I write this on my return from Carlton’s Cinema Nova, where Paul Barclay, presenter of Radio National’s Big Ideas, was discussing a recently published memoir, A Season of Death, with Michelle Lesh and Raimond Gaita. The book’s author, Mark Raphael Baker, died of pancreatic cancer on 4 May last year.
Michelle Lesh, an international lawyer and academic, is Mark’s widow. Raimond Gaita, a moral philosopher perhaps best-known for his acclaimed memoir, Romulus, My Father, is Michelle’s step-father.
Michelle and Raimond sat together on the stage of the darkened cinema, speaking of the man they knew and loved. Their grief was palpable, and so too was their deep attention and connection to Mark’s manuscript and their steadfast determination to honour his intentions for this, his final book.
A Season of Death is the last in a trilogy of memoirs that began with The Fiftieth Gate (1997) and continued with Thirty Days (2017). The Fiftieth Gate, which won a NSW Premier’s Literary Award and has sold 70,000 copies, documents Mark’s exploration of his parents’ memories and past in relation to the Holocaust. Thirty Days records the life and premature death of Kerryn Baker, Mark’s first wife of thirty-three years, and was written in the first thirty days of mourning. This final book, A Season of Death, follows Mark through his terminal illness while also charting the deaths of Mark’s older brother, Johnny Baker, and his father, Yossl, both of whom died not long before Mark. His mother, Genia, survives them all.
Three memoirs about death and unbearable loss, the last about the author’s own dying? Too much tragedy, you might think. Yet what’s so striking about A Season of Death is its vitality. How do you write with such spirit and humour, even joy, in the face of death? The answer for Mark Baker is love. This memoir sings with it: love of family of origin, of his first wife and adult children, of Michelle and their daughter Melila, not yet two when Mark died.
A Season of Death is divided into five sections. In the first, Regeneration, Mark recounts the lifting of his grief over Kerryn’s death and his eager courtship of Michelle. He includes Michelle’s reservations about their compatibility — their age difference, her sensitivity for the feelings of his adult children.
“My children’s fears were allayed once I fully confirmed whom I was dating,” Mark writes. “They knew Michelle. They trusted her. Gabe [Mark’s son] teased me and asked if we’d ‘canoodled.’” When Mark relays this exchange to Michelle, her response is succinct and wise: “Please don’t talk about that stuff with your kids.”
The second section, Remarriage, is a whirlwind of romance and new beginnings: his marriage proposal, instantly accepted; living together as a couple in St Kilda; a stint in London while Michelle teaches at the London School of Economics. Mark recalls the excitement of travel with a much-loved partner: London’s theatre scene, Ottolenghi restaurants, deck chairs under a benign English sun in St James’s Park. He recalls how “a friend who saw us in London remarked how happy and at one we were.”
Michelle then secures a position with the United Nations in Geneva investigating allegations that war crimes had been committed by Israel and Hamas during border skirmishes that taken the lives of hundreds of Palestinians. Geneva has special significance for Mark: after Yossl’s release from Buchenwald, he and his brother Boruch were chosen along with other young boys to rehabilitate to Geneva. Later, when the brothers had arrived in Australia, they set up a modest clothing factory called Swiss Models, “a title that sounds more suited to an escort agency than an ode to a period of their lives when they experienced freedom for the first time.”
After Mark learns of his terminal diagnosis, Boruch returns as a haunting figure: “What I’d repressed was that my uncle, in whose household I spent much time, had fallen ill in his mid-fifties… Only after he died was his illness named. Pancreatic cancer.”
The idea of genetic susceptibility to cancer is a recurring one here. (Mark’s charismatic brother, Johnny, died of oesophageal cancer.) So too is the idea that intergenerational trauma might play a role in various illnesses. Mark writes that his mother attributes her longstanding depression to Mark’s severe bout of croup as a baby and her fear that he might die: “Not in her experience as a child hiding underground in darkness in the forest. Not in her elder brother being killed near Lodz in Poland on the way to Belzec. Not in the vehicle accident that killed her mother after the war when she was twelve years old. But her depression lies in me, an innocent baby.” The burden for Mark is heavy, and long-carried; so too the fact that his diagnosis causes his mother much suffering. Yet she derives much comfort from the gift of Melila, whose presence provides “a balm for her grief.”
The memoir’s sections four (Retribution) and five (Revelation) span the time of Mark’s diagnosis and, as he frames it, his “living with cancer.” Many readers will be distressed by Mark’s account of his path to diagnosis. He describes four months of often debilitating abdominal pain, misdiagnosed by a variety of doctors as constipation, irritable bowel syndrome and stress. (Early tests hadn’t revealed malignancy.) He loses nine kilos, a sinister indicator apparently never remarked on by his doctors despite Mark’s communicated anxiety about the possibility of cancer. It’s only when he asks for help from a close friend and gastroenterologist that an MRI is ordered and the diagnosis correctly made.
Remarkably, there’s no anger or bitterness in this telling: the reader senses that Mark has made a conscious decision not to let negative emotions consume the time he has left. But he’s not content to accept a less than holistic approach from his treating medical team. He finds an oncologist who, rather than focusing only on cancer markers, looks him in the eye and asks at each visit, “And how is Mark Baker?” He consults a naturopath and an acupuncturist, he practises yoga, he continues to write his memoir.
“The discipline he displayed [in writing] was astonishing,” Michelle told us at the Cinema Nova. Despite the medical procedures and treatments and their inevitable side-effects, despite pain and fatigue, he wrote whenever he could, because writers write in order to understand, to find clarity, resolution and even peace.
He is driven to create a coherent narrative, not necessarily of life events; instead a narrative that answers the question: who is Mark Baker? He was, among other things, an academic and a writer. He founded an organisation for global social justice, established and led a synagogue, was associate professor at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University.
But he doesn’t dwell on those achievements. “If there is one action that expresses what I hope is an essential aspect of my true self, it is my response to the cynical claim that refugees from Afghanistan stranded at sea en route to Australia were throwing children overboard,” he writes. He tells of his protest at a gala event organised by members of the Jewish community in honour of John Howard, the man who “aggressively promoted those dehumanising [border protection] policies.” Mark’s action was to hold up a placard bearing the words ST LOUIS 1939 and EXODUS 1947 (referring to boats carrying Jewish refugees immediately before and during the second world war, the former to tragedy, the latter to the new state of Israel). Underneath were the words, TAMPA 2001.
At Cinema Nova Michelle spoke of how, after Mark’s death, she and Raimond sat side by side for days on end, going through Mark’s manuscript, line by line, in an undertaking both absorbing and exhausting. Mark’s desire for authenticity was paramount, she explained, a wish that she and Raimond thoroughly respected. Mark once said to Raimond, “You can’t write a memoir looking over your shoulder.”
Michelle, who greatly values her privacy, told her audience that she consented to Mark’s writing about the details of their courtship, their gruelling marathon of IVF treatment (so movingly captured in the book’s third section) — a staggering twenty-two embryo implantations — and the unsurpassable joy of pregnancy and birth to a healthy baby. “In sharing a life with him, I shared my story.”
Day by day, side by side, line by line: the honouring of a rich life, the loving response to Mark’s exhortation on his opening page, “Remember me! Remember me!”
In its subject and voice, in its honesty and humanity, in the beauty of its prose, this is truly a remarkable book. Remarkable, too, is its author’s recognition that the binaries of life and death/comedy and tragedy, and of love and loss/suffering and joy, are not binaries at all: they bleed into each other, interdependent, deeply connected. As Mark writes, “My words will protect me, laid in earth.” •
A Season of Death: A Memoir
By Mark Raphael Baker | Melbourne University Press | $29.99 | 256 pages
