a shrivelled up effigy of the former tall and elegant person that she had been many years before.
My wife Lin and I went through a complicated procedure of selling the flat we lived in, as well as my mother's house in South Caulfield, and buying a larger house in a nearby suburb, where my mother would have exclusive use of part of the house as well as share the other parts with us.
However frail, depressed and introverted my mother was, during our daughter's birthday parties she still managed to muster up some of her former self and be the life of the party that she used to be with children decades ago, organising them into playing games.