Melbourne Jewish Book Week 2026

It was an inordinate privilege for me to be invited as a panellist at last month’s Melbourne Jewish Book Festival – a festival of books and writing that is held every two years in (you guessed it!) the vibrant city of Melbourne, Australia.

I was one of the very few non-Jewish authors invited to take part – and it gave me the opportunity to meet and listen to to several famous Jewish writers.

The panel discussion in which I played a part was titled ‘Intersections: Shared Histories, Different Journeys’.

Ably moderated by Dr. Marcelo Maghidman, himself a Monash academic and published author, the panellists comprised of Ayelet Tsabary, Merav Fima and myself.

Ayelet’s grand parents migrated in 1934 to what was then the British Mandate for Palestine in 1934 from Yemen – a land where at the time there was a large number of Jews whose presence there had been documented from even before the first century of the Common Era. Today it is believed that none of these Yemenite Jews are left in Yemen – most have migrated to Israel (where they are known as Mizrahim or “Eastern People”) where they make up about 40% of the current Israeli population.

One of the aims of Ayelet’s writing is to give a voice to the Mizrahim, who – despite constituting such a large proportion of Israel’s present population – did not really have a place in modern Jewish literature, which has been dominated by Ashkenazi (European) Jews. Ayelet’s books – The Art of Leaving, The Best Place on Earth, Songs for the Broken Hearted – give a voice to the different cultures existing in Jewish society and celebrating the influence of Yemeni Jews and Mizrahi stories. I learned from Ayelet about the traditional songs of Yemeni Jewish women – songs made known, for example by Gila Beshari and A-WA, which have an important place in Mizrahi culture.

Merav spent part of her childhood in Montreal – and by a stroke of serendipity I discovered that she had attended high school in Montreal less than 10 kilometres from the Bedford Elementary School where I myself went to school (ofcoourse, my time in primary school was several years before hers!!)

Merav now who lives in Melbourne and is the author of Late Blossoms, a book that was awarded The Szymon (Simon) Klitenik Award for Jewish Fiction last month. The collection of stories in the book are set in mid-twentieth century in Jerusalem, each story featuring different women writers, painters or poets who had migrated to Jerusalem during the dark days of Europe following the end of the 1914-1918 war and the rise of Nazism. These were women who faced the challenge of continuing their creative work in a new and unfamiliar environment – and for some even what was at the time an unfamiliar language – and shaped the literary and cultural scene in the emerging state of Israel.

How did my own writing fit into this story?

In my book Sri Lanka, Serendib and the Silk Road of the Sea I had written about two significant connections between Sri Lanka and the Jewish people.

The first was the stories of the India Jewish Traders of the Middle Ages – Jewish merchants from lands on the western aspect of the Indian Ocean (places in North Africa like Yemen, Cairo and Baghdad) who traded with the west coasts of Sri Lanka and India, and even established settlements in places like Galle, Cochin (Kochi) and Calicut (Kozhikode). The extensive work of Jewish historian Shelomo Dov Goiten using the documents found in the Cairo Geniza shed light on, as I said, “the connection between my own ancestors and the ancestors of Ayelet and Merav”.

The second fascination connection that revealed that the people of the Levant and the people of Sri Lanka and India were communication g and trading since ancient times is the recent finding in Israel and Lebanon of early Iron Age Phoenician flasks containing residues of Cinnamaldehyde . Since Cinnamon then grew only on the west coast of India and Sri Lanka – in fact, even today, Sri Lanka is the world’s largest exporter of pure Cinnamon, claiming some 90% of the world’s market share. This finding by Israeli archaeologists raised the intriguing possibility of long distance trade between our peoples as far back as the tenth century BCE.

The panel provided a unique opportunity for us to talk about the different journeys each of us took to be present in Melbourne on that stage, as well as the interconnected history of our peoples – Sri Lankans, Mizrahim and Sephardim.

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Available from Vine Leaves Press

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