Sue Smethurst,
The Freedom Circus: One Family’s Death-Defying Act to Escape the Nazis and
Start a New Life in Australia. Sydney:
Ebury House/Penguin Random House, 2020.
xiv + 303 pp. + 12 colour and
black and white plates.
Reviewed by Norman
Simms
This is neither a
memoir, diary or documentary history of the Holocaust, but a “novelized”
reconstruction of a family history. Another case of a second generation
survivor of the Holocaust collects the personal memories of their parents and
grandparents and then, the author being a journalist, uses her skills and
connections seeks out corroborating documents and details to fill out the story
of (in the language of a circus barker) “One family’s death-defying act to
escape the Nazis.” Though Kubush, the clown and husband of Mindla (pronounced
Marnya) Horowitz, is not born into a circus family but runs away from home to
join up, the whole idea of Jews as acrobats, bare-back riders, strong men,
bearded ladies, trapeze artists, lion-tamers and all the rest of what every
group of performers calls itself “The Greatest Show in the World” – well, it
doesn’t fit with most clichés of American middle-class Jews. Even Mindla’s
father, religious and bourgeois as can be in Warsaw’s Jewish quarter, finds his
daughter’s decision to marry a clown unacceptable, at least until he sees his
future son-in-law in action under the Big Top, realizes that things are going
from bad to worse for the Jews as Hitler’s rise to power looms over Central and
Eastern Europe. Then in an irony confounded inside its own enigmatic irony,
what saves the newlyweds and their young son Gad (later Dennis), is the fact
that both Hitler and Stalin are avid fans of the circus and leave enough
loop-holes in their tyrannical systems for the Jewish family to escape the
worst of the Holocaust and eventually survive the war.
They lived through and
survived the years of World War Two and the Holocaust. A plot line is
established in chronological order, episodes are contained within chapters of
similar lengths, necessary background information is laid down to form the
basis for the characters to act and speak. The way the characters speak and
think is presumed for the early parts of the book before the escape to
Australia is to understood as in Polish and Yiddish but is rendered in
contemporary Australian English (but with some anachronisms and awkward
neologisms). The narrator tells the story in the historical present tense for
dramatic effect, to bring events that happened close to a century ago into the
time when the readers make their way through the book and to heighten the
suspense of actions not yet completed and the ironies when people speak about
what they think they see, hear, hope and learn too late about. All this is done
by Sue Smethurst in a mostly competent manner.
There are, however,
hardly any scenes of or allusions to the death camps, medical experiments.
horrible tortures or gas chambers. Instead after they meet and are married
Kubush and Mindla live through the opening days of the Nazi push into Poland,
the blitzkrieg of cities like Warsaw, the division of the country into German
and Russian zones, the consequent separations, attempts to get together, and
the long periods of struggling to keep alive, incarceration, forced labour,
escape and journeys further and further into the bleak icy regions of the
Soviet Union. Eventually, they reach Teheran (Iran) together and are cared for
by British and American armies; then they travel into tropical Africa where
they live out the war, working at necessary jobs to keep food and shelter for
the large number of other Polish and Jewish refugees and occasionally
entertaining the camps with bits and pieces of their circus routines. Then they
find themselves in Europe again, in an old movie production lot, and wait years
and years until they receive clearance to immigrate to Australia. Then they
arrive and start to make new lives for themselves and their three children in
Melbourne. After so many painful and humiliating experiences of loss and
frustration, they do settle down, and complete their lives with the remnants of
family and an increasing number of grand-children and great-great-grandchildren
and many friends.
In other words, what is
new are scenes of escape and capture, long train journeys, Malinda’s weeks of
incarceration in an over-crowded, dirty, disease-infested Russian prison,
forced to sleep on the floor, perform her excretory functions in a small common
bucket, and fed on stale bread, watery soup and occasional potato peels—or bizarre
stays in luxury weeks in a luxury Moscow hotel while Kubush rehearses and then
performs with the leading Soviet circus. The familiar events of the war and the
Shoah are on the periphery, and the unfamiliar scenes of life on the Russian
side are near the heart of the narrator’s story.
Some of the Accounts of
circus life and the persons who help one another add a new perspective to the
usual generic history of Jews on the run and in captivity, but very little
about any Jewish perspective on theatrical traditions; or the inner life of the
outsiders who get caught up in the Russian retreat from the Nazi invasion.
Still every life is precious and every memory adds to the memory of those who
were murdered and had their private and public lives ruined by the Holocaust.
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