They came from an old world to a new land. The Yiddish speakers from Eastern Europe brought few material possessions but clung to a language and a culture that defined who they were, a way of life that had endured pogroms, persecution and a genocide that pushed them to the brink of extinction. Melbourne gave them a second chance at life, an opportunity to rebuild a secular Yiddish world that sat at the core of their existence. Hardship had taught these Jews to be resilient, fiercely independent and great institution builders. A community centre quickly became the beating heart of Yiddish Melbourne. The arts flourished, newspapers were launched and schools were established. But these immigrants also brought their competing political ideals and hotly contested notions of what it meant to be a Jew in this corner of the world. Their arrival in Melbourne was not always welcomed. Australian authorities only grudgingly accepted them as immigrants, in restricted numbers and under the sponsorship of Jews already living here. Yiddish speakers, with their boisterous demeanour and high visibility, challenged the authority of the established Jewish community, which traced its origins to the first settlement and which believed that 'blending in' was the antidote to antisemitism. Using the voices of the immigrants themselves, along with archival sources, Taft and Markus give a compelling account of how these Yiddish speakers came to shape, change and define an entire community.
Professor Andrew Markus is the Pratt Foundation Research Professor of Jewish Civilisation at Monash University and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. He has published extensively on Australian immigration and race relations. Andrew heads the Scanlon Foundation social cohesion research program which in 2017 conducted its 10th national survey. He is also the principal researcher on the Australian Jewish population and Yiddish Melbourne research projects. Andrew is a post-war immigrant from Hungary who arrived in Australia in January 1957.
Dr Margaret Taft is a research associate at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University. For the past 12 years her research has focused on the reconstruction of Jewish immigrant life in pre-war and post-war 20th-century Australia. Her particular interest lies with the Yiddish speakers from Eastern Europe whose personal agency, leadership and cultural identity transformed what had been a predominantly Anglo Jewish community. Margaret is an experienced author, teacher, lecturer and public speaker. Her publications include From Victim to Survivor: The Emergence and Development of the Holocaust Witness 1941-1949 and A Second Chance: The Making of Yiddish Melbourne, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Community History Awards. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, her early years were spent in the culturally rich post-war immigrant community of Northcote.
