‘No Country for Idealist’ - a memoir to remember!

 ‘No Country for Idealists. The Making of a Family of Subversives’ by Boris Frankel is a memoir that is tragic, mind boggling, inspiring, heart-rending and engrossing! It straddles the life the times of a period in Australia and the Soviet Union that provided circumstances that infected the Frankel family and brought sadness and not hope, cynicism not idealism. 

Boris, who I had the fortune to spend some time with as an Honorary with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute at the University of Melbourne, weaves an extraordinary life story with personal anecdotes dotted through the forensic analysis of ASIO and Federal Government machinations. Names such as Menzies, Downer, Casey, Spry are the adversaries who along with KGB agents bring much pain and suffering to the family. 

I was fixated on the national and international events that were played out on an innocent father whose only failing was that he was an idealist and believed in social justice and equity. Neither Australia nor the  Soviet Union were up to the challenge! It was a painful realisation for Abraham Frankel that his idealism was not just misplaced but that he had been hoodwinked by the Soviet propaganda and disinformation. 

In Australia the authorities meted out punishment based on innuendo and fabrications. It left me in awe of the Frankel family’s resilience and survival in the face of incompetents and malicious people on the left and right who served their own bureaucratic or political ambition rather than humanity. I am reminded of the many families and individuals who suffer systemic injustice and vilification today.

Will the real Fran Leibowitz please stand up!

 

Labouring under Leibowitz. It was a night not to remember much. In front of a packed out Hamer Hall, Fran Leibowitz was upstaged by the lack of staging and engagement with an often bewildered audience. Perhaps most were hoping from the New Yorker insufferable, acerbic, caustic and life bending comments! She was billed as providing ‘opinionated, insightful and hilarious social commentary’ and to cast ‘a disdainful gaze at  revolting spectacles of celebrity’. But it was repartee that was often the long winded ordinariness that was underwhelming. In an opening that started badly Fran Leibowitz and Crikey Editor in Chief, Sophie Black, sought to spar in 30 minutes of ‘hard’ interrogation. But Fran fielded the questions with ease and there were few challenges and only the occasional opportunity for the Leibowitz barbs we have long got used to and longed for. 

It was an introduction to Leibowitz that generated little of the anticipated ‘razor wit’ nor insights into issues of gender, race, gay rights or the media’. 

Fran was then left on stage to her own devices and to become a combative with the audience. If only. But it was a controlled ‘audience’ that filled the Q&A session that seemed to have been programmed prior to the event. The questions came mysteriously via a floor monitor (from whom?) that where underwhelming in their content and failed to illicit anything other than long winded and slightly embarrassing stories that seemed to never end. 

No punch lines here or anything to remember. The highlights were few. On Taylor Swift’s boyfriend Leibowitz response was ‘Couldn’t she do better than that’. On Trump,  ‘He’s worse than Putin’. On why are you in Australia. ‘It’s the money’. And in the most searing and perhaps expectant question ‘What’s wrong with America?’, her quick answer was ‘Americans’. That got a laugh. However it did not match up with her previous comment that she is always being asked to explain America! How dare they. I'm not to blame! 

On New York there was very little or of her life, her extensive  library that required a larger apartment than she could really afford; she’d stop going to parties as the people she would want to be with were all dead (now that’s kinda funny), and no mention of her past, current or even her future writings. She barely moved from the lectern and was tied to a standup microphone. At least we could hear her as in the Crikey interview hand held microphones were used! 

Overall it was a bit blundering, lacked the expected absurdity and acerbic commentary and often overplayed so the one liners became lost in the telling. Barbs at Australia (why is it good to sound local?)  including us worrying about fruit fly or cigarette smoking were overplayed and on our distance from New York. Wondering if we’d ever been to New York clearly failed to come to grips with the audience and us  knowing the name of the Governor of Florida seemed to come as a shock.

My question, if there had been a live Q&A went something like ‘what do Taylor Swift, Donald Trump and Fran Leibowitz have in common?’ I’d like to think that would have raised the bar.