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The Promised Lands exchange, part 3: Imagining a vast Jewish colony in Australia

[additional-authors]
February 3, 2016

Adam Rovner is Associate Professor of English and Jewish Literature at the University of Denver. He holds an M.A. from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Ph.D. from Indiana University-Bloomington. His articles, essays, translations and interviews have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and general interest publications. An accomplished public speaker, Rovner has addressed a variety of audiences in Canada, England, Israel, and the U.S. His short documentary on Jewish territorialism, No Land Without Heaven, has been screened at exhibitions in New York, Paris, and Tel Aviv. He is a dual American-Israeli national and currently lives in Denver, Colorado.

This exchange focuses on Professor Rovner’s book, In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel. Parts one and two can be found here and here.

***

Dear Prof. Rovner,

It is indeed fun to have the ability to muse “about what a Jewish state in the Niagara River might have looked like.” In fact, some novelists have done something like that (notably Michael Chabon but also the less known Israeli author Yoav Avni).

But you have the data with which to give such imaginary alternate histories a more scientific treatment. So my last question to you will ask you to try and do that. Of course, we don't know what would have happened to any of the Jewish enclaves discussed in your book. But we – you – do know what the visionaries that wanted these places to become the Jewish home had in mind as they crafted their plans.

So how different were these places supposed to be from one another – and how different were they supposed to be from the Jewish State that was ultimately established?

Thank you for this exchange and for a fascinating book.

Shmuel.

***

Dear Shmuel,                                                                                    

I’m happy you brought up the alternate histories by Michael Chabon and Yoav Avni. Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union reinvigorated the counterfactual genre when it appeared nearly a  decade ago. His novel imagines that a Jewish territory was established in Alaska, an idea that was in fact pursued by territorialists in the 1940s. Avni’s Herzl Amar [“Herzl Says”] has not been translated into English, though an excerpt appeared in JewishFiction.net not too long ago. His novel considers what might have happened had Herzl been able to create a Jewish state in today’s Kenya. Another title to mention is Israeli author Nava Semel’s Isra Isle, which is forthcoming in English this fall. Semel delved into the history of Mordecai Manuel Noah’s plans for a Jewish sanctuary in New York and produced a fascinating montage of the implications this would have had for contemporary Americans and Jews. What I want to suggest is that alternate histories are as much about the present as they are about the past.

So with that in mind let’s consider what might have happened had one of the homelands my book discusses been established. For that, I need to provide some background. In the Shadow of Zion details the proposal to create a vast Jewish territory in northwest Australia in the 1930s. The idea was championed by Yiddish author, editor, and poet Melech Ravitch (Zekharye-Khone Bergner) who arrived in Australia in 1933. Ravitch published dispatches from his journey in a Yiddish newspaper in Poland and reported that parts of Australia’s Northern Territory could support 100,000 Jewish immigrants and “flow with milk and honey.” His enthusiasm for a Jewish colony in Australia allowed the Warsaw-based Freeland League for Jewish Colonization to focus their attention there.

By 1939, the Freeland League was negotiating with Australians to lease a massive tract of land roughly the size of Belgium. Freeland League members sent their most effective leader, Isaac Nachman Steinberg, to tour the region and lobby for the plan. Steinberg was a lawyer, playwright, and publicist who had served as Lenin’s commissar of justice in the first revolutionary government. Oh, and Steinberg was also an orthodox Jew who used to pray in the middle of Soviet cabinet meetings. He traveled through the area with a scientist and together they concluded that the area could absorb up to 75,000 Jewish colonists. Even Western Australia’s Premier—something like a governor—approved the plan. But that was at the end of August 1939, a mere week before the eruption of World War II.

Steinberg next pursued a city-state in Tasmania. A young Christian gentleman, Critchley Parker Junior, convinced Jewish journalist Caroline Isaacson that the island’s forests, fisheries, and mineral wealth would allow the Freeland League to create a “New Jerusalem” on its shores. Isaacson introduced Parker to Steinberg and the three soon toured Tasmania as guests of the state’s Premier in early 1941. Steinberg didn’t know at the time that Parker was hopelessly in love with the married Isaacson. After the Premier approved the proposal, Parker set off for southwestern Tasmania to scout for the planned colony on his own. An experienced bushwalker, he wandered in miserable weather until his supplies were ruined, his matches grew waterlogged, and he fell ill. Weak, alone and dying of hunger, Parker crawled into his tent to record feverish descriptions of a Jewish colony in his diary. He invited Le Corbusier to become the architect of the “Paris of Australasia” and urged future settlers to establish wallaby “fur farms.” Parker succumbed a few weeks later. It would take more than four months for his corpse to be located, still tucked into his moldering green sleeping bag. This story has all the elements of a Werner Herzog film: ambition and failure, futility and love, pitiless nature. Best of all, it’s 100% true—that’s the truth of accountants I’m talking about for the Herzog fans among your readership.

Now to the fantasy… Suppose that the Freeland League had managed to raise the funds necessary to lease the 10,800 square mile territory they had sought by the end of 1939. Had they done so, perhaps 100,000 Jewish colonists would have been found, eager to escape a Europe in flames. And what if these 100,000 Jews resettled by the Freeland League in the northwest had agitated to admit more refugees? Even in wartime, several thousand more might have been rescued, provided with visas and an escape route to a distant safe haven. And if Critchley Parker Junior had not tragically died, his close association with the Tasmanian Premier might have resulted in the creation of yet another settlement in 1942. Though by then the Nazi’s Final Solution was operational, perhaps a few thousand more lives could have been saved. Certainly, the many survivors languishing in displaced persons camps after the Holocaust could  have found entry into one of Australia’s two Jewish zones.

Fewer Jews would have immigrated to Israel and the U.S. as a result, but a vibrant Yiddish-speaking community in Australia would have altered that country’s character and made for a more diverse diaspora. Yiddish arts and literature would thrive down under, providing a counterpart to the renascence of Hebrew culture in Israel. Freeland colonists in the northwest would have become ranchers and pioneers of low-moisture agriculture. In Tasmania, the Jewish city-state would boast modernist buildings, a deep sea fishing fleet, and wallaby fur farms. All across Australia, Jewish individuals would rise to positions of political and cultural power. (This is turning into Mel Gibson’s nightmare now.) The daughters and granddaughters of Freeland League colonists would today be lawmakers, judges, academics, authors, and artists. Personally, I like to imagine that the rock band AC/DC would have had a Jewish member, giving new meaning to the lyric “I’m on the way to the promised land” in the song “Highway to Hell.”

A great triangle of Jewish culture—America, Israel, Australia—might have arisen. Perhaps the prominent Yiddish journalist, Shmulikl Rosner, would today be interviewing an American about his recent book that imagines what the world could have lost had the Australian New Jerusalem not been established in time to rescue interwar Yiddish culture.

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