Hachette

• Review: Dirt Poor Islanders – Winnie Dunn (Hachette) Although Dirt Poor Islanders is her debut novel, Dunn is not new to the literary scene.
• That Dirt Poor Islanders draws on Dunn’s lived experience is crucial to its mission.
• The novel is an impassioned response to dangerous and detrimental stereotypes, such as Chris Lilley’s character Jonah from Tonga.

Whiteness and dirt

Dirt Poor Islanders traces young Meadow Reed’s negotiation of this tension. The novel is a work of autofiction – a blend of autobiography and fiction – which includes metafictional reflections on the genesis of the resulting book.

• The first chapter of Dirt Poor Islanders is a story she writes in her “gifted and talented” class.
• Dirt Poor Islanders contributes to a tradition of Australian narratives of young second- and third-generation migrants, often blending autobiography and fiction.
• They go as far back as Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi (1992) and Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded (1995).
• But Meadow is even more disgusted by the bugs, dirt and mould that infest the family homes and her body.
• Being both Scottish and Tongan, she thinks, meant “we were made out of – whiteness and dirt”.

Togetherness

• Despite the cultural insistence that “togetherness was what it meant to be Tongan”, Meadow resents this idea for most of the novel.
• Togetherness seems to consist primarily of the expectation that the family are together in suffering and poverty, rather than love and community.
• It is only when she recognises the togetherness of “kith and kin – blended not just by blood but by skin and soil too”, rather than perceiving her abjection, that she begins to understand her identity and heritage.

• In a scene that brings the abjection and resistance full circle, she refuses to use the dirty toilet outside the family home.
• She ends up with constipation: a literal blockage or denial of her body.
• Her anguish is only resolved when her grandmother takes her to a sacred site, promising “Tonga making betta you”.
• And her grandmother is right: as Meadow squats on the ground, she realises they are matched in their abjection.

Jessica Gildersleeve does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Last year, after a 15-year campaign, her abuser, Malka Leifer, who had fled to Israel, was tried and sentenced, convicted of 18 charges of sexual abuse against Erlich and her sister, Elly.
• (She was acquitted of charges involving a third Erlich sister, Nicole.)
• But when her need was most acute, Erlich could not have contacted any of these services.

Adass Israel ‘evokes 19th-century Europe’

• As with most ultra-Orthodox Judaism, Adass Israel originated in 19th-century Europe as a conservative reaction to liberal secularism.
• The cut of the men’s black silk coats worn with white shirts, and their mink hats, come from that time and place.
• The Australian congregation was only formed in 1939, but the tiny enclave within East St Kilda and Ripponlea where Melbourne’s Adass Israel community lives effectively evokes 19th-century Europe.

• Her parents had joined a generation later, as converts to Orthodoxy after emigrating from England.
• She notes that as a result, “my mother was on a mission to prove her worth to the Adass community”.
• Erlich writes that from a young age, she realised her mother’s rage “had no rhyme or reason, no trigger we could predict”.
• The children were punished by being deprived of food and even the ability to go to the toilet at night.

• Marriages are arranged via matchmakers, and couples have few meetings before their wedding.
• Erlich writes that the first time she had an unsupervised conversation with her former husband, Shua Erlich, was on their wedding day.
• Such is the fear of contamination by gender, unrelated girls and boys do not mix after they turn three.

‘It was just a woman’

When Dassi Erlich was in year nine, in December 2002, a new principal was appointed to the girls’ school. Malka Leifer had come from Israel with excellent references and appeared to be everything this devout congregation could desire. Erlich writes of “the respect and awe” the schoolgirls felt in the presence of this charismatic woman, who exuded authority.

• Her mother was flattered when Leifer offered to give her daughter private lessons out of school hours, to advance her religious education.
• Erlich wrote of these “lessons” that “I never found my words” to object to the continuing assaults on her body.
• The account of her inability to escape is hard to read, but is also hard to stop reading.
• It is hardly surprising the Adass community reacted to the news of the principal’s criminal behaviour in the same way.

• Her religion controlled every aspect of her life, but could not save her from being raped.
• It was just a woman.”

  Read more:
  Holy Woman's fleshy, feminist spiritual pilgrimage is a warning against religious coercive control

Unrestrained power, control and authority

• When Erlich becomes suicidal after the birth of her daughter, her husband’s liberal Jewish father pays for her admission to the Albert Road psychiatric clinic.
• The end of her marriage was inevitable, as were her many missteps on the way to freedom.
• In enclosed sects, whatever their complexion, those who leave and speak out against misbehaviour are shunned, often losing all contact with their families.

• The response of the Orthodox Jewish community to the truths exposed by Erlich and her siblings was as expected.
• In 2016, a year after the judge in Erlich’s civil case ruled that “Leifer’s appalling misconduct […] was built on this position of unrestrained power, control and authority that had been bestowed on her by the Board”, Adass Israel was the subject of a television documentary, Strictly Jewish.

Global quest for justice

• Instead, she was released from custody, feigning a mental illness that had turned her into a zombie-like state.
• The book details the behaviour of Israeli medical, legal and political figures in their efforts to prevent Leifer from facing trial.
• Jewish politicians, both Liberal and Labor, led their colleagues in supporting the sisters’ quest to bring Malka Leifer to judgement.

• Erlich’s account of how her predator was eventually brought to justice shows how well these siblings learnt to work with the once unfamiliar outlet of social media.
• After their Facebook group was trolled by Leifer’s supporters, they established a Twitter thread, #bringleiferback.
• Although the extradition, trial and conviction of Malka Leifer was a group effort, full credit for bringing her to justice must go to the sisters – Dassi Erlich, Elly Sapper and Nicole Meyer.
• This is a very self-aware memoir: Erlich and her sisters know they need to take control of their own narrative.

Joanna Mendelssohn has in the past received funding from the Australian Research Council

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• Australian publisher Hachette has withdrawn from publication the memoir of a retired police officer, after concerns were raised about its accuracy.
• Christophe Glasl spent 16 years in Victoria Police before writing his tell-all memoir, Special Operations Group, named after the elite force he was a member of for four years.
• In one chapter, Glasl writes of his involvement in the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.
• The case raises a number of questions: chiefly, what kind of fact-checking processes, if any, do publishers use when commissioning and editing non-fiction books, especially memoirs?

How do book publishers check facts?

• Book publishing doesn’t have the same intensive fact-checking culture as journalism – partly due to the resources it would involve.
• The first element is trust, Andrew Wilkins, who has been a book publisher for over 25 years and was editor of industry publication Books & Publishing, told The Conversation.
• Read more:
  How can publishers support the authors of trauma memoirs, as they unpack their pain for the public?
• “But in practical terms that would be very difficult to do, with so many different publishers involved and the sheer length of a book manuscript compared to a news story.”