My suburb is the heart of the city’s shtetl-south. It’s no utopia but a lesson in coexistence |
My suburb is the heart of the city’s shtetl-south. It’s no utopia but a lesson in coexistence
April 27, 2026 — 7:00pm
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When my family arrived in Melbourne in 1988, from Soviet Odessa, we landed in Doncaster. This affluent suburb of hilly cul-de-sacs starkly contrasted the poverty and repression we had just fled.
My parents enrolled in English classes at Box Hill TAFE, my brother and I at the local primary school, where we didn’t have to chant dogma about Great Leaders. The shops brimmed with food, for which we did not have to queue. And yet, my mother, eight months pregnant with her third child, looked along our vast, silent street and wept. “Where are our neighbours?” she asked my father. “Where is the sea?”
We soon realised that we needed to move south, towards our Russian-Jewish community. And so we did, approaching the heartland incrementally, via Glen Huntly, then Carnegie and eventually Caulfield. And the heart of the heart, was of course, Balaclava. Here, my mother shopped for pelmeni (dumplings) and tvarog (soft cheese); here, she could ask the grocer for a specific selyodka (salted herring) and know that he knew. She sat in its cafes and imbibed its residents – artists and musicians drifting up from St Kilda, the Italian fruiterer, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish boys scuttling between the Yeshivah and the kosher bakery, the dog-walker striding to Alma Park.
And of course, there was the sea. From the hill on Balaclava Road we could see its glistening ribbon, and the view always felt like a........