I submitted the following memoir essay last year to the Griffith Review for its issue, "Such is Life: Life Stories". It didn't make it into the magazine, but I think still has merit.
My first few years were a colourless melange of images – a kind of papier mache world of greyness; the colour of falling dust in an empty room. I can vaguely picture the flat we lived in, my kindergarten, the strictness of the teachers and the grim faces of the other children. There were long lines of people in the street and walls with ubiquitous pictures of stern-faced officials. It wasn’t all bad – I remember moments of joy tobogganing down a frozen slope in winter, the smell of pine woods in summer, the warm and reassuring waft of my mother’s cooking. Somehow, though, an insipid flatness seemed to penetrate everything.
When I was six the greyness lifted; rose like morning mist and parted into shreds under the torch of the sun. I was with my parents on a train that had just crossed the border into Austria from Czechoslovakia, from behind the Iron Curtain into the “free” West. We were refugees, Jews, fleeing the Soviet Union.
It was January 1977 and travelling from eastern Europe to the West was like peeling off a shroud across the brain. Even at the age of six I could feel it. As the train puffed into the outskirts of Vienna, it was the colour that amazed me. The colour! Even in the middle of winter in Austria there was colour, shape, difference, variety. To a young boy fascinated by cars and used to the four or five makes in the Soviet Union, which were a shade of nothing, the Austrian cars were a riot of colours, shapes and curves.
The Soviet Union was a country controlled by fear with a political/economic system equivalent to a chain around the neck of every person living there. A work colleague who in the late 1980s visited the place we left, Kiev, had one word to describe it: “miserable”. His job as a photographer was to follow the children affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster after they returned home from a charity-sponsored stay in Australia. In Kiev, the nearest city to Chernobyl, he found endless food queues and a dour and mostly sullen population.
Nowadays the Soviet Union, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), is consigned to the “failed experiments” section of the dustbin of history. Then it was a behemoth with more than one hundred nationalities under a rigid communist ideology policed at the point of a gun; a creaking industrial giant that could barely feed its own people, pouring what wealth it had into an arms race with its capitalist foe, the USA.
The Russian philosopher Alexander Zinoviev coined the term “homo sovieticus” to describe the kind of person created by the communist system. That person had to deal with a grinding life of material shortages, official hostility and corruption, and a cultural blandness and uniformity that stifled creativity. As a result there was an almost bovine mentality of resignation to the troubles of life.
I had internalised this in my short six years on the earth; that’s why everything from the train seemed a wonder, remarkably alive and different. In the 1970s and 1980s, Jews were practically the only people to permanently leave the Soviet Union. As a result of pressure from the US and Jewish welfare organisations during a thaw in the Cold War, Jews were allowed to migrate to Israel. Yet many chose not to go there, ending up in America, Canada, Australia or New Zealand.
Our journey began at a tiny place called Chop on the Soviet border with Czechoslovakia. The train station was probably bigger than the town itself and, like in so many scenes of refugees across the world, was filled to bursting with a nervous and expectant throng, suitcases everywhere and the cries of children. The place was patrolled by soldiers with rifles, and each family was allowed to take out of the country no more than $US100 in currency. Bags were stuffed with coral necklaces, cheap cameras and other trinkets that could be sold somewhere en route. In the middle of the night our train arrived. There was an almighty rush to board. Despite having tickets, the platform attendant told us the train was full, and with chaos around us my father pulled out a bottle of vodka from somewhere and shoved it into the attendant’s hands. On the train we were crammed into a compartment with another family, my mother and I on one berth and my dad sleeping on the suitcases.
We were only a few days in Vienna, but the impression was tremendous. There was a dazzling variety of food in the supermarkets, a seemingly endless supply of goods in the shops. It was a cornucopia of plenty for people who had known only queues and the meagre basics.
From Austria the next stop was Italy. We were among thousands who waited for months to receive permission and visas for the final leg of the journey, awaiting eagerly the chance to start life anew, to prove we could be worthy citizens of the “liberated” West.
What is freedom? To this day my parents say they decided to leave because they hated the communist political system. There was no freedom of speech and no quarter given to the individual. Migrating to Australia was the fresh start: happiness found in well-paid work, family life and home ownership.
Grateful as we were to find refuge, the liberation was only partial. For my parents, the end of the journey was a life in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. In their minds, redemption was about living the typical life everybody was supposed to have. By the time I could think critically, I rebelled. I hated the lifelessness of suburbia and its vapid routines of work and consumption. At the age of 19 my struggle was to find meaning – and I knew there were other quiet lives of desperation being lived behind the illusory curtain of stability, the white noise of weekend lawn mowers and ever-flickering TV sets.
In my late teens I wanted to make sense of my family’s journey to freedom. I wondered if freedom was more than the ability to openly speak your mind and live a comfortable material existence. Was it more than simply a release from harsh social constraints? Could it be something to do with an inner experience of fulfilment not reliant on external social conditions?
The 20th century psychologist and social theorist, Erich Fromm, in his book The Fear of Freedom (Routledge, 2001), made a distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom to” in his attempt to understand why so many people supported authoritarian regimes like those of Nazi Germany. Fromm argued that submission to such regimes was a retreat into a false security as a result of social upheaval and uncertainty; it represented a psychological escape from personal responsibility – a delegation of authority to the state that rightfully belonged to the individual. For him, true freedom was about making choices from a whole and integrated personality – “freedom to” being an active orientation of a person to live a meaningful life with creative social interaction.
There is a correlation to Fromm’s work in Viktor Frankl’s classic Man’s Search for Meaning (Beacon Press, 2006). The essence of what it is to be human, according to Frankl, ultimately lies within the heart of every person and cannot be dictated by society. It is up to the individual to live from a centre of authenticity within. A former inmate at Auschwitz, Frankl had seen and experienced horrific brutality yet maintained a core of dignity: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
When I discovered the works of Fromm, Frankl and other writers who blended social critique with psychological insight, it was as if a key had clicked in a lock. Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were extreme examples with which to make a point about the nature of freedom, yet it was clear to me that submission to external social norms was still primary everywhere. In the contemporary West “the economy” is god, material wealth the primary goal to which people’s energy is harnessed. Individuals are conditioned to be materialistic and ego-centred to feed the all-important engine of economic growth. The constant psychological bombardment of advertising, which creates an endless stream of artificial wants and desires, ensures most people are in step with the program of consumption.
If freedom is an orientation from the inner self, then trying to find meaning in external objects is not simply illusory but potentially highly damaging. In Australia, high rates of depression, alcoholism and other addictions, youth alienation and suicide are signs of a tattered social fabric. There is an existential chasm at the root of our society which no amount of material wealth or consumption will fill. With the decline of organised religion, Western culture is blind to the inner world of spirit and meaning, so individuals take the inner journey without its support, often haphazardly and with a degree of suffering.
From the time I left home at the age of 21, my path was one of self-discovery. At university I found a passion for left-wing politics and through my 20s was a committed activist in grassroots movements for peace, protection of the environment and the rights of trade unions. I wanted to make a difference – to reach out from the atomised and lonely self that I felt was my endowment from society and embrace the world. I meditated, trained in martial arts and discussed politics and spirituality with friends and fellow travellers.
The fire of my idealism continued to burn through work in community radio, which led to a career in journalism and the eventual realisation, many years later, that I was a writer.
All of my experiences have helped shape a still-evolving inner structure at the core of which is a simple hunger for life – in all its depth, variety and mystery. Along the way I’ve been blessed with teachers and mentors without whom I could not have made the journey. The American mythologist Joseph Campbell once said that people weren’t searching for meaning in life, but rather the “experience of being alive”.
I returned to Kiev, now in the independent Ukraine, for the first time in 2006. The place had undergone an enormous and rapid transition to capitalism, and every street and square that once bore a communist name now had one celebrating Ukrainian independence and nationhood. Yet though the old economic and political order had toppled, the psyche of the people seemed largely unchanged. Everything had changed, yet everything remained the same.
There was more than a trace of the old animal survival mentality in the way people jostled like cattle on packed suburban trains, cursing one another; more than a glimpse of homo sovieticus in the rudeness and slow service of shop attendants. And though the fruits of capitalism were everywhere in the heart of the city – in the smart facades of banks and the sharp suits and expensive clothes of the nouveau riche, the vast majority of people lived on meagre incomes in suburbs of shabby tenement blocks.
I wondered where the spark of life was in the minds of the people. The so-called Orange Revolution had occurred not long before where the result of a rigged general election was overturned by mass protest and political pressure, and a stirring from the deep freeze of communism was palpable. In front of the parliament building, small numbers of people still camped and protested. Yet real change seemed an achingly slow trickle.
In most people I spoke to there was a deep powerlessness and resignation. When one family friend complained about the poor state of housing and the senseless bureaucracy attached with getting anything done, I asked her why she didn’t join with others and push for change. The response was a dull stare. More dull stares came my way from other people. If a robust and socially engaged populace is the product of a healthy civil society, then it was clear that strong institutions independent of the ruling elite were virtually non-existent in Ukraine.
In my despair I wrote a poem inspired by Yeats’ The Second Coming, imagining the waves of physical and ideological invasions Kiev had endured in its history, culminating in the present hegemony of Western-inspired capitalism. It was like a foreign body had settled and was feeding on a dull and credulous population. As in Yeats’ poem, I pictured the next Beast, the next invader, moving its thighs and rising from the expanse of the Dnieper River that cuts through Kiev.
As I sat in the plane about to fly out of the city, images poured forth of that frosty morning at the age of six when colour announced itself to me in the world outside. What had I learnt in the years since? The glow of life, if it is to have any permanence, any depth, must come from within outwards. Perhaps some of the colour that I had seen out the window had now made its way into my own life. Maybe I no longer was simply observing it as an awe-struck passenger, but blending my own individual palate.
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