The human rights activist, award winning author and storyteller was raised in Melbourne by Polish-Jewish refugee parents in working class Carlton in the 1950s. Photographs of family members killed in the Holocaust before his birth filled the walls of his childhood home. His own mother was left disturbed and broken by her own experience of losing her entire family in the Holocaust during the horrors of World War II.

She would float in and out of moment of darkness. As a child it was hard watch.

From an early age, Zable became acutely aware of the damage war can do to people.

People who live through war, destruction, human adversity and tragedy are not victims, he says. They’re survivors. 

“I grew up in a house of absences, a house of ghosts,” Zable explains.

“People will do anything in order to find a new life. They will do anything in order to find a life free of oppression, free from fear, a life of security. Nobody willing becomes a refugee and what you will find is that many will always have longing for where they came from.”

Zable visited Ballarat this week to discuss his new book The Fighter. 

It delves into the life of Australian Jewish champion boxer Henry Nissen who grew up in working-class Carlton during 1950s and 60s. 

Henry’s journey from young, skinny, wide-eyed boy to champion boxer leads him on a path of self-discovery and to a world outside of the confines of his childhood home which is haunted by the dark shadow of a tragic past. 

Zable’s visit came during National Refugee Week which celebrates refugees and their profound contribution to communities.

It also aspires to highlight the harrowing journey refugees and asylum seekers make to find freedom and safety in a new land. 

There is no denying the stark comparisons between Zable and Henry. But Zable says what drew him to Henry’s tale was the connection he found not only with himself but so many others seeking asylum.  

“The Fighter is a story of one family, of one particular neighbourhood in Carlton,” he says. “But what you discover is that it resonates with so many others migrants. It’s a variation of their own story and life.” 

In his work, Zable explores the inter-generational pain caused by Nazism and the notion of silence oppressing war stories from being told.

He describes it as an “unspoken pact” between the wartime generation and their children which stopped their painful stories from being told.

Perhaps the most poignant element of the book is Henry’s mother Sonia’s silent battle with depression and descent in and out of madness.

It is paralleled with Henry’s battles in the ring. Sonia survived the Holocaust but remained broken by what she witnessed and the horrific acts which were perpetrated upon her, in Bergen-Belsen. 

They were both fighters.

The miracle of storytelling is to recognise every person has their own unique story but threaded into the layers is a common humanity that connects us all, Zable explains. 

Since he was a child Zable has kept a journal.

In the darker moment of his childhood when his mother was taking a turn it was a place he could seek solace. 

Still today, he religiously scribbles of bits of pieces of life as sees it. Folded into his words are snapshots of how others see the world captured through conversations with strangers and friends.

“When you write a story, you have to enter into the world of other people,” Zable says. 

“You have to have the courage to knock on somebody’s door and enter into their world.”

“Again and again, I discover very quickly, when I walk through the door into another world, another culture in Melbourne, no matter who answers the door, we have a lot in common.”

“There is a common humanity there. The thing is, when you sit at the kitchen table or wherever it may be, eye to eye and you just speak to people, you will see them for who they really are.”

Zable spends much of his time at Melbourne’s Asylum Seeker Resource Centre sharing meals with people.

“If you went there and joined the community meals you would hear amazing stories and meet amazing people,” Zable says.

“These people have all kinds of skills and talents. They are architects, engineers and lawyers.”

This Zable’s tenth book. 

He has spent his life writing stories, memoirs and biographies of displaced people, those who come from traumatised backgrounds, refugees and outsiders.

He has found reoccurring themes in every tale, including parallels between those seeking refuge in a new country and those who have lost everything in tragedies like the Black Saturday bushfires.  

“There always seems to be three acts to the drama,” Mr Zable says.

“Act one is they lived in another place, they had a home and a community, but something traumatic happened. It could be a fire or a war but for whatever reason they have had to make a run for it and leave behind their old life.”

Zable says throughout their lives the pendulum shifted between moments of elation for their home to moments of great longing, displacement and nostalgia for the past.

But what Zable weaves subtly into The Fighter’s narrative of electric characters who live for years in Carlton and surrounding suburbs, is that with one shift in the wind, you could be the stranger. You could be the person seeking refuge. 

“At the heart of being civilised is the way you treat strangers,” Zable says. “You have to enter a story without prejudice, without judging.”

“Listen to their story before you make up your mind about who a particular person is. At the heart of it is engagement with humankind.”

“That is where the heart lies.” 

He praised the work of groups running in Ballarat including  Rural Australians for Refugees and Grandmothers Against Detention Centres.

 “There are things happening in Ballarat that are wonderful. There are neighbourhoods here where amazing things would be taking place where human connection is helping others to overcome adversity.”

The Fighter: A True Story is available at bookstores. 

- Melissa Cunningham