Author’s quest for redemption in the wake of Holocaust suffering

MARK RAPHAEL BAKER: 1959 - 2023

In his last published column, before he died last month aged 63, Mark Baker, a writer, historian and one of Australia’s foremost Jewish public intellectuals, lamented that terminal illness had forced him to disengage from the world’s problems. It was not how he had imagined his end of days.

“Rather foolishly, I fantasised that I would set up a tent in the Judean desert,” he wrote in Plus61J Media, “go on a hunger strike, and wait until a final peace accord would be signed between Israelis and Palestinians.

Mark Baker in his study, 2017.

“I knew it was a piece of shticky melodrama, but I actually believed that my one last vainglorious tilt at living would be an act of megaphone martyrdom.”

The passage is vintage Mark: self-deprecating humour, poignant irony and the theme that defined his life’s work, namely, the quest for redemption in the face of unfathomable cruelty and suffering.

It is a theme he imbibed from his parents, Holocaust survivors Yossl and Genia Baker, a name which was Anglicised from the Polish “Bekiermaszyn.” Yossl had arrived in Australia with a single sewing machine, enough for the couple to fashion a comfortable childhood for Mark and his elder brother Johnny.

Mark Baker at Treblinka death camp, on a research trip for The Fiftieth Gate in front of a stone that has written on it Wierzbnik, the town where his father Yossl was born, 1995.

The boys went to Mount Scopus College and enjoyed family holidays at Surfers Paradise. After Year 12 Mark went to Israel, starting off at a Yeshiva, a Jewish seminary. But as the rabbi at his funeral remarked, he had a lifelong struggle with the idea of God. Mark also struggled with the Yeshiva’s “spartan conditions.”

He shifted to Hebrew University, returned to Australia in the early 1980s to study arts at Melbourne University, graduated with honours and was awarded a scholarship to Wolfson College, Oxford, ultimately completing a PhD on Eastern European Jewish history.

He spent long hours in the Oriental Reading Room teaching himself Polish so he could decipher 19th century Polish newspapers. At his side was his wife Kerryn, a doctor. The two former Scopus classmates would be married for 33 years. Their first child, Gabriel, was born in Jerusalem, where Mark was a postdoctoral fellow at Hebrew University. Daughters Sarah and Rachel would follow.

Amid the stints at overseas universities, in 1988 Mark was appointed an inaugural lecturer in Jewish studies at Melbourne University. I attended one of his public lectures and can still remember how mesmerising he was at the lectern. His pedagogy was greatly influenced by his mentor, historian John Foster, who taught the past through the experiences of ordinary families.

The launch of the Fiftieth Gate, 1997

Mark uncovered the mystery of his own parents’ wartime experiences in his 1997 masterpiece, The Fiftieth Gate: A Journey Through Memory. Yossl was imprisoned in death camps; Genia spent two years hiding in a hole after all the Jews of her village were deported.

The Fiftieth Gate won a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award and spent years on the high school curriculum. At its 20th anniversary reissue, the Holocaust historian Christopher R. Browning said the book “remains the gold standard of second generation Holocaust memoirs.” Mark had asked: “What right did I possess, as a child of survivors, to recreate an account of the Holocaust as if I was there?”

But Mark could not tolerate things left unsaid. His book even depicts his parents stammering in heavy accents. Nor could he tolerate things left undone, and he had an astonishing talent for inspiring others and rousing them to action. He founded a Jewish humanitarian relief organisation, an egalitarian Orthodox congregation and in the 1990s, Generation magazine, Australian Jewry’s answer to Vanity Fair, where he published my first piece of journalism.

By 2008 he was director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University. During his decade at the helm the ACJC grew into a globally significant centre of Jewish scholarship from Eastern European history to Jewish mysticism to genocide studies, a fledgling field that drew on the testimonial culture in Holocaust studies.

The last family Passover, April 2023.

He pioneered overseas study trips to Israel and the Palestinian territories, Prague, Berlin, South Africa and most powerfully, Rwanda. During one study tour there he travelled to a schoolhouse in the south where 50,000 had been slaughtered in a day. The sole survivor was a man who held the key to the classrooms; he pointed to the skeletons of his wife and children, naming each of them.

His Israel study trips featured Palestinian guides alongside Jewish ones. Back home, he engaged with Palestinian and Arab academics and writers, undeterred by criticism from communal leaders and the occasional nervous donor. Mark shattered the Jewish community’s taboo around publicly criticising Israel— his criticism growing more fierce as Israel lurched to the right and hopes dimmed for a two-state solution. Meanwhile, he braved hostile audiences to defend Israel’s right to exist. An academic of the old school, he thrilled to robust and respectful debate.

“We agreed about a lot,” wrote the philosopher Raimond Gaita, Mark’s long-time colleague, and latterly his father-in-law, in a tribute in The Conversation, “but anybody who eavesdropped on our conversation would think we were often in constant and sometimes passionate disagreement.”

One night in May 2015 Mark had dinner with a leading demographer of world Jewry, one of the many distinguished visitors to Monash. Mark’s wife Kerryn was there too. That night she suffered terrible stomach cramps; she blamed the French fries. Within 10 months Kerryn had died aged 55 of a rare stomach cancer. “One minute my wife was there. In a flash she was gone.” In a flash Mark had written Thirty Days: A Journey to the End of Love, a harrowing, candid and deeply stirring monument to his late wife.

He found love again with Michelle Lesh, an expert in international humanitarian law. It would be the pattern for the coming years: intense joy shadowed by almost biblical tragedy. The year after Kerryn’s death, his brother Johnny, himself a pillar of Australia’s Jewish community, died of a similarly brief battle with cancer. At his funeral, a crushed and bewildered Mark quipped that he would not be writing another death memoir. His father Yossl’s death three years later was at least timely.

In 2021, Michelle gave birth to their daughter, Melila, their “miracle” of faith and reproductive technology. Soon after, he became a grandfather.

But Mark would be called to one last literary encore in the genre he’d been forced to perfect.

In the year between his being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and his death, he wrote and wrote as he watched the rise and fall of the Luna Park roller coaster from his St Kilda apartment. We will read two of his books posthumously: a literary thriller called The Alphabet of Numbers, and the aptly-named memoir, A Season of Death.

Mark Baker’s family photo, June 2022Credit: Cara Mand

In his final column in which he aired his fantasy of “megaphone martyrdom” is the revelation that he was a complete failure at self-absorption: together with Michelle and Melila he had dragged himself to a local protest against Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government and its attempt to neuter the country’s judiciary.

He is survived by his mother Genia, wife Michelle, four children and three grandchildren.

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