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Alien Son
This collection of autobiographical short stories about life in Australia as an immigrant from Czarist Russia remains the best-known work of Judah Waten.
‘For years that famous thing the Australian short story, has had nothing new to say. Or, having new things to say, has left them half unsaid. But in Alien Son … Judah Waten has something new to say, gets it said, and conveys the full feeling of it.’ So wrote I.M. in The Age on the book’s publication in 1952. He continued, ‘Mr. Waten’s account of the new people [Waten’s parents] and the new land [Australia] is that of a man who has learnt — after the usual ups and downs of feeling towards both of, them — to love and to value them. The other new thing in Mr. Waten’s book is the getting down on paper — in all their freshness — the feelings of the then only child of a newly arrived couple.’
Judah Waten AM (1911–1985) was a novelist and short story writer. His works include The Unbending (1954), Shares in Murder (1957) and Distant Land (1964). He received the Patrick White Award in 1985.
‘For years that famous thing the Australian short story, has had nothing new to say. Or, having new things to say, has left them half unsaid. But in Alien Son … Judah Waten has something new to say, gets it said, and conveys the full feeling of it.’ So wrote I.M. in The Age on the book’s publication in 1952. He continued, ‘Mr. Waten’s account of the new people [Waten’s parents] and the new land [Australia] is that of a man who has learnt — after the usual ups and downs of feeling towards both of, them — to love and to value them. The other new thing in Mr. Waten’s book is the getting down on paper — in all their freshness — the feelings of the then only child of a newly arrived couple.’
Judah Waten AM (1911–1985) was a novelist and short story writer. His works include The Unbending (1954), Shares in Murder (1957) and Distant Land (1964). He received the Patrick White Award in 1985.
186 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1952
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 7, 2014
Alien Son is a collection of tales, thinly fictionalised, from the childhood of the author. Judah Waten was a prominent member of the Communist Party of Australia from the early twentieth century. His intense sense of loyalty meant he stuck with the party through the trevails of Stalin, Hungary and Czechoslovakia despite the disillusionment of many of his peers.
Waten's parents - his hapless, emotional small businessman father and his stoic, long suffering and goy-averse mother - drag the author and his sister from one prospect to another, trying first the metropolitan, then the rural regions of their new home Australia. Waten, the 'alien son', attempts to mix with the kids he meets along the way, all the while bemused by his mother's warnings about the fickle locals and embarrassed by his father's hare brain schemes and low, laughable standing in the communities which the family are never never quite able to infilltrate.
While I can see why Alien Son was revered by The Argus in 1952 as being 'the highest of all Australian fiction of the year.' it's a great example of how the realist fiction so favoured by many communist writers of the time can fail to achieve any sense of timelessness. Sure, it exists to document a time and an experience, and to educate and change, but as a piece of literature read in 2013 it's often just plain dull. Granted it is well crafted and you come to feel for Waten, his father and mother, but most of the time it just reads like Harp in the South with all the colour and humanity drained out of it.
I'm hard-pressed seeing it's benefit except as an historical chronicle of the Jewish migrant experience in Australia. For that reason I give it three stars but based solely on readibility I'd be forced to give it two.
Waten's parents - his hapless, emotional small businessman father and his stoic, long suffering and goy-averse mother - drag the author and his sister from one prospect to another, trying first the metropolitan, then the rural regions of their new home Australia. Waten, the 'alien son', attempts to mix with the kids he meets along the way, all the while bemused by his mother's warnings about the fickle locals and embarrassed by his father's hare brain schemes and low, laughable standing in the communities which the family are never never quite able to infilltrate.
While I can see why Alien Son was revered by The Argus in 1952 as being 'the highest of all Australian fiction of the year.' it's a great example of how the realist fiction so favoured by many communist writers of the time can fail to achieve any sense of timelessness. Sure, it exists to document a time and an experience, and to educate and change, but as a piece of literature read in 2013 it's often just plain dull. Granted it is well crafted and you come to feel for Waten, his father and mother, but most of the time it just reads like Harp in the South with all the colour and humanity drained out of it.
I'm hard-pressed seeing it's benefit except as an historical chronicle of the Jewish migrant experience in Australia. For that reason I give it three stars but based solely on readibility I'd be forced to give it two.
Read
August 13, 2025What a charming and quite lovely book. A collection of related chapters that recount the stories of the narrators childhood. The focus is on the struggle of his parents, praticularly his mother, to adjust to Australia and its ways of life, after emigrating from Russia sometime in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries and settling in rural Australia.
What could be a novel focused on the difficulties and tribulations the family face, and mired in negativity, is a book that instead is full of wry observations and warmth. Warmth both for the traditions of their 'strange' family life, as well as for the myriad of characters, both immigrant and native, thta people its pages.
One of the first books published in Australia that is written from a the view point of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants, this book is both a lot of fun and a part of the history of Australian literature. Highyl recommended.
What could be a novel focused on the difficulties and tribulations the family face, and mired in negativity, is a book that instead is full of wry observations and warmth. Warmth both for the traditions of their 'strange' family life, as well as for the myriad of characters, both immigrant and native, thta people its pages.
One of the first books published in Australia that is written from a the view point of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants, this book is both a lot of fun and a part of the history of Australian literature. Highyl recommended.
September 13, 2019
Judah Waten writes of a migrant experience Australia was an alien place for the scarcely disguised Waten family . Russian Jews they arrived and all made the best of the change. Mother experienced it all with great difficulty,stoicism and mistrust. Father was comical and inventive.
It is funny,tragic, sad and heartbreaking The language is rich and the time ,just before the first world war adds another dimension i loved it.
It is funny,tragic, sad and heartbreaking The language is rich and the time ,just before the first world war adds another dimension i loved it.
July 23, 2025
Judah Waten was a peripheral figure in Australian literature: a life-long communist, he mostly wrote polemical pieces for left-wing and communist newspapers and periodicals, with forays into fiction and non-fiction. Born in Odessa early in the Twentieth Century when it was part of the Tsar's Russian Empire, his parents emigrated to Western Australia before World War One, before later moving on to Melbourne. Alien Son is a fictionalized memoir of Waten's childhood in both those places. The book is structured in a series of vignettes that deal with his parents, the countryside, and Judah's growing sensibility of Australia and his place within it.
Given Waten's sensibilities, it's no surprise that this book focuses on the division of wealth, on power imbalance, and indirectly on racism. It also discusses what it means to emigrate from one's old world to a new life in a new world.
Waten's parents are the main characters of this book: his father was a dreamer, full of grand plans that never reach fruition, working hard to scrape together enough money for his family to survive. His mother refused to engage with Australia in any way - she stayed within the Russian Jewish diaspora and refused to learn English. She spent her time pining for the old country, and mourning the fact that her son was becoming someone she couldn't know.... an Australian.
Many of the vignettes emphasise the 'otherness' of being an emigre, especially a Jewish one. The story of the family's journey from Western Australia to the East clearly describes a young boy's shame at being different. Being forbidden to share food with gentiles immediately separates him from the other people on the ship. Mrs. Hankin's journey east to find a Jewish husband for her young daughter is an evocation of the difficulty of all migrants - wishing to continue their culture in a new world that doesn't understand, with the younger generation falling between the old life and the new.
Poverty is another theme of this book. Most of the Jewish community as represented are very poor, working as bottle-os or bag men. As the book progresses the community gets poorer, and begins to lose hope in the new country. Young Judah's eyes are opened to poverty; people who work themselves to death for a pittance, or who are beaten by the police for asserting their rights, or those who have lost the will to fight and are resigned to their fate.
Perhaps surprisingly, there is little overt anti-Semitism in the book. There is an over-arching sense that the Jewish community was looking out for itself because no-one else was looking out for it, but there is little sense of Jew-baiting in Australia, although there are a few references to pogroms and the 1905 revolution back in Russia. Anti-Aboriginal racism is on show, not from Waten, but from others of the poorest set.
As a work of literature, Alien Son is no great shakes: Waten was no doubt a victim of Socialist Realism, and the writing is very matter-of-fact and straightforward (although I did like the phrase "tiny, tired raindrops" used to describe the aftermath of a storm). As a work of social commentary and of the struggles of a certain group of immigrants at a certain time, Alien Son is invaluable.
Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au
Given Waten's sensibilities, it's no surprise that this book focuses on the division of wealth, on power imbalance, and indirectly on racism. It also discusses what it means to emigrate from one's old world to a new life in a new world.
Waten's parents are the main characters of this book: his father was a dreamer, full of grand plans that never reach fruition, working hard to scrape together enough money for his family to survive. His mother refused to engage with Australia in any way - she stayed within the Russian Jewish diaspora and refused to learn English. She spent her time pining for the old country, and mourning the fact that her son was becoming someone she couldn't know.... an Australian.
Many of the vignettes emphasise the 'otherness' of being an emigre, especially a Jewish one. The story of the family's journey from Western Australia to the East clearly describes a young boy's shame at being different. Being forbidden to share food with gentiles immediately separates him from the other people on the ship. Mrs. Hankin's journey east to find a Jewish husband for her young daughter is an evocation of the difficulty of all migrants - wishing to continue their culture in a new world that doesn't understand, with the younger generation falling between the old life and the new.
Poverty is another theme of this book. Most of the Jewish community as represented are very poor, working as bottle-os or bag men. As the book progresses the community gets poorer, and begins to lose hope in the new country. Young Judah's eyes are opened to poverty; people who work themselves to death for a pittance, or who are beaten by the police for asserting their rights, or those who have lost the will to fight and are resigned to their fate.
Perhaps surprisingly, there is little overt anti-Semitism in the book. There is an over-arching sense that the Jewish community was looking out for itself because no-one else was looking out for it, but there is little sense of Jew-baiting in Australia, although there are a few references to pogroms and the 1905 revolution back in Russia. Anti-Aboriginal racism is on show, not from Waten, but from others of the poorest set.
As a work of literature, Alien Son is no great shakes: Waten was no doubt a victim of Socialist Realism, and the writing is very matter-of-fact and straightforward (although I did like the phrase "tiny, tired raindrops" used to describe the aftermath of a storm). As a work of social commentary and of the struggles of a certain group of immigrants at a certain time, Alien Son is invaluable.
Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au
April 20, 2025
It was Pinchas Goldhar (1901-1947) who encouraged Waten to write stories of his childhood, and his autobiographical novel Alien Son (Angus & Robertson, 1952) was the critically acclaimed result. It is a series of linked episodes in the life of an impoverished immigrant Jewish family consisting of Father, an eternal optimist who (like Waten's own father Solomon) became a hawker and ‘bottle-o’ after his drapery shop failed; Mother, always pining for the life she left behind; a sister with a limited presence in the story, and the nameless boy, who thrives on the challenges of adapting to his new environment.
Alien Son offers a vivid picture of life in small country towns in the early 20th century when initiative and hard work could sometimes be sabotaged by bad luck or by external economic forces such as the Depression. The novel opens soon after their arrival in the new land, when Father has failed to make any money in the city, but had been told of a town where he was sure to make money if he opened a drapery shop.
Mother is pessimistic because she's heard this talk before, and she foresees nothing but sorrow ahead.
Father prevails, but their arrival doesn't look promising.
Alien Son offers a vivid picture of life in small country towns in the early 20th century when initiative and hard work could sometimes be sabotaged by bad luck or by external economic forces such as the Depression. The novel opens soon after their arrival in the new land, when Father has failed to make any money in the city, but had been told of a town where he was sure to make money if he opened a drapery shop.
The possession of money, he said, would compensate us for the trials of living in a strange land. (p. 1)
Mother is pessimistic because she's heard this talk before, and she foresees nothing but sorrow ahead.
We should lose everything we possessed; our customs, our traditions; we should be swallowed up in this strange, foreign land. She had often wheeled my sister and me to shipping offices to inquire for ships leaving for home. And once she almost bought passages for us but she didn't have quite enough money. (p.1)
Father prevails, but their arrival doesn't look promising.
We arrived at our new home long after the sun had sunk beneath the hills, which had become mysteriously black with odd lights that blinked forlornly as if signalling messages of distress.
In the dying light Mother stood gazing at the dingy, brown wooden cottage and while she stood she seemed to age and her narrow shoulders to grow more stooped. Her sad eyes wandered hopelessly over the broken picket fence and the neglected fruit-trees with their naked limbs outstretched.
Suddenly Mother was startled out of her deep musing by a merry clamour that sprang around us like a wind springing up from nowhere. The street which had been deserted was now alive. Men in shirt-sleeves and women in aprons stood behind fences and from open doorways flickered the yellow light of kerosene lamps. Children appeared from all the dark corners of the street, clustering around the wagon, chattering in a language of which we understood not a word. Mother seized my sister and me by our hands and bundled us into the house. And, disconsolate and weary, we sat on chairs in a room that smelt musty with dampness and disuse. By the light of a spluttering candle, our parents silently walked to and fro and emptied the bulging wagon. (pp.5-6)
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/04/21/a...
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