Max

With special guest:

• Alex Miller
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

Those who fought against the Nazis in World War II were necessarily shadowy figures. It was a matter of survival.

For Max Blatt who lived the latter half of his life in Australia those shadows stayed with him until the day he died. Even 20 years after his death those shadows and mysteries still shrouded his life story. But our guest today the award winning writer Alex Miller was not content to leave the story in the black hole of Nazi atrocities. For Alex and all of us these stories need to be explored and revealed if the community as a whole is to get over being so damaged by events in the not so distant past. Despite the sadness and tragedy in Max’s family this story becomes one of survival, friendship, mentoring and most of all love.

We hear about Max’s treatment by the Gestapo when he was on their most wanted list and his ultimate escape from their regime. But when he left the Nazis behind in his travels to Japan, China and eventually Australia what else did he leave behind?

In this new book Max we hear about the inspiration author Alex Miller drew from his closest friend. Put simply, without the encouragement of Max Blatt (born Moses Blatt) we would not have the canon of work from Alex Miller. This is because Max gave Alex encouragement in his early work when he was on the point of giving it all away. Alex reveals what inspired him to continue and what he so admired in his best friend who he describes as a German / Polish / Jewish / Socialist / intellectual.

Our very eloquent guest has scoured the written records and developed the oral history so that he can fill in many of the gaps in the story. Alex finds out more than Max himself would have known about what happened to Max’s family. And by a series of coincidences Alex finds members of Max’s family living peacefully in Israel.

The book is a culmination of many years of searching and remembrances. It is a story that needs to be heard because as Alex says it would be Max’s influence on the friendships of the living that would frame his story in the present. There are lots of resonances today with some world leaders we can think of and even with the experiences of Indigenous people around the world.

Finally Max’s story is told in a way that he surely deserved.

Alex Miller

Alex Miller is the award-winning author of twelve novels and a collection of essays and stories. His work is published internationally and widely in translation. Alex is twice winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1993 for The Ancestor Game. Conditions of Faith andLovesong are both winners of the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. In 2012, Autumn Laing received the Melbourne Prize for Literature for an outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life. Coal Creek won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award in 2014. Alex’s twelfth novel, The Passage of Love, published in 2017, is his most autobiographical work, a deeply moving masterpiece of the writer’s early struggles and loves from the vantage of old age.

Song selection by our guest: Another Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd

Podcast (mp3)