In No Country for Idealists, there is a photo of Boris Frankel at 15 (p336). I first knew him maybe six years later, when he sat in the front rows of my lectures on Soviet Politics at Monash, listening sceptically. I was not much older. He raised his hand – unusual in those hierarchical days – to ask a question that, as I recall, had the sense: “Are you a Stalinist? You sound like one”. I gabbled some reply about having to see matters in a wider perspective and there began a life-long friendship of frères ennemis.

This one short exchange should have taught me more about politics and power than any discussion of the nature of the Communist project. Sadly it did not, as I took refuge in the bigger picture purveyed by Left progressives after the “Thaw”, where from their Olympian pinnacle, experts (not quite self-appointed) claimed to see further than the sparrows on the ground and thus in the logic of capitalist individualism going back to Descartes, had to silence the “partial”, benighted view “from below” in favour of generalities. The lesson that Boris was giving me was that the “big picture” cannot be valuable unless it listens to the voice from below. What I did not know was that he had lived through the Thaw, while my expert sources, from Togliatti and Deutscher to Manning Clark, who had just met Soviet Man, had not.

Ever since, Boris has corrected my enthusiasms with his sociological “realism”, with the facts that undo my ideological-theoretical flights, the realist honesty that makes this book a must-read for anyone on the Left, in Australia or worldwide – above all ill-informed goy like me – who have much to understand nowadays when we are baffled by the fascistic policies of Netanyahu and his popularity among Israelis. Boris’ story has a club-like veracity that recalls Wiesenthal’s comments about the official story of the camps. Boris sums up his real experience of several months in Cold War USSR in these words (p253): “… within the space of a few months, we too had undergone a steep learning curve from childhood innocence in St Kilda to the knowledge and streetwise premature adulthood required by being immersed in the rawness of Soviet life”. I did not know it, but I was facing an interlocutor with rare personal knowledge of the USSR and how that shatters the dreams of men. His family, led by the staunch Communist father, Abe, a true believer, had left Australia to return to the workers’ “paradise” of Soviet propaganda despite mass media condemnation. The fateful date was in May 1956; Khrushchev’s secret speech would become public on their voyage.

This book is mainly about how they reached the decision to return and how the dream was destroyed by reality. Abe was destroyed by the facts of Soviet life. But it also explains how Boris, and his siblings, rose like Prometheans from the ashes of that experience of the Thaw, remaining loyal to a Leftism that could no longer be Communist after the reality of Stalinism was acknowledged “in house”. His book about what happened after they made it back to Melbourne remains to be written, but it should be. The strength of the present book lies in its matter-of-factness about a rare experience. Of course, progressives like me used to try to salvage something from the post-1956 wreckage by turning to Deutscher or E. H. Carr but we missed the mark, that of the “felt” experience of simple men and women like Boris’ Dad and Mum. We needed to listen to that voice from below before combatting the “cold warrior” scholarship of the epoch.

Like millions of other Jews, Boris’ Mum and Dad had fled European persecution via Palestine to end up in post-war Australia, passing by the almost compulsory migrant way-station of Carlton to settle in St Kilda, where Boris still lives. To this point it was not so different a story from that told by Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo, another long-time friend, about her father and family, although her connection with the shtetl was two generations back (My Fathers’ Shadow, p 279), or even from that of the now very conservative Michael Gawenda, whose memoir appeared recently. But there the common story of persecution and the wish for a better world starts to fragment in their solutions sought by the two families. Boris’ father, a simple working man, proudly proclaimed his Communism in a violently anti-Communist Australia; Sandra’s dad hid his Communist Party membership, and Gawenda chose to join those who damn socialist solutions.

Boris’ father and mother mixed with Russian speakers, including the “spy” Petrov, and brought up their children to be proud of Russian literary and cultural traditions. They were early multiculturalists in an Anglo-Irish monocultural world. Here the account (unconsciously?) shifts from that of the father and his deceptions, to a wider and extraordinary story – an admonition to individuals like me – of a minority on the Left, a story of its cohesion and occasional survival to our days. Both Boris and Sandra became eminent writers, but the importance lies elsewhere than in those personal trajectories. Certainly, they remind us of how closed that Australian world was where after a cursory study of the USSR and one year of Harry Rigby’s Russian language class, I was let loose to talk about the USSR while ignoring all that felt knowledge in Boris and his peers. In some ways, as an immigrant with Communist sympathies, my story was not greatly different from his. Nevertheless, I belonged to the privileged Anglo group while he and his like were forcibly silenced. Not as in the USSR, whose misery, hardship and discrimination the Frankel family experienced in a factory town near Kerch until Boris and his sister,15- and 13-year-olds, courageously made the nightmare train journey alone to Moscow to seek help from the British Embassy to get home to Australia. The Australian Embassy had been closed after the Petrov affair. Boris duly acknowledges the kindness of simple Brits – the Embassy cook fed them bacon and eggs and put them up. Australians showed no humanity and a cringing servility towards their imperial masters. For them, the only explanation for the return was that Abe was a Russian agent and so they kept him in the USSR for several years after Boris, his mother, and siblings were allowed to return.

Sandra’s book, beautifully written, suggests why Boris’ story is so important, although his family were “non-entities” and the crushed Abe eked out his remaining years when he was finally allowed back by an ignorant and cruel Anglo-Irish officialdom. Reading both books together, I was struck by the commonalties, but more so by the differences. Sandra’s story of her father’s “psychological presence” is as much a story of human love and solidarity as Boris self-published bluntness about the societies he lives in. Her handsome, urbane, second-generation Australian Jewish father was well connected: he was someone as the leader of the Australian anti-nuclear and anti-war movement: she resents his philandering but enjoys his success. It is much more the story of two individuals than a political tale: “isn’t that Communist Sam Goldbloom your father? … who are these people? I don’t know them, nor they me. They don’ know Dad. Or did they? Reverting to past comfort, to past loyalty, I reply with that long ago devised response, even though he is now fifteen years dead! He’s always denied that he was a member of the Communist Party” (p151).

Hers is an enthralling story which, when put alongside Boris’, shows what his message is. Both recognise the limitedness of their Anglo interlocutors, with their often-naïve racism. But hers’ is about two individuals, who are subjects, seen through a psychological sophistication that ignores Kazantzakis’ wisdom that everything is simple until you start talking about it. Boris’ book is about working people who are cyphers, who have little time for psychological introspection. His father only comes alive through this story and then only has meaning in a vast socio-political context which gives him meaning. Boris’ father needed to be brought alive in a way Sam did not.

Maybe, having just read Camus’ unfinished autobiography, First Man, I am reading too much into Boris’ memoir: that poor, simple people survive by helping each other, and their subjectivity, or role in making a new future, is obliterated by the hardship of their lives. We have been hegemonized to ignore and silence them because they do not have the words to say it with. Making Abe “someone”, Boris reminded us (the experts?), who see farther than the sparrows, that history has been made with all those billions of nameless humans – who have no mausoleum in any cemetery except as a mass of victims. But he does make history from below come alive in his rage and resentment: “Reading ASIO’s wilful distortion and discounting about the truth about my father’s endless risks and ceaseless sacrifices and trials in his attempts to get us out of the Soviet Union, still makes my blood boil” (p313). It is Boris’ rage at our hypocrisy which stands him in good stead. He is still a determined Leftist, concerned about all others, refusing to join the Ozzie majority.  

Someday, he may have the space to write about his relationship with Abe, and how his father lives on in him, as Sandra, so heart-wrenchingly, does for her father, Sam.