We Who Decide

We Who Decide is a story of deceit, lies, and ambiguity. Shoshanna Liebler, an 18-year-old European Jewess, on the eve of the Anschluss of 1938, flees Austria, for Australia. A high-fashion designer, known as ZaSu, collaborates with her parents and brother to rebrand the House of Liebler with a portfolio of affordable creations for Europe’s leading fashion houses.

Compare

da-vinci-finalist — da-vince-eye-finalist

We Who Decide is a story of deceit, lies, and ambiguity about a woman who became a doyen of post-war Sydney’s haute couture. It describes the life of Shoshanna Liebler, an 18-year-old European Jewess who, on the eve of the Anschluss of 1938, flees Austria, for Australia. A renowned high-fashion designer, known affectionately as ZaSu, she collaborates with her parents and brother in the family business, which, for more than a century, designed and manufactured military and police uniforms for the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Determined to modernise the group’s business, ZaSu develops a portfolio of affordable creations for Europe’s leading fashion houses.

Entrepreneur Ashton Frost, of the fictional Sydney-based Frost Emporium, is determined to incorporate the Liebler style into his family’s retail chain. Frost finances ZaSu’s journey to Australia, but her new life begins in a detention wing of the Long Bay prison. Upon release ZaSu decides to obscure her identity, religion, and sexuality if she is to succeed in a conservative country about which she knows nothing. Cut off from her family and a trusted aide-de-camp, ZaSu seeks to uncover the truth about the fate of her mother, father, and brother.

Sample

from Chapter 1

Last night I dreamt my old maths tutor, Frau Sonke, scraped
her crimson fingernails across the blackboard as a prelude
to a smack with a cane across my knuckles. I woke from a tipsy
sleep and hurled the feather pillow onto the cabin floor. Then,
touching knees to chin, I slipped into a fitful doze on a fearful
sea.

The crisp air of the Great Australian Bight had changed
during the evening’s champagne, dancing and inconclusive
chess tournament. But now, enveloped in a humid fug, I play an
unsettling game of ‘What if?’

An orange glow fills the cabin’s porthole, framing a perfect
circle around the sun rising from the Tasman Sea. A toneless
scrape reminds me of the opening bars of Strauss’s Einleitung,
oder Sonnenaufgang1 performed by the Vienna Court Opera. I
whisper, ‘Speak English’, though still it ties my tongue. Stylised
handshakes and exaggerated eye rolls, à la Josephine Baker,
grant me a moment to find the correct word. Men seem to
adore these cutesy-tootsie flutters, but women see through my
strategy. As for my assistant Leo Hubler, the contradictions of
English syntax are difficult, and I scold him whenever he speaks
German.

I wash my feet and legs beneath a tepid trickle of brackish
water in the cramped shower recess and splash the last of my
Kölnisch Wasse2 across my torso and neck.

The breakfast xylophone chimes a greeting to the hungry.

Coffee and dry crackers, a slice of fruit, a boiled egg perhaps, but
thoughts of food set the stomach butterflies aflutter. No matter.

The liner is due to dock by six this evening and by then someone
or something will dislodge my fear of the unknown.
A stroll might settle nerves, but my fellow travellers have
snared vantage points on the railings and stare westward at the
haze-shrouded horizon. In the Port of Fremantle, my mental
images of Australia proved unrealistic, but, with journey’s end
imminent, the terrors that prompted my flight from Europe roil
as pixilated pictures. The dazzling Australian sky seems to drain
the colour from my memories.

Leo knocks a rapid coded triplet.

‘It’s open.’

‘Weißt du, was zum Teufel dieses Summen ist?’

‘English, Leo! How many times must I tell you, and no, I
don’t know what this buzz is, but it’s driving me insane!’

‘I thought deaf I am going,’ Leo says.

‘I am going deaf,’ I reply, emphasising each word.

‘Pardon?’

‘Never mind, I’ll ask someone. There’s bound to be an answer.’

Leo’s presence is reassuring, but my recollection of our final
tense meeting in Papa’s office to plan our escape is indistinct.
And though today marks the climax of events which brought us
to this point of latitude and longitude, I realise I cannot recall
the features of my father’s face.

A needle-sharp sun prickles the back of my neck. I return to
the cabin for my pillbox hat, scarf and sunglasses before walking
to the dining compartment. Waiters preen. I tap twice on the
white linen tablecloth for a double measure of black coffee.

Leo piles cheese and smoked meat atop two hot bread rolls. I
crumble a dried cracker and mix the debris into yellow yolk. A
pinch of pepper, a touch of Tabasco and a tap for more hot black
coffee signals the magnitude of my hangover.

A purser pushes back two heavy swing doors.

‘Good morning, Miss Lieder.’

‘Excuse me, Herr Purser. May we speak?’

Leo excuses himself and returns to the buffet table for more
delicacies.

‘Call me John.’

‘Thank you, John – and you may call me Susan. Can you tell
me please the cause of the hum which fills the air above our
ship?’

John sits opposite and calls for tea.

‘You’ll get used to it and after a while you won’t notice them,’
he says, counting three spoons of sugar into the hot, black liquid.

‘Them? Who are they, please?’

‘Cicadas.’

I decline his offer of an unfiltered cigarette and rummage for
the word s’cardas, but all I can manage is a vague recollection
of a similar tone I heard during a summer holiday in the Greek
village Faros, on Ikaria.

‘Insects, Miss Lieder.’ John ashes into a clean tray and
blows at the steam coiling from the sweetened beverage. ‘Like
grasshoppers, but different. You must have them in Europe. The
noise tapers off as the sun gets higher, but these buggers are
Green Grocers, the loudest insect on earth. There are hundreds
of species. Let me think.’ He counts on his fingers. ‘There’s the
Brown Baker and the Cherry Nose, the Yellow Monday and the
Red Eye, the Whisky Drinker and the Double Drummer and
the Black Prince, and lots more.’

‘But to hear the sound this far out to sea!’

‘We are closer to the shore than it appears. The heat haze
makes the land seem a long way off, but we are making good
time and scheduled to sail through the Heads about noon or
one o’clock.

‘I’d better go. Might see you at lunch,’ John says and, after
a slurp of tea and leaving behind the ground-out remnants of
a cigarette stub, he disappears back behind the swinging doors.

Henry Johnston

Henry Johnston, Australian author, essayist, and poet, was born in the UK in 1951. He is a contributor to both The Australian Independent Media Network and Independent Australia. In his career, Johnston served as an ABC Radio producer, speechwriter, and senior policy adviser. In the Independent Australia 2023 writing competition, his essay “In The Company of Giants”, won the Most Compelling Article award. Other pieces of work encompass the short story “An Upturned Sky” (Stringybark Publishing), and an anthology Port Out Starboard Home, which was released as an eBook on Smashwords. He has written two novellas: Best and Fairest and The Last Voyage of Aratus and Other Stories. Set in inner-city Sydney during the 1960s, Best and Fairest chronicles the lives of 13 young men united by their love of Rugby League. In The Last Voyage of Aratus and Other Stories, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is given a modern twist. His current project is a collection of poetry called The Gardens of Stone.

Sample

from Chapter 2: Red, White, Red

My father, Maximillian Liebler, began his morning constitutional on the Penzinger Straße, then walked past Embassy Row, before taking a brisk stroll through Auer-Welsbach Park. On mornings when I accompanied him, Papa paused after crossing the boulevard and, with hand on heart, turned toward the Schönbrunn Palace with a formal bow, to bid a silent ‘good morning’ to the memory of the old emperor.

Papa began this tribute to Franz Joseph after surviving the terrible Ninth Battle of the Isonzo against the Italians in November 1916, in the weeks before the grand aristocrat’s death. Fidelity to the emperor prompted my parents to buy the estate on Penzinger. Within its leafy confines we celebrated a life of good fortune as proud subjects of a monarch who gave succour to all his peoples, both near and as far as the borders of the Pale of Settlement.

Papa always wore a sprig of alpine Edelweiss, the insignia of his regiment of the Imperial Hunters, and an important element of his ritual. I wove the small white flower heads into a dense cluster so precise only touch could reveal it as an imitation.

I am Shoshanna, Susan in English, Maximillian Liebler’s only daughter. Either my mother Ruth or I pinned the totem to his lapel, impossible for him to do so now since the loss of the first joints of his fore and second fingers from frostbite during military service in the Tyrolean trenches.

Teeming summer rain thwarted Papa’s morning walk in those fatalistic hours, so a comfortable chair by the wireless listening to the BBC World Service served as a suitable substitute.

Papa heeded my brother Rudolph’s advice to be sceptical of the domestic press. Editorial bias, Rudolph said, had grown conspiratorial since the calamity of the brief, bloody civil war. Rudolph said the Austrian press barons had abandoned impartial reporting in the tense days after Chancellor Dollfuss suspended parliament in 1933.

Any type of trade with Italian clients, and Dollfuss’s obvious fascination with fascism, spiked my father’s blood pressure. The trusted BBC News service detailed the breadth of Dollfuss’s political naivety, which led to the slaughter of hard-line socialists holed up in the nation’s Red redoubts. The majority of casualties fell in Vienna’s Karl Marx Tenement in the 19th district. According to my father, far better to establish a détente with the former President of Parliament Karl Renner, and the socialists – who numbered about half the population – than shoot them.

My father, brother and mother, along with thousands of like-minded citizens, abhorred Dollfuss’s authoritarian world view.

Papa championed liberalism over mindless discipline. The wanton destruction of the centrepiece of Red Vienna shook his faith in the possibility of a secure Austria. This tenement building, inpired by Otto Wagner, an architect Papa lauded above all members of the Vienna Secession, crumbled under a barrage of shellfire.

And though much had changed since the fall of the Habsburgs, my father admired the early initiatives of Karl Renner. As a veteran, he welcomed the introduction of state aid for disabled ex-soldiers, who had lost limbs or the use of lungs from phosgene gas. But, from the time of Dollfuss’s ascendancy, Papa recounted a growing pessimism amongst old comrades in arms and close associates.

I watched the golden days of the last century fade with the steel grey tones flecking his goatee and thinning hair. But life continued. An unselfish son, the love of his life and, dare I say, me, imbued Papa with a determination to keep the Liebler enterprise safe from travails. And London beckoned.

My father gave me the nickname ZaSu, in honour of his favourite American actor ZaSu Pitts.

ISBN :

SKU:	N/A
ISBN:	9781922830876, 9781922830883
Categories:	Action & Adventure, Adult Fiction, Books, Books, Fiction, Fiction, Fiction Books, Fiction Books, Glass House Books, Historical Fiction, Literature & Fiction, Romance Novels
Tag:	Trading Now