MARK RAPHAEL BAKER: 1959 – 2023
In his last published column, before he died last month aged 63, Mark Baker, a writer, historian and one of Australia’s foremost Jewish public intellectuals, lamented that terminal illness had forced him to disengage from the world’s problems. It was not how he had imagined his end of days.
“Rather foolishly, I fantasised that I would set up a tent in the Judean desert,” he wrote in Plus61J Media, “go on a hunger strike, and wait until a final peace accord would be signed between Israelis and Palestinians.
“I knew it was a piece of shticky melodrama, but I actually believed that my one last vainglorious tilt at living would be an act of megaphone martyrdom.”
The passage is vintage Mark: self-deprecating humour, poignant irony and the theme that defined his life’s work, namely, the quest for redemption in the face of unfathomable cruelty and suffering.
It is a theme he imbibed from his parents, Holocaust survivors Yossl and Genia Baker, a name which was Anglicised from the Polish “Bekiermaszyn.” Yossl had arrived in Australia with a single sewing machine, enough for the couple to fashion a comfortable childhood for Mark and his elder brother Johnny.
The boys went to Mount Scopus College and enjoyed family holidays at Surfers Paradise. After Year 12 Mark went to Israel, starting off at a Yeshiva, a Jewish seminary. But as the rabbi at his funeral remarked, he had a lifelong struggle with the idea of God. Mark also struggled with the Yeshiva’s “spartan conditions.”
Read the article by Julie Szego in WAToday.