Guest Post from John Johnston III: Fictional Characters

This essay has three parts. The first tells you about who I am and why I find ways to put Jews and Judaism in my fiction. The second tells you about my novels and the Jewishness of them. The third is the good bit. When I build worlds for my novels, I make sure that there is food in the world. I will talk about some of that food and, of course, there will be recipes. Recipes are worth waiting for. If you want to start on the fiction before you read the first post, then my most recent novel is The Green Children Help Out. I explore what a superhero looks like when created by a Jewish Australian woman with disabilities. Hint: there’s no Superman. And now, on with the posts.

Part One

I’m Jewish Australian. It used to take courage to say this in front of strangers, and it still takes a moment and a deep breath. Things are different in Australia. It’s not just the big spiders and curious streetlife. I’d rather talk about the curious streetlife, because kangaroos are a traffic hazard where I live and our magpies attack people. Also, it’s easier than talking about being Jewish.

Officially, I’m classified as CALD (Culturally And Linguistically Diverse), but until recently I was NESB (from a Non-English Speaking Background). Unofficially, I’m called many things. I often call myself a giraffe (an exceedingly short one).

Why a giraffe? Strangers tell me after panels or papers or talks,  “I’ve never met anyone Jewish before” or “You speak very good English for someone Jewish.” People with more worldly knowledge ask when I left New York or Israel or, if they’re less tolerant tell me, “You should go back to where you came from.”

I usually ask, “Do you mean Melbourne in general, or specifically Hawthorn?” Melbourne is my home city and Hawthorn my home suburb. I’ve been away for nearly forty years.

The conversation continues, “Go to where your parents came from.”

“That’s difficult, because my father lived in country Victoria and my mother in Melbourne””you need to choose.”

The conversation seldom stops there. Most of these people expect me to turn into some mythical being from somewhere they never quite identify, and are very disconcerted when they find out my father’s mother’s mother’s mother was born in London, as was her mother, and her mother’s mother. The rest of me comes from all over Europe. My family has been in Australian for well over a century.

Most Australians expect Jewish Australians to be exotic. The most common terms are “Exotic White” or “Near White.” During the infamous White Australia policy, Jews were Honorary Black.

These days, I describe myself as “off-white.”Â It stops all the questions before they begin.

The writer I’m most often told about when people discover my profession is Arnold Zable. He wrote a fictionalised account of his family’s last days in BiaÅ‚ystock during the Holocaust. He was one of the last people to escape this far, you see. Another member of his family who escaped married a cousin of mine and a couple of years ago I finally met Zable.

“You know my mother,” I said, “And your cousin married one of my cousins.”

“Which cousin?”Â he asked.

“Feivel, the carnival guy.”

This tells you something else about Australian Jewry. Prior to World War II, we were few in number. Many of us are related in some way, if we come from an older family. Or our parents went to Sunday school together.

We are culturally different to Jews who arrived after the Shoah. I call us the scones-and-committee branch of Judaism. Our branch has writers and musicians and dentists and teachers and shopkeepers and lots of people who worked in the garment industry. I have a cousin who specialises in lipstick and a sister who specialises in wine. My great-aunts ran a shop that Phryne Fisher would have gone to for her haberdashery. My family fought in World War II. We are, in our way, quintessentially Melburnian.

And yet”¦ I’m off-white. It took until my third novel for strangers to stop telling me my English was very good for someone Jewish.

All these descriptions roll out as if I’ve said them a thousand times. I have. They’ve been my defence against bigots and those who assume there are no Jews in Australia and against all those people who don’t see me unless I shout.

My fiction helps me shout. I hold the pinpricks I face up to the light so that a picture shines through. I don’t write literary novels. I write science fiction and fantasy. Every now and then I stop and ask, “Why don’t I write like CS Lewis or “Doc” Smith or, in fact, any of the writers I grew up reading?” I have things to say about myself and my culture, I suspect, that don’t fit into a classic SF story. There are scones, there are committees, and there’s a lot more.

Next post: Meet the novels in which I say these things.

BIO: Dr Gillian Polack is a Jewish-Australian science fiction and fantasy writer, researcher and editor and is the winner of the 2020 A Bertram Chandler Award. The Green Children Help Out is her newest novel. The Year of the Fruit Cake won the 2020 Ditmar for best novel and was shortlisted for best SF novel in the Aurealis Awards. She wrote the first Australian Jewish fantasy novel (The Wizardry of Jewish Women). Gillian is a Medievalist/ethnohistorian, currently working on how novels transmit culture. Her work on how writers use history in their fiction (History and Fiction) was shortlisted for the William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or Review.

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Is Canada’s fascination with zombies the death knell of undead chic?

Good day, eh? And greetings from the Great White North. It’s great to be here on Cat Rambo’s blog to extoll the virtues of our great Canadian literary culture.

OUR GREAT LITERARY CULTURE

We’ve got some great writers up here in Canada, eh? Like, you guys probably think that Ernest Hemingway’s the best thing since sliced bacon. But a lot of people don’t know that old Ernie had the stuffing beat out of him by Canadian writer Morley Callaghan in a boxing match in Paris back in the 1920s. (So much for your Nobel prize there eh, Ernie?)

Speaking of Nobel prizes, I should mention Margaret Atwood. Now, Margaret’s a real good gal, eh? She can hold her beer and paddle a canoe with the best of us but she’s a pretty good writer, too. People say she should win a Nobel, but she’s been standing in line for so long now that they’ve lost interest in her (like we have with Prince Charles). But it doesn’t change the fact that she’s smart as a whip. About our great Canadian literary culture, she said:

“Canadians are forever taking the national pulse like doctors at a sickbed: the aim is not to see whether the patient will live well but simply whether he will live at all “¦ Our stories are likely to be tales not of those who made it but of those who made it back, from the awful experience — the North, the snowstorm, the sinking ship — that killed everyone else.” ““ SURVIVAL: A THEMATIC GUIDE TO CANADIAN LITERATURE, Chapter 1

Like I said, she’s clever. And she’s right! Even if she couldn’t have licked Ernest Hemingway in a boxing match in his prime (but I bet she could now, eh?)

What Canadians are most often challenged to survive is our great Canadian wilderness.

OUR GREAT WILDERNESS

Whenever Americans want to make a cowboy movie, they come north to film it, eh? Because all their wilderness is gone. We still have some of ours, although Prime Minister Harper is working hard every day to change that, and to make us more modern and civilized like America. Indoor plumbing, Velcro®, remote control tee-vees. What’s next?

Well, what’s next is the very popular Northern Gateway/Keystone XL Pipeline, eh? Because whenever Canadians want to make money, they go south because all our money up here is gone. But Americans still have most of theirs (although their politicians are working hard every day to change that, and to make them more modern and civilized like, say, Russia ““ or maybe the Chinese).

Anyway, with the wilderness gone, what is there left to survive?

Zombies of course!

OUR GREAT ZOMBIES

Hold your horses, eh? That’s no zombie, that’s Prime Minister Harper (although it’s kind of hard to tell the difference sometimes because he never blinks). Anyway, Prime Minister Harper occasionally takes breaks from rehearsing with his rock band the Van Cats to negotiate trade deals, like the one with China that introduces a mysterious street drug into Canada called L that unleashes a zombie apocalypse.

You probably never wondered what a zombie apocalypse would look like up here, but I tell ya’ ““ it’s pretty scary! I wrote a book about it, eh?

Now why would anyone write a zombie book that takes place in Canada? Well first off, there’s what Margaret said about how we’re always taking the pulse of the patient to see if he’s alive. That sounds right up Zombie Alley, if you ask me! And as for survival, well isn’t that the whole point of a zombie story?

Some of you might be asking: without any wilderness left to challenge your survival, how can this novel truly be Canadian?

Well, like I said, Americans travel north for our wilderness (what’s left of it) and we go south for money. But in abandoning nature for civilization, we’ve created a new wilderness ““ one inside ourselves that’s every bit as ugly and toxic as the slag heaps at Fort Mac, one we try and fill with cash and dope and a new flat-screen tee-vee or fishing boat or something like that.

But that’s just us, eh? Dead inside and following the herd, slack-jawed and trying to consume enough to fill that bottomless hunger the wilderness left behind when it vanished.

So thanks for reading. I hope you’ll check out my book, eh? I worked real hard on it.

““ la fin ““

(“˜cuz this was made in Canada, part of it has to be in French, eh?)

Bio: Jamie Mason is a Canadian sci-fi/fantasy writer whose short fiction has appeared in On Spec, Abyss & Apex and the Canadian Science Fiction Review. His second novel KEZZIE OF BABYLON was released by Permuted Press in March, 2015. Learn more at www.jamiescribbles.com

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