Seeds sown in a Season of Death
A book review by Dr Anne Sarzin
Mark Raphael Baker (1959-2023), former Associate Professor at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University, authored two significant memoirs, The Fiftieth Gate (1997), in which he probed his parents’ survival in Buchenwald during the Holocaust.
Two decades later, in 2017, his second memoir, Thirty Days: A Journey to the End of Love (2017), focused on the illness and death of his first wife, Kerryn, who died in 2016 aged 55.
Married for 32 years, they had three children. After the ten agonising months of her illness and a further ten months of mourning, Mark was determined to leave behind the land of the dead and re-engage with life.
Tragically, he was pulled back into a vortex of grief when his older brother Johnny was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The family’s sorrow deepened with the subsequent death of their father, Yossl after a fall near the family apartment in Surfers Paradise that he shared with his wife. Sadly, the family suffered a further loss with the death of Mark’s beloved Aunt Sylvia from pancreatic cancer.
Can this litany of woes get any worse? The answer is yes and the next saga in this heartrending catalogue of deaths belongs to Mark himself, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, dying 13 months later on 4 May 2023. What distinguishes this final devastating period during the season of death is the phenomenal tenacity of spirit he demonstrated in writing this memoir every day, his dogged determination to record a searingly honest family narrative that constituted a record of his life, providing a legacy for his adult children and especially for his baby daughter, Melila, the ‘miracle’ child from his second marriage to Michelle Lesh. Hopefully, Melila would get to know her father through his memoir.
For the book reviewer, however, an evaluation of this memoir is complicated. Mark’s widow Michelle and his stepfather-in-law Raimond Gaita devoted a year to the painstaking preparation of the manuscript he left behind. They acknowledge their major role—lovingly executed—in ‘completing’ the manuscript. ‘We finished sentences left hanging and clarified ones whose meaning was opaque. Occasionally we added entire paragraphs when it was evident that, either hurried or distracted, Mark felt the need to push the narrative along before the next chemotherapy session… As all editors do, we cut and added… We had to trust that our intimate knowledge of Mark justified what we believed he intended to say when he did not say it.’
Mark Baker
And therein lies this reviewer’s dilemma. While recognising the core, the nucleus, the passion and pain are undoubtedly Mark’s, one cannot be sure where his thoughts end and where those of the editors begin. While one must laud their heartwarming and infinitely loving commitment to bringing this memoir to a wider world, it makes the reviewer’s task daunting in this particular respect, the complication of what might be described as invasive editing.
There is also the important consideration of whether a memoir of intense personal pain and loss, primarily intended for family archives, can legitimately find a space and relevance in the lives of readers among the general public. The editors note that Mark hoped it would be ‘a work of literature’. At times, the writing is somewhat uneven, veering from truly profound and poetic insights to mundane and pedestrian facts. There are, however, glimmers of light and flashes of humour that leaven the texture, illuminating the gloom.
It was incredibly ambitious of a man stricken with horrific pain and a death sentence to spend his last months recording his story so clearly and so courageously. Perhaps that is where Mark’s greatness lies and where this book triumphs with its concern and plea for remembrance, that those who pass from the scene should be cherished, their values upheld, their humanity recognised by family and friends, and their legacy thus safeguarded for future generations.
While this is a death story, it is also a love story of a man and woman, Mark and Michelle, facing his death openly and truthfully. In a season of darkness and depression, compounded by excruciating physical and emotional pain, it is a rare achievement that this memoir emerged at all, providing as it does such meaningful testimony to a life well lived.
A Season of Death
Mark Raphael Baker
Melbourne University Press 2024
I congratulate you on both the candour and the sensitivity with which you wrote this review, Anne Sarzin. As a poet, editor and reviewer myself, I fully understand the dilemma posed. I think Mark Baker would like this review – I know that’s presumptuous of me to say, as I only had slight contact with him many years ago; I have, however, read his writings and kept abreast of his work across the board. I think it a shame that the editing was as invasive as it was, even if with good intention. Good editing means, as much as more formal application, keeping the voice of the writer without intrusion. It is far better to suggest occasionally what you don’t know through probable likelihoods, or leave as is for reader contemplation.