LAUSR

Melbourne and from its inception it was populated by a considerable Jewish community, with Yiddish-speaking migrants settling there in the early twentieth century. A Second Chance details this new community, which expanded to Northcote, Thornbury and Coburg, where synagogues and communal organisations were established. A Second Chance clearly demonstrates that although immigration to Australia after the Shoah was restricted, Eastern European immigration was transformative, creating a shift within the community, with Polish Jewish values becoming the cultural ‘norm’ of the city’s Jewish life. Unfortunately, A Second Chance makes Yiddish Melbourne synonymous with Polish Jewry. Missing from the narrative is any reference to the previous generation of Yiddishspeaking Russian immigrants, who arrived from the 1880s. Similarly, this is not a history of all postwar or interwar Jewish immigration. While charting the rise in the dominance of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the communal organisations of Jewish Melbourne, it should not be forgotten that this was not the only way of expressing a deep attachment to Judaism or Jewish culture. An area of concern is a failure to comprehend the identity of the existing Jewish community. The established community had also created a Jewish society, representative of their values. This community were the descendants of emancipated British settlers, whose outlook was very different from those in Eastern Europe, where enlightenment ideas and Jewish emancipation took far longer to develop, and where anti-Semitic activity and pogroms were endemic. While Zionists and Bundists did turn towards secularisation and independent activity, this was within the religiously conservative world framed by Hassidism, and their Jewish values were formed differently from those in the English-speaking world. The Yiddish community had lost not only its homeland, but for the majority of its members their extended families as well. Concepts of diaspora reflect absence. These individuals created a diaspora within a diaspora; a Jewish consciousness based on loss, heightened by the losses of the Shoah and of a culture destroyed in its inferno. A Second Chance: The Making of Yiddish Melbourne provides valuable scholarship to the literature on Australian immigration, and for the community itself, it affords a sense of pride in their achievements and a voice to a generation.