Opinion Articles

*Revenge is not sweet
By Annette Dooley OP
Annette Dooley is a Dominican Sister living at Waratah and a keen reader and thinker.

It is generally accepted that an important ingredient for a happy Christmas holiday is a good book. If that can be topped by a favourite author, the joy of the anticipation is usually fulfilled. Happily, for me this is what happened these last holidays.

The essayist Lily Brett, I met in the late 1990s through Too Many Men. Her latest collection, You've Gotta Have Balls, did make me wonder if she was being deliberately irreverent, for after all, Brett is Australian. I remembered an American song from World War II called Dis ‘ere gent wants one meat ball . Brett now lives in the Big Apple and yes, the title does refer to that classic New York dish.

Brett, like another favourite of mine, film producer and director Woody Allen, is a Jew. Her parents were the sole family survivors of the extermination camps. She was born in Berlin in 1948, not long before the family came to Melbourne .

Given such a background, one would hardly expect her work to be relaxing reading, but as you have probably suspected she is a humorist. This gift, it is clear, she inherited from her parents, particularly her father, who is still alive and has lost nothing of that precious Jewish capacity to look honestly at the self and laugh at the quirks of our humanity. Lily, the centre of the essays, is a self-acknowledged neurotic and her widowed father is the prism through whom she acknowledges herself.

It was her father who pointed me to my New Year's resolution for in him, so whimsically and gently portrayed, we see the embodiment of forgiveness. To give one memorable illustration from Too Many Men: he pandered to her wish of going to Warsaw mainly to see the family home. She is loaded with pills and health remedies. He is bemused by her desire. The home is seen and then she wants to visit the Holocaust Memorial cemetery.

His particular wish is to check if certain shops along a certain street still sell a certain type of cake. To his delight, his desire, which fulfils the present experience while acknowledging the past, prevails.

Here in Newcastle our courts are in session again and though justice will surely be dispensed, that is not the end of the tragedies that have occurred.

No one claims that forgiveness is easy. To focus on the present, with an eye to the future, while never dismissing the past, can be truly heroic. For those of us who navigate ordinary, everyday offences, the alternatives are there.

I recently read a reflection on The Lord's Prayer. On “lead me not into temptation” the writer's view was that if one gives in to the temptation not to forgive, one's own spirit may be diminished.

Lily's father knows how to have his cake and eat it too.

  *This article was published in The Newcastle Herald on 30th January 2006.