Can We Talk About Poland?

This essay explores the concept of translation in the context of intergenerational and intra-ethnic relations in Australia. It is particularly interested in how translation as both concept and practice inform the thorny issue of contested pasts and conflicting memories. Our study focuses on the relationship between memory, migration, and translation with specific reference to the unsettled relationship many European migrants, and especially Holocaust survivors and their descendants, have with their former homelands. It is concerned with how the concepts of home and ‘homeliness’ are negotiated and represented between and across generations of Australians of Polish, Jewish, and Polish-Jewish backgrounds. We focus on second and third generation migrants who, marked by some familiarity of their parents’ world, language, and culture, develop their concept of self as diasporic translation. The case study for our investigation is the exhibition Can We Talk About Poland? put on by the Jewish Museum of Australia in Melbourne in June 2016, and featuring works by Arnold Zable and Lindsay Goldberg.