A Cork on the Waves

A Cork on the Waves - Halina Robinson

A Cork on the Waves begins with a description of Halina's childhood in the Polish towns of Przemysl and Kalisz. Halina tells of problems in her family homes problems that as a young child she did not fully understands that led to her living with her father, and later, with her father and step-mother. She attended a Zionist-leaning Jewish school which educated its students in Polish as well as instructing them in Hebrew and Yiddish. Halina tells of some incidents of anti-Semitism that she came into contact with as a child, but for the most part she presents a picture of good neighbourliness. The remainder of A Cork on the Waves describes Halina's life in post-war Poland, until her emigration together with her first husband and young daughter to Israel. Though she makes mention in her introduction and other places of the fact that they ultimately ended up in Australia, the book does not tell how or when they arrived. Halina's style is descriptive yet distant. Clearly much research has gone into ensuring that her book is historically accurate; she also offers insights into particular events and experiences that she is only able to offer because of revelations that came to her after the war. Interestingly and unusually, Halina writes about herself in the third-person, referring to herself as "Lina"; this contributes to the distance that one senses between author and events. As Halina states in her introduction, "Every event described in this book really happened. However, everything has been filtered through Lina's memory seventy years after her walks in the Kalisz park. Events and backgrounds of the book have been meticulously checked using the most reliable sources. The resultant book reads as a piece of fiction, but it is in fact also a well-researched slice of history."