Tali Lavi

Tali Lavi reviews 'Insomnia' by Marina Benjamin

January-February 2019, no. 408 • 18 December 2018

The morning I begin to read Insomnia, a darkly thrilling beauty of a book, the sky turns a duckblue albumen. Domestic hush and personal restlessness coexist. This tension of dualities recurs within Marina Benjamin’s philosophical and poetic reckoning with the state of insomnia. I am not a fellow sufferer. There was a mere dalliance with insomnia after the birth of my children, stayed by drugs p ... (read more)

Tali Lavi reviews 'A Second Chance: The making of Yiddish Melbourne' by Margaret Taft and Andrew Markus

November 2018, no. 406 • 26 October 2018

In my childhood home, Yiddish prompted a frisson of the suppressed. This was a direct consequence of adults speaking it whenever they did not want us children to understand. Yiddish was the language in which jokes, clever and sometimes ribald, worked. When attempting to translate, inevitably my grandmother would shrug; English was found lacking. Yiddish dimpled our conversations, and the foods tha ... (read more)

Tali Lavi reviews 'The Storyteller: Selected stories' by Serge Liberman

Online Exclusives • 31 August 2018

When I look at certain images of German-born photographer Roman Vishniac, the accompanying pain is acute, for his mesmerising monochromatic portraits of Eastern European Jews before their devastation in the Holocaust are not mere ethnological studies. Elie Wiesel refers to Vishniac as ‘poet of memory, elegist of ruined hopes’ in the foreword to A Vanished World (1983). The same might be said o ... (read more)

The Antipodes (Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre)

ABR Arts • 16 July 2018

Strange and terrible events unfold around us. Conflicts erupt; catastrophes occur; a billionaire reality television performer reminiscent of a snake oil merchant is elected president of the United States. Following these destabilising forces, a chorus comprised of dissonant tones of reproach and plea often emerges: ‘Where are the artists’ voices?’ The answer is nuanced. Singular voices are p ... (read more)

Foxtrot

ABR Arts • 21 June 2018

A doorbell rings. Along with the Feldman family, we are catapulted into Samuel Maoz’s mesmerising drama, one worthy of its Greek tragedian and European absurdist antecedents. Deeply shocked, a woman faints and fits; a man is frozen. Their son Yonatan, a soldier, has been killed. Hell descends on the stylish apartment at 8 am. We know this because one of the three solicitous soldiers, emissaries ... (read more)

Tali Lavi reviews 'The Tattooist Of Auschwitz' by Heather Morris

March 2018, no. 399 • 22 February 2018

Early on in this book, the fictional Lale Sokolov, based on the real man of that name who survived Auschwitz and its horrors to eventually live in suburban Melbourne, has his arm tattooed. Aghast, he laments, ‘How can someone do this to another human being?’ He wonders if, ‘for the rest of his life, be it short or long, he will be defined by this moment, this irregular number: 32407’. The ... (read more)

Hir (Red Stitch Actors' Theatre)

ABR Arts • 06 February 2018

A soldier comes home from war only to find that home is not what it once was. This premise, fertile with dramatic possibilities, has inspired storytellers from Homer and Sophocles to contemporary writers like Ben Fountain. In Taylor Mac’s Hir, the foreign war zone and the rainbow-splattered domestic space act as minefields. The play – first seen in Australia at Belvoir in 2017 – is confined ... (read more)

Tali Lavi reviews 'Stop Fixing Women: Why building fairer workplaces is everybody’s business' by Catherine Fox

September 2017, no. 394 • 30 August 2017

In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf instructs women to ‘write calmly’ and ‘not in a rage’. Commentator Catherine Fox writes ‘calmly’ about contemporary realities with great potential to spark rage. Stop Fixing Women operates partly as a rejoinder to Sheryl Sandberg’s popular manifesto Lean In (2013), which addressed ‘internal obstacles’ for women. Fox’s argument is ... (read more)

Tali Lavi reviews 'Once We Were Sisters' by Sheila Kocher

August 2017, no. 393 • 23 July 2017

As Nadine Gordimer once mused, ‘Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.’ Sheila Kohler’s site of personal haunting is the murder of her sister Maxine in South Africa more than three decades ago. Once We Were Sisters is not, however, a maudlin memoir. Whilst the book readily enters dark territory, it also resuscitates the wr ... (read more)

Tali Lavi reviews 'As the Lonely Fly' by Sara Dowse

June-July 2017, no. 392 • 29 May 2017

Sara Dowse is a fine observer of politics and power. Her new novel, As the Lonely Fly, traverses three continents over fifty years and contains a multitude of characters, but its focus is honed in on three sisters, of sorts. While Chekhov’s play of that name is typified by waiting, Dowse’s story is of continuous flux and upheaval. Clara-later-Chava, Manya-later-Marion, and Zipporah flee from U ... (read more)