Arnold zabel biography
- Arnold Zable is an.
- Arnold Zable (born 1947) is an Australian writer, novelist, storyteller and human rights advocate.
- Arnold Zable is an Australian writer, novelist, storyteller and human rights advocate.
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The Watermill
Born in New Zealand in 1947. The son of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors, he grew up in the inner Melbourne suburbs, speaking Yiddish as his first language. His website describes him as ‘an acclaimed writer, novelist, storyteller and human rights advocate based in Melbourne’, but this doesn't do justice to the richness of his life experience and concerns.
He’s been writing, storytelling and teaching for at least 40 years, not just in Australia but in the USA, Papua New Guinea, China, many parts of Europe and Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, always concerned about justice, human rights and how people survive dislocation and trauma. Close relationships are often part of the story, so are trusted friends or allies, and a tough inner core that helps hold some people together through terrible times. Healing is very much part of his concern in this book.
The Watermill's four stories are set in China, Cambodia, Eastern Europe, Kurdish Iraq-Iran and Australia, all the people in them survivors (for at least a time) of terror, displacement and loss.
You
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Violin Lessons by Arnold Zable
Cultural Studies
by José Borghino•
September 2011, no. 334
Violin Lessons by Arnold Zable
Text Publishing, $29.95 pb, 288 pp
Cultural Studies
by José Borghino•
September 2011, no. 334
The reception of SBS’s documentary Go Back to Where You Came From held out the promise that Australians’ antagonism towards asylum seekers was softening. But old certainties shift in unpredictable ways. In an essay in the September 2010 issue of The Monthly, Robert Manne, a long-standing critic of the Howard government’s asylum seeker policy, asked some uncomfortable questions of the left: Didn’t Howard’s ‘Pacific Solution’ actually work? What if the Australians who are hostile to asylum seekers can’t be dismissed as a racist redneck minority, but are instead the ‘overwhelming majority of the Australian mainstream’? What, then, of the mythical Australian values of mateship, equality, and the fair go? Arnold Zable’s latest book, Violin Lessons, situates itself within this, the most disturbing moral debate Australia has engaged in since
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Arnold Zable
Arnold Zable is an Australian writer, novelist and human rights advocate.
His books include the memoir Jewels and Ashes, three novels: Café Scheherazade, Scraps of Heaven, and Sea of Many Returns, two collections of stories: The Fig Tree and Violin Lessons, and The Fighter. With his books, essays, articles, plays and others stories, Arnold shares his unique understanding of memory, history, displacement and community.
Arnold has worked in the USA, Papua New Guinea, China, and across Europe and Southeast Asia. In 1998 he worked with curators to produce the script for Victoria’s Immigration Museum. He is a university lecturer and can often be found at writers’ festivals across the country.
In 2013, Arnold received the Voltaire award for the promotion of free speech and human rights advocacy. He is a patron of Sanctuary, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, the Eastweb Foundation, the Victorian Storytellers Guild, and a former member of the Victorian Immigration Museum advisory committee. He was also president of Melbourne Centre – P
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