Ranging from remote provinces in China and Cambodia to pre- and post-war Yiddish Poland, Kurdish Iraq and Iran, and Indigenous and present-day Melbourne, Arnold Zable's quartet of stories depicts the ebbs and flows of trauma and healing, memory and forgetting, the ancient and the contemporary. And ever-recurring journeys in search of belonging.Arnold Zable is a highly acclaimed novelist, storyteller and human rights advocate. His works include Cafe Scheherazade, Scraps of Heaven, Violin Lessons and The Fighter, which was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier's Literary Award and a New South Wales Premier's Literary Award. Zable lives in Melbourne.'Zable elevates history into near mythical tales of wonder.' Australian'This is a man who truly believes in the power of stories.' Age

Cafe Scheherazade is a haunting meditation on displacement, and the way the effects of war linger in the minds of its survivors.In this deeply moving book we meet Avram and Masha, proprietors of the cafe, and hear the tales that they and their fellow storytellers have to offer: of Moshe stalking the streets of Shanghai and Warsaw, of Laizer imprisoned in the Soviet city of Lvov, and of Zalman marooned in Vilna and Kobe. And we learn how Avram and Masha met and fell in love and came to create their Melbourne cafe together.In this mesmerising book, at once fable and history, fiction becomes a way of remaining faithful to the stories of cities strung across the globe like pearls on a string, to the maps and narratives etched in the minds of old men talking in a cafe by the sea.'An original, deeply felt, beautifully written book.' Sydney Morning Herald

It's 1958 and Australia is becoming a different place. The Melbourne working-class suburb of Carlton is now home to many immigrant families trying to begin new lives and make sense of the old.Romek and Zofia, liberated from the camps in Poland, work hard at the local market, but their love is in ruins. Bloomfield is king and custodian of Curtin; the resplendent Valerio, stylish and soccer-mad, has just arrived from Italy. Romek and Zofia's skinny twelve-year-old son Josh takes up boxing and becomes bewitched by the Swedish Girl. But Zofia is tormented, and as she falls further into madness, Josh wonders if she can ever be made whole again.Scraps of Heaven is a stunning evocation of a changing world, where optimism is tinged with sorrow at the raw memories of war. Arnold Zable's irresistible storytelling becomes a celebration of survival, a reminder that scraps of heaven can be found everywhere.'An affectionate recreation of the inner-Melbourne suburb of Carlton...

The island of Homer's Odyssey has beguiled readers for millennia. Master storyteller Arnold Zable takes us to modern-day Ithaca, to its mountains, its villages and its harbours, and into the houses of its people.Xanthe is drawn to Ithaca, the birthplace of her father Manoli and her maternal grandfather Mentor. She is translating Mentor's manuscript, his story of leaving Ithaca and his life in Australia: fleeing the Kalgoorlie riots, working in Melbourne coffee houses with his compatriots, studying in the State Library, and learning to dream his way back to Ithaca and back to his lost son.Slowly she begins to understand her father's dark moods: the lure of the sea, the promise of fortune. And the ache for the hum of the Ionian winds, the rhythm of the looms and the silence of the rocky Ithacan soil.Sea of Many Returns is a profound meditation on displacement, nostalgia and exile-a story that affirms the enduring resonance of the Odyssey for voyagers of all...

Henry Nissen was a champion boxer, the boy from Amess Street in working-class Carlton who fought his way up to beat some of the world’s best in the 1970s. Now, he works on the Melbourne docks, loading and unloading, taking shifts as they come up. But his real work is on the streets. He’s in and out of police stations and courts giving character statements and providing support, working to give the disaffected another chance. And all the while, in the background is the memory of another fighter, his mother—and her devastating decline into madness.The Fighter is a moving and poetic portrait of a compassionate man, but also a window onto the unnoticed recesses of Melbourne.Arnold Zable is a highly acclaimed novelist, storyteller, educator and human rights advocate. His books include Jewels and Ashes, The Fig Tree, Café Scheherazade, Scraps of Heaven, Sea of Many Returns and Violin Lessons. He lives in Melbourne.‘A master...

Arnold Zable takes the reader on an intimate journey into the lives of people he met on travels over the last forty years. These are tales aching to be told. Tales of hardship, of yearning and of celebration. From the songs of Arab diva Umm Khultum on the banks of the Tigris to the strains of a young boy playing the violin for his mother in Melbourne, to the swing jazz of the nightclubs and cabarets of 1940s Baghdad, a fisherman playing a flute on the banks of the Mekong, and Paganini in the borderlands of eastern Poland… Music weaves its way through each of these spellbinding stories. Tales that span the globe, and bring us back to Melbourne to the powerful and heartbreaking story of Amal—her flight from Baghdad, her fears boarding the unseaworthy SIEV X, her survival when it went down, and her desire to have her story told. Arnold Zable's books include Jewels and Ashes, Café Scheherazade, The Fig Tree,...

The Fig Tree is a tender book of true stories about family, about journeys, about home. Arnold Zable, bestselling author of Café Scheherazade, describes remarkable people struggling through tragic times and rejoicing in the unexpectedness of life itself.Zable writes with wonderful feeling about the Greek villagers who made the long journey to and from Australia, about those lost in the Holocaust and postwar diaspora, about Jewish actors and writers who found new audiences in their adoptive country.At the heart of this book is Zable's understanding of our obligations to the wanderers among us, to the dispossessed and the stateless. He makes a gift of their stories in The Fig Tree, celebrating the common threads of humanity that bind us all.'The master storyteller has done it again.' Australian Book Review

'Do you ever think about those you left behind?', I ask father. 'Not often', he says. 'Such memories are a luxury I can't afford.'First his parents made a journey to the New World. It was the 1930s, and Europe was seething. As he grew up, Arnold Zable heard tales, songs, fragments of the world they had left behind. He had inherited a fractured, vibrant past which both fascinated and disturbed him. Finally, he had to confront the mystery: he had to travel back to the Old World, to his parents' home, to his grandparents' birthplace, and to a land pervaded by ancestral ghosts.Jewels and Ashes is the result of that journey of discovery. Moving effortlessly between centuries and continents, and across inner and outer land-scapes, it is an astonishing achievement. In one stroke, the Jewish historical experience has become a gift to the world.