Alan Collins

Gripping Memoir - Moorabbin Kingston Leader

A MEMOIR is not an easy thing to write. It clamps its feet firmly between two camps - one of which is the history of a life lived and the other of an experience remembered. So the memoir, unlike a novel, wears two hats. It is on the one hand an historical document and on the other, a personal narrative. It sits somewhere between experience and fact, memory and truth, reality and imagination. Alan Collins’ memoir, Alva’s Boy, successfully straddles both history and literature.
read the full review…

Melbourne launch 26 October 2008 – extract from speech by poet Alex Skovron

Reading Alva’s Boy, one is confronted by a childhood balanced on a high wire suspended above an abyss. Alan’s mother dies the day he is born; the infant is bundled between orphanages, children’s homes and distant relatives before his father Sampson Collins, newly married to his latest wife Shirley, decides, for motives that appear somewhat ambiguous, to give the boy a home – but what a home! A weak, half-hearted father and a selfish shrew of a stepmother, with her own equally unpleasant mother in tow as a bonus. I don’t want to reveal too much, but suffice to say that Alan’s boyhood is the antithesis of what we understand by happiness, security, and a warm family environment. The youngster is thrown back onto his own resources: he develops a rich inner life, aided by a fertile imagination and a thirst for experience, and manages to navigate his lot with stoical acceptance, courage and, ultimately, an understanding beyond his years. ‘Poor Alva’s boy’ becomes a survivor.
Indeed, one of the remarkable and compelling qualities of this book is the way the author is able to look back upon that chaotic childhood of his, and to transmute it into something so endearing – and so free of bitterness. Alan’s narrative skill, his gift for storytelling, carries the reader forward with a fluidity and grace all too often belied by the events and experiences being described. He pulls off a masterly balancing-act in his blending of realism, recollection, reconstruction, humour, pathos, irony, tragedy and joy – all done with an almost brutal directness, a davka irreverence, but always with a telling wit and Alan’s characteristically light touch. We are swept up in his tale, and held in thrall by its immediacy, its honesty, the sheer exuberance of the writing. And don’t take the subtitle too literally. The tone may be unsentimental, but the reader is not only engrossed and entertained, but at times profoundly moved.

The story is full of energy and colour, the pace carefully sustained, now gliding along impressionistically, now settling to dwell on intricate descriptions or intimate reflections. It’s an absorbing read. We are given a privileged insight into the boy who would become the man who would become the writer we would come to know. But we are given a lot more besides. The flow of episodes, scenes and conversations recreated by the author abounds in delicious period detail, woven into an authentic, picturesque backdrop to the unfolding tale. Alva’s Boy is thus a document of the times – those black-and-white Depression years of the 1930s and the nervous early phases of the Second World War – a treasure-trove for the reader and social historian alike to relish, whether for the lively vernacular, the fertile popular culture of the day, or the habits, conventions and prejudices of a bygone generation, at least within Alan’s particular stamping-ground, the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney. There are many glimpses into the antisemitism of the period, which, although well-entrenched, never took on the more sinister undertones of its European counterpart. And then, importantly, there is the Anglo-Jewish perspective that underpins the narrative, a standpoint not so common in recent Australian Jewish autobiographical writing. It offers a precious snapshot of a community that would soon be transformed forever by the great tide of immigration in the wake of the cataclysm that was about to engulf European Jewry.

The Launceston Examiner – 4 October 2008 – Review by Heather Cosgriff – extract

Set in Sydney during the Great Depression and migrant influx of World War II era, Alva’s Boy tells the story of a young Jewish boy’s dream of finding a mother figure as he takes to the streets of Bondi to survive his father’s broken marriage and loveless family life.

Narrated from the perspective of the child, the unflinching directness of the writing is by turn poignant and confronting.

As the title suggests, the author has shunned sentimentality in favour of sensory description, and the book is the better for it, easily evoking the smells, tastes and sounds of childhood and avoiding bogging the reader down in emotion.

In the end it’s an uplifting testament to the resilience of youth.

The Age – 1 November 2008 – Review by Dianne Dempsey

Looking back on dark years.

Fortunately for the reader, Alan Collins finished this striking memoir shortly before his death earlier this year. He was born to a Jewish family in 1928 in Sydney, and fate had him marked from the start. His mother died hours after he was born. His father refused help from his family and decided to bring his son up himself. But rather than do the actual rearing, he had Collins placed in a series of homes where battled loneliness, neglect and sometimes downright cruelty.

There is a Dickensian feel about his story as Collins takes us from situation to situation. For a time the young toddler is cared for by an uncle and aunt in a small flat in Bondi Junction. Aunt Cissy played cards all day with her friends while young Alan lived on the sofa, playing with the discards in a fog of smoke from the Craven A cigarettes.

While not bitter, Collins sometimes gets close. “A good man, Uncle Alf … He could have been a real full-quid father to me, had not my own been the criminally stupid, vain, irresponsible bastard that he was.”

Collins’ memoir is an illuminating look at Sydney’s lively Jewish community in the 1930s and ‘40s. It is also a testament of courage and resilience. Collins somehow survived his childhood and went on to become a successful businessman, writer, husband and father.

The Spectator - Peter Coleman

….This touchy art is not altogether lost. It survives in the literature of an older generation, for example, in Alan Collins’s posthumous Alva’s Boy, an ‘unsentimental memoir’ launched in Sydney last week by Barry O’Farrell, the leader of the opposition in New South Wales. It tells the story of a Sydney Jewish street urchin, bloodied but unbowed, from that neglected ethnic group, the long established, thoroughly Australianised Jews whose forebears settled here some 200 or more years ago. They produced their share of Great Men (the soldier John Monash, the governor-general Isaac Isaacs, the philosopher Samuel Alexander) but most of them got by in more humble stations including a quota of shysters, dummkopfs and Roy Renes. They were often patronised by the more sophisticated refugees from Hitler, the ‘reffos’. But their way of life is the background of Alva’s Boy. In the tradition of the old cartoonists, Collins draws his caricatures of Bondi’s Jews, Italians and Aussies with zest and stoic humour. Alva’s Boy is a tonic for these refined times…

The full article can be found here

Jewish Museum Of Australia Journal - April 2009 - Jan Epstein

Alva’s Boy, Alan Collin’s memoir of a boyhood lived without his mother Alva, who died within an hour of his birth on Yom Kippur, 1928, is a heartfelt personal revelation.

I knew Alan Collins through the Florence Melton Adult Mini School class I taught in 2007. He was a gentle, constant, intelligent presence in the group, and I took to him instantly. By year’s end, I felt I had known him all my life. When news of his death came early in 2008, I felt a personal loss out of all proportion to the time I had known him. Such is the ability of some people to reach out and grab you by the heart and mind.

Added to his presence in the class, and the small bouquet he brought to my house after the course finished – which marked the beginning of a short but profoundly satisfying friendship that continues through his devoted wife Ros – I read with enormous pleasure and admiration his novel The Boy From Bondi, published in 1987, the first in a trilogy about his boyhood and young adulthood.

I’m a film person, who, as Fellini once remarked about cinema generally, loves “dreaming with the eyes open”. This is what captured me from the first page with The Boy From Bondi. It was translucently visual - an image of the past delivered in vivid snapshots that were profoundly personal, based as they were on events and memories of his own young life, yet recalled with a clarity and objectivity usually associated with the lens of a camera.

Having just read Ride On Stranger, published in 1943 and made into a drama series for ABC television in 1979, I felt sure no writer since Kylie Tennant had captured Australia in the 1930s and 40s with such veracity and precision. That was before I read Alva’s Boy.

Alva’s Boy is subtitled ‘An unsentimental memoir’, which it certainly is. The Boy From Bondi, and its sequels Going Home and Joshua, fictionalised Alan’s experiences, which allowed control of the past through the creation of Alan Collins’ persona, Jacob Kaiser. Alan Collins’ novels remind us that it is never clear in literature, filmmaking or any of the arts, where autobiography ends and fiction begins, and indeed to what extent we can be objective about anything.

In Alva’s Boy, Alan blurs this boundary between fact and fiction wonderfully, managing to convey with gut-wrenching honesty, sharp wit, and great generosity of spirit, what it was like to be the boy that he was, and even the new-born babe. For Alan is present at his own birth in more ways than one.

‘And now she lay dead in a pool of blood and placenta, her olive skin blanched with beads of sweat that would all too soon turn to icy points. My father, Sampson Collins, abused the newly installed wall-mounted telephone for its inability to connect him with his doctor – any doctor – who might restore life to his 27-year-old wife of little more than a year. He rounded on the midwife with an ill-judged mixture of abuse and supplication until the woman raised her arm to strike him, paused in mid-sweep, and then let her arm fall in a dejected gesture that ended in her tenderly pulling a covering over the body…’

Alan’s tale of his mother’s death and his subsequent abandonment by his father – not to his mother’s family comprising a grandmother, his mother’s two sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts who wanted him, but to a succession of institutions, wet-nurses, and a quite wicked step-mother – is the stuff of Dickens and Victor Hugo (Les Miserables). This comes to mind because Alan’s story is in its way a tale of redemption, not from the outside (as in the case of Jean Valjean), but from within, the very nature of the child becoming the man.

Neither caricature nor gratuitous self-pity is found anywhere in Alva’s Boy. Simply stating the facts of his life, Alan writes of his father Sam, the footloose commercial traveller selling men’s costume jewellery in country New South Wales, who ‘from photographs appears to have been a man of elegance, a ‘masher’ who considered himself irresistible to women: ‘If I do not dwell too kindly on my father, it is because I invest in him my entire stock of misery.’

He writes on the occasion of his father’s fourth marriage when he was eight-years-old, in understated recognition of a child’s needs: ‘He [Sam] broke into a trot, hobbled by Shirley in her tight skirt. I was not far behind and had run ahead of Ma [Shirley’s mother, called ‘the stick-insect’]. I reached my father’s side and insinuated my wiry body between him and Shirley Compton only now she was Mrs Sampson Collins, the fourth lady to own that title. For the second time in my small memory, my father put his hand on my head.

“What do you think of your new home, Alan me boy?” Quite dizzy from this affection, I hardly looked at the cottage in front of me. I looked up at my father but he was now, aah, actually kissing Shirley, and she with a free hand was pushing me out of the circle. “Does it matter, Sam, what the brat thinks? What about me? Ask me, why don’t you?” ’

Alan Collins was gifted with great recall. On every page his highly observant descriptions of people and things – jewellery, furniture, streetscapes, Craven A cigarettes, his father’s gold Eversharp propelling pencils, a first ride on the top of a bus, his first visit to the Great Synagogue in Sydney with its vaulted ceiling and myriad stars, his viewing of his father’s sister dead in her pine coffin at a dingy Jewish funeral parlour in Chippendale – “Her teeth had been removed, her mouth had caved in below a pinched beak-like nose” – are redolent of time and place.

Paramount for Alan was his sense of smell, which above all other senses “received messages and triggered responses”: the scent of bay rum on his father’s skin; the congealed breast milk of his first wet nurse, Mrs O’Donohue; the Sunlight soap used by Martha his second nurse; the smell of blood and bone used by the gardener at the Scarba Home for Infants which permeated his own baby clothes; and the perfume used by Bella, the divorcée whom Sam married within a year of Alva’s death, which sent Alan’s young mind reeling.

Yet the thread that runs like a heart beat through Alva’s Boy is Alan Collins’ capacity to survive, not just physically and emotionally intact through a childhood that reads at times like something out of Oliver Twist, but to have become and remained throughout his long life, so loving and large in spirit.

Despite the worst that Sampson Collins could do to his son, Alan was born into an extensive Jewish family in Sydney, and this family, despite their treatment by his father, is everywhere present in the book, permeating the pages like Bella’s scent or the gardener’s blood and bone, sustaining the boy who like a seedling in a forest of monstrous growths, strains towards the light.

At the age of nearly four, Alan was sent to live with the ageing Harry and Cissy Cohen, distant relatives of Sam who were given a pound a week to look after his son. Harry was “a self-styled conservative orthodox Jew in the English tradition who had fallen on tough times during the Great Depression, while Cissy who had curvature of the spine, chain smoked and played cards each day to win ‘penny pots’ to supplement their meagre income.”

While Harry and Cissy were past their prime as parents, and Alan was not their son, the writer vividly conveys the couple’s attempts, sometimes successful, in providing support for the abandoned child of a father for whom they felt undisguised disgust.

And cut off as Alan was from other children in the Cohen’s pokey Bondi Junction flat, and an outsider and ‘Jewboy’ in a school and neighbourhood in which he never really feels at home, it is Harry who to an extent becomes his mentor and Jewish saviour, introducing Alan to his Jewish heritage, and defending the boy to the best of his ability against the worst outrages of his father.

In the end, Alva’s boy is no longer ‘poor Alva’s boy’, but a strong vibrant voice in Australian journalism and literature, and the impish, loving and generous man who touched the lives of all those who were lucky enough to know him.

Quadrant - Lee Shrub - May 2009

EVER SINCE PEOPLE have been able to write their memoirs, many have set to. Some have been quite shattering-even world-changing- many more have been fascinating, tender, funny, brave, eye-opening or eye-glazing. Here we are at eye-opening Alva’s Boy. It has an added piquancy in that it is local in both time and place: and it happens that l have a good deal in common with Alan: he was born in 1928 and I in 1929, and I, like him arrived at Bondi Beach Public School in   1938; and while he lived at 48 Francis Street, I lived in the parallel one behind his at 47 Sir Thomas Mitchell Road. And much else we shared, between reading The Saint and Phantom comics, frequenting local penny libraries and being Jewish.

But there the similarities fade. He had a terrible life.

It began ill and hardly got better. His young mother unfortunately, and against her mother’s wishes, married the debonaire glitzy commercial traveller, Sampson Collins. No sooner married than pregnant. For economy’s sake she was to be delivered at home by the mid-wife. It was Yom Kippur. So, out came the baby, then came the blood. On and on. The doctor could not be reached-he was praying hard at the synagogue-but the phone didn’t seem to work anyway. Alan became an instant orphan.

At this point Alan the narrator becomes a sort of Tristram Shandy, telling us exactly how his bris (circumcision) felt then the feeling of the rough cloth of his wet-nurse’s apron and other sensory matters. In fact, if he weren’t Jewish, I would say here is the beginning of his via crucis. It is certainly the beginning of his hard, hard life. For reasons of-probably-bloody- mindedness, Sampson refuses all offers of family members to care for Alan and dumps him in the Scarba Home, run by the Benevolent Society of New South Wales, where he does at least grow and become some-what attached to his wet-nurse. Regulations are regulations, and at two years he must leave. The weeping nurse rushes to give him a teddy bear, but the matron takes it away: it belongs to the home, she says.

So he is promoted to the Ashfield Home for Infants, where he remains till the age of five. He is scarcely visited, though his wheelchair-bound nana and uncle come a couple of times and his dad marries number three, but any hopes Alan has that this is to be a cuddly mum come to naught.

Next he finds himself in a new ménage: Uncle Harry and Auntie Cissi, who for a quid a week take him into their one-room flat:

I never had a proper bed. Or for that matter, I never had a proper bedroom. I slept, played, sat, was washed, dressed and sometimes fed on their couch so malignant that even my little body could not find a place between the springs to glean some small comfort. I would fall asleep from sheer exhaustion-exhausted by the unrelenting gramaphone…

There is a good deal more misery, but at least Uncle Harry a man of some culture and kindness, tried to teach him the Hebrew alphabet (well meant but not easy for a five-year-old on the lap), told him some heroic Bible stories just like mine) and took him to the Great Synagogue, memorably to the Torah festival, where the Torahs are taken out of the ark and walked around the congregation in all their glory just as I saw in a grand synagogue in Vienna, taken by an auntie).

But that is as good as it ever got for him.

AND ALAS there is only worse to come. Alan had always hoped to be called Alan by anyone talking to, or more often at him, but he was usually called lad, or boy, or chum, but mostly, poor Alva’s boy. Suddenly his father, some-what down on his uppers, announced that he was marrying a beautiful shikse, many years younger than he, and boy-o-boy, how great. Alan at once thought a young mum, who’d call him Alan, and give him a hug… What he got was a horrible harridan, who only called him brat, or bloody brat, and whose even more horrible mother called him Jewboy, and worse.

So, they moved into that house in Francis Street, but Alan was never to enter it. He was to sleep in the laundry-toilet annex, where he had to pull up his stretcher bed any time during the night when the others needed a pee. He was to eat out of an enamel bowl only out there.

Two step-brothers followed, not each by Sampson, but as Sampson went ever further downhill, the new little boys ended up nicely kitted out and at the Marist Brothers up the road. Alan’s school life was horrible too. A slight burst of light came when a neighbour engineered a summer school working holiday for him at her son’s potato farm near Windsor. The best thing about it was the tucker and the fact that they called him Alan.

Something of interest is the difference between the settled Australian Jews, the hard-working, buying-and- selling-and-making locals, and the reffos who began to

appear in numbers from 1939. The old lot, like Sampson, greatly disliked these, shall I say, cosmopolitan, often university-educated Jews, with their brief- cases and overcoats and foreign accents. Nothing was easy for any of either lot, but while Alan was in trouble in Bondi Beach Public as a so-and-so Yid, I was pet for being the first reffo ever seen there. (”Bags sit next to her,” they said.) But the biggest difference between us was simply that I was loved.

The wonder is that through it all he did manage to grow. He stole fruit and spuds, and baked the latter in a cave by Ben Buckler, he worked a bit here and there, he became a paper-boy on the early morning Bondi trams-a hazardous affair. He even saved a little money. So, slowly, and with a sudden bit of luck-about which my lips are sealed-the book ends on a hopeful note, and the reader is glad.

It is even more gladdening to find at the end that he had written four other books, had entered the middle classes, married and had three boys. One cheers his life, and deeply regrets his death.