Brina Israel's body
memento mori I don't want to forget Theodore Krakouer and Brina Israel, my grandmother's grandparents, but it appears that everybody else in the world already has. There is little to be passed down to me. All has been lost, or was hidden, many years ago. And I have no access to an Old World: I am Australian, four generations Australian on this side, and even more established on my father's side. What Brina looked like. Does it matter? I have to imagine all of it. As a free settler, there is no recording of her physical features as there is with Theodore. And no photographs, of course. What I have, more resonant anyway, is a set of correspondence from 1874 on microfilm, letters back and forward between a woman who signs herself Mrs Brina Krakouer and the Colonial Secretary. About who was to pay for the keep of her lunatic husband in the asylum. They wanted her to pay. These writings, in her loopy hand, tell me many of the things I want to know. My embellishments can come out of her modest little letters, heartfelt, pleading, compelling.
Having seen one photograph of her youngest child, my great-grandfather David as an adult, I want to construct her physical shape, her distinguishing features. I am interested after all in bodies, in such definitions. Women's bodies give me pleasure. By the age of thirty six, around my age as I write, she had nine living children, her first born when she was twenty. Her defacto husband was dead and she was a widow at the age of forty four; she wrote these letters when she was forty one. In moments of high imaginative flourish, I want to be like her as I get older; I want to be emotional and tough, and stick to my guns. Brina was resilient, and I think she must have won this fight she had with the authorities. Won it at least by maintaining her stance, her honour. So, how she might have looked. This is the picture in my head. She is little, a tiny woman even before she began to shrink. Dark hair, penetrating eyes, a larger than usual nose, a quick wit, sharp temper. A discomfort with the climate: it gave her prickly heat in her armpits and inner thighs, made her prodigious child bearing saga a pain in her skin and right through her body. Giving her a roughened face: ruddy, a hard complexion. She went grey early, craved some space for herself, wore her hair long. Dreamed of her father and mother, wondered about how it was that she and Esther had decided to take this adventure as young women. Bird features, dainty, dark and delicate. The two girls on the boat, a supreme sacrifice by Brina, at nineteen, to leave home in London and to travel with her younger sister to Australia. They did it because Esther was pregnant and only sixteen years old, and the girls decided to get away and start in a new place. Did their parents know about this, did the family withdraw their support? In every generation since has been this transgression in my family: the beginning of a baby out of wedlock. How do these patterns occur? Are we meant to follow such difficult routes? By the way that such evidence has been hidden, you could imagine it was unique, a rare and shameful slippage that didn't, doesn't, happen in other families. In all of these years in Perth and Fremantle it is likely that she didn't have the chance to read or own a single book. She was literate, and so was Theodore. For Jews, books and learning are precious, central in a life and a family. The idea of this progression, towards knowledge, to change and learn: it is enabling. It was precious to my grandfather, who was not a Jew, and to me, but for the rest of the generations between Brina and me, it has not been important. I have figured Brina in my head as a stereotype. I explain this to myself as the best way to manage such a task. Probably the only way.
What sort of a man was this one that Brina met and had babies with. She was twenty, he was thirty something, already married, the father of one. A convict to the Swan River Colony in 1851. Both wife and son safely back in the Mother Country. (He was from the Fatherland: born in Poland, educated in Germany.) He had books delivered to him while he was imprisoned at Portland Prison. He was a reader, and a record was kept of his borrowings. These books: Saturday Magazine, Cottage Visitor, Caves of the Earth, The Snow Storm, History of the Plague. Did this mean he had an imagination, an interest in the natural world, the damage that men could do to each other, the ferocity of disease.
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