Book Review - Alien Son by Judah Waten

 Alien Son by Judah Waten

Sydney: Picador, 1995 (first published 1952)       ISBN 0330273760

Judah Waten was a peripheral figure in Australian literature: a life-long communist, he mostly wrote polemical pieces for left-wing and communist newspapers and periodicals, with forays into fiction and non-fiction. Born in Odessa early in the Twentieth Century when it was part of the Tsar's Russian Empire, his parents emigrated to Western Australia before World War One, before later moving on to Melbourne. Alien Son is a fictionalized memoir of Waten's childhood in both those places. The book is structured in a series of vignettes that deal with his parents, the countryside, and Judah's growing sensibility of Australia and his place within it.

Given Waten's sensibilities, it's no surprise that this book focuses on the division of wealth, on power imbalance, and indirectly on racism. It also discusses what it means to emigrate from one's old world to a new life in a new world.

Waten's parents are the main characters of this book: his father was a dreamer, full of grand plans that never reach fruition, working hard to scrape together enough money for his family to survive. His mother refused to engage with Australia in any way - she stayed within the Russian Jewish diaspora and refused to learn English. She spent her time pining for the old country, and mourning the fact that her son was becoming someone she couldn't know.... an Australian.

Many of the vignettes emphasise the 'otherness' of being an emigre, especially a Jewish one. The story of the family's journey from Western Australia to the East clearly describes a young boy's shame at being different. Being forbidden to share food with gentiles immediately separates him from the other people on the ship. Mrs. Hankin's journey east to find a Jewish husband for her young daughter is an evocation of the difficulty of all migrants - wishing to continue their culture in a new world that doesn't understand, with the younger generation falling between the old life and the new.

Poverty is another theme of this book. Most of the Jewish community as represented are very poor, working as bottle-os or bag men. As the book progresses the community gets poorer, and begins to lose hope in the new country. Young Judah's eyes are opened to poverty; people who work themselves to death for a pittance, or who are beaten by the police for asserting their rights, or those who have lost the will to fight and are resigned to their fate.

Perhaps surprisingly, there is little overt anti-Semitism in the book. There is an over-arching sense that the Jewish community was looking out for itself because no-one else was looking out for it, but there is little sense of Jew-baiting in Australia, although there are a few references to pogroms and the 1905 revolution back in Russia. Anti-Aboriginal racism is on show, not from Waten, but from others of the poorest set.

As a work of literature, Alien Son is no great shakes: Waten was no doubt a victim of Socialist Realism, and the writing is very matter-of-fact and straightforward (although I did like the phrase "tiny, tired raindrops" used to describe the aftermath of a storm). As a work of social commentary and of the struggles of a certain group of immigrants at a certain time, Alien Son is invaluable.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell