BAKER, Mark (Raphael)

Nationality: Australian. Born: Melbourne, 7 October 1959. Education: Melbourne University, B.A. (honors) 1983; Wolfson College, Oxford (fellowship), M.Phil. 1986, D.Phil. 1994. Career: Historian, University of Melbourne, 1988-2000. Since 2000 founder and CEO, MindAtlas Pty. Ltd. Founder and editor, Generation Magazine: Australian Jewish Life, 1989-2000. Founder, Keshet, Jewish humanitarian relief foundation, 1995. Awards: Lady Davis fellowship, 1986-87, and Golda Meir fellowship, 1994-95, both Hebrew University of Jerusalem; New South Wales Premier's award, 1997, for The Fiftieth Gate.

Publications

Memoir

The Fiftieth Gate: A Journey through Memory. 1997.

Other

Editor, Jews, Gardens, God, and Gays: Essays in Honour of John Foster (1944-1994). 1997.

Coming to mainstream prominence mainly through the publication of his family memoir, The Fiftieth Gate (1997), Mark Raphael Baker has enjoyed an esteemed academic career as a historian at the University of Melbourne (1988-2000). The recipient of major international fellowships from Oxford University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Lady Davis Fellowship, 1986-87; Golda Meir Fellowship, 1994-95), Baker conducted research concerning the social history of East European Jewry. His teaching areas have included the Holocaust, comparative genocide, modern Jewish history, and Jewish philosophy. In 1989 Baker founded Generation Magazine: Australian Jewish Life, a quarterly devoted to social commentary and artistic pursuits that continued publication until 2000. Baker's outrage at the Rwandan genocide in 1994 was expressed in his establishment in 1995 of Keshet, a Jewish humanitarian relief foundation that aimed to increase public awareness of regional and international atrocities. In early 2000 Baker founded and has remained the chief executive officer of MindAtlas Pty. Ltd., an innovative online repository of knowledge that aims to promote awareness and tolerance of cross-cultural diversity and difference.

Baker was born in 1959 in Melbourne, Australia, which is residence to the largest community of Holocaust survivors per capita outside Israel. Baker is a member of the second generation, the often-applied phrase to children of Holocaust survivors. His parents met in the small community of survivors that gathered mainly in the capital cities of Melbourne and Sydney and married in 1953. As told in The Fiftieth Gate, as a teenager he became acculturated to pop-culture references to, rather than discussion of, his parents' traumatic pasts. His parents' difficulty and anxiety in discussing this past was resented by Baker, a recipient of what he viewed as the material overindulgence resulting from the newly found wealth immigrant communities acquired from the industries of property investment and development, clothing, textiles, and manufacturing synonymous with the postwar economic boom of the 1950s.

Baker's adolescence of living privately as a vicarious witness to his parents' pasts is also arguably a metaphor for a larger collective dynamic between silence and speakability of the traumas of Nazi Europe that migrated with survivors into a subterranean Australian historical and social consciousness. Before 1980 the Holocaust was not visibly commemorated or widely spoken about as a public narrative of trauma. There was a wall of silence, if not resistance, to knowledge. Certain international events and trends served as moments in this confrontation with silence, at both the community and national level. In Israel, events included the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, the Six-Day War in June 1967, and the Yom Kippur war in October 1973. Debates over denial and war crimes were taking place, and in 1977 the Office of Special Investigation was established by American President Jimmy Carter, who also sought to make Holocaust memorialization an official program of the U.S. government. The screening of the American television miniseries Holocaust in the late 1970s also marked a major watershed in consciousness in both the United States and West Germany. The impact of these events in Australia was not immediate or entirely visible but instead contributed to an already existing but largely community-based culture of Holocaust memories.

In Sydney the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943 was commemorated from the late 1940s and was named Solemn Memorial Day in the 1970s. In November 1979 a Holocaust committee under the Jewish Board of Deputies was established, and in 1981 the first major exhibition on the Holocaust attracted some 40,000 people. In May 1982 the Board of Deputies established a separate Holocaust Remembrance Committee, and in May 1983 an Australian Association of Holocaust survivors was formed. Subsequent events included the first International Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in May 1985, the formation of a descendants' group and child survivors, oral testimony projects, teaching kits, websites, the opening of the Sydney Jewish and Holocaust Museum, and school trips to Poland. In Melbourne the visibility of international events also shaped an emerging consciousness, though it was still largely confined to family and community commemorated events, such as the Buchenwald Ball, an annual event attended by survivors and their spouses. In The Fiftieth Gate Baker discusses movingly his father's inspired contributions to this gathering.

In Melbourne in particular a literary consciousness was forged through the works of children of survivors rather than from first-generation memories. During the 1980s and 1990s the poetry, short stories, and novels of Lily Brett and the second-generation writing of Arnold Zable, for example, began to push the Holocaust from a concern of survivors, their families, and communities to the mainstream. This literature exposed the legacies of generational transmission and the continuing presence of burdensome and inexplicable memories. The presence of war criminals in Melbourne and Adelaide, the establishment of a government-sponsored Special Investigations Unit, and the publication in 1994 of an anti-Semitic novel about the Holocaust, The Hand That Signed the Paper, by Helen Demidenko (who was later exposed as a fraud) all contributed to a greater cultural sensitivity to the Holocaust's intimate and mournful location in the identities of various Jewish communities in Australia.

Through his profile in Jewish community circles, academic career, and occasional journalism in mainstream daily newspapers, Baker has contributed—in a dramatically moving fashion—to the repositioning of the Holocaust as an urgent moral concern in discussions of contemporary genocide, literary hoaxes, historical revisionism, and denial. It would be difficult, therefore, to discuss the passage in historical consciousness of the Holocaust from a location of personal and community memories to a concern that demanded that attention of Australian public and social debate in the past decade without the contribution of Baker's intellectual diversity, luminous output, and significant visibility. The Fiftieth Gate contributed immeasurably to that painful but necessary passage.

—Simone Gigliotti

See the essay on The Fiftieth Gate: A Journey through Memory.