Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the experience of a novelist/ethnohistorian writing an autoethnographic novel that shared knowledge and broke unspoken cultural rules about acceptable subjects. The presenter, Dr Gillian Polack, wrote the first Australian Jewish fantasy novel.

Paper long abstract:

Dr Gillian Polack is an ethnohistorian and also a novelist. This paper is her exploration of the pitfalls involved in writing an authoethnographical novel. Some of those pitfalls included handling the effects of persecution on culture, negotiating the construct of fiction that did not simply replicate the standard views of Judaism from US and European literature, and educating the reading public about a previously almost invisible aspect of Australian culture.

Judaism in Australia is little known, but dates back to the first European settlement of the country.

The first fantasy fiction work by a Jewish Australian writer was George Isaac’s The Burlesque of Frankenstein published in 1858. Yet the first Australian Jewish fantasy novel, that is to say the first fantasy novel that explored Australian Jewish culture (Gillian Polack’s The Wizardry of Jewish Women) was first published in 2016. This gap in time between the first published Australian Jewish fantasy writing and the first Australian fantasy Jewish novel is critical. It reflects the subjects that are acceptable to explore fictionally. It also reflects the way Jews are seen in Australia.

The novel contains a significant amount of autoethnography, and uses Dr Polack’s family traditions to build the culture explored in the novel. In this paper, Polack herself will explore the cultural contexts and content of the novel, how it was written and what hidden aspects of culture emerged.

The autoethnographical approach used to write this novel was the subjectivity that changed the rules.