The Life Times And Music Of Mark Raphael

This biography explores the life of Harris Furstenfeld, born in 1900 of Polish Jewish immigrant parents into the dire poverty of Londons East End. Fatherless six weeks after his birth, his childhood is one of hardship and deprivation, yet his love of music transcends the squalor of his surroundings. His mind is filled with the immovable ambition to become a concert singer, no matter what the obstacles. He decides to change his name to Mark Raphael, and to forge a career for himself. From soup kitchens and second hand clothes to direct charity, bullying,persistent worry about making ends meet, and living through two world wars, his struggles enable him to achieve his goal, and much more.

This biography explores the life of Harris Furstenfeld, born in 1900 of Polish Jewish immigrant parents into the dire poverty of London's East End. Fatherless six weeks after his birth, his childhood is one of hardship and deprivation, yet his love of music transcends the squalor of his surroundings. His mind is filled with the immovable ambition to become a concert singer, no matter what the obstacles. He decides to change his name to Mark Raphael, and to forge a career for himself. From soup kitchens and second hand clothes to direct charity, bullying, persistent worry about making ends meet, and living through two world wars, his struggles enable him to achieve his goal, and much more.

Giorgio Vasari, Florentine painter and architect, friend of Michelangelo and intimate of the Medici, is best known for his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, published in 1550 and in an enlarged edition in 1568. With more than two hundred biographies, it has for centuries been recognized as a seminal text in art history and one of the most important sources on the Italian Renaissance. It is to Vasari that we owe much of our knowledge of Raphael (1483–1520), who in his day was considered perhaps the greatest painter of all time. Rich in colorful anecdotes, The Life of Raphael is important for its sustained attention to the range of Raphael’s art, whose chronology and development Vasari describes in detail, together with the painter’s ample love life and spectacular social career. It also pays attention, unprecedented for its time, to theoretical issues. This edition, introduced by the scholar Jill Burke, includes thirty pages of color illustrations covering the entire span of Raphael’s oeuvre.

What right did I possess, as a child of survivors, to recreate an account of the Holocaust as if I was there? In writing The Fiftieth Gate, Mark Baker describes a journey from despair and death towards hope and life; it is the story of a son who enters his parents’ memories and, inside the darkness, finds light. In his evocative prose, Baker takes us to this place of horror, and then brings us back to reflect on these events and remember: ‘Never again’. Across the silence of fifty years, Baker and his family travel from Poland and Germany to Jerusalem and Melbourne, as the author struggles to uncover the mystery of his parents’ survival: his father Yossl was imprisoned in concentration camps and his mother Genia was forced into hiding after the Jews of her village were murdered. Twenty years on from its first publication, The Fiftieth Gate remains an extraordinary book. It has become a classic and has now sold over 70,000 copies. In Baker's new introduction, he recalls his motivations for writing this important memoir, and highlights how the testimonial culture in Holocaust studies has spread to awareness of other genocides and our responsibility (and failure) to prevent them. As well as The Fiftieth Gate, A Journey Through Memory, a seminal book on his parents’ experience during the Holocaust, Mark Raphael Baker has written a compelling memoir, Thirty Days, A Journey to the End of Love, about the recent death of his wife. He is Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the School at Monash University, Melbourne. ‘Heartrending and beautiful...This simply written, subtly complex narrative is instantly recognisable as a masterpiece, and the reader is rewarded by the light it sheds.’ Age ‘Combining precise historical research and poetic eloquence, Mark Baker’s The Fiftieth Gate remains the gold standard of second generation Holocaust memoirs on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary edition.’ Christopher R. Browning ‘Baker does with memory, what Rembrandt does with light. He uses it to model, to imagine, to illuminate, to astonish.’ Philip Adams

One minute my wife was there. In a flash she was gone. In the ten months of Kerryn’s dying, I prepared myself for everything except for her death. Now that she is gone, I am desperate to know her as I never knew her. Thirty Days is a portrait of grief, of a marriage and of a family. It is the moving memoir of Mark’s wife of 33 years, Kerryn Baker, who died ten months after her diagnosis, aged 55, from stomach cancer. It is also a study in how we construct our own version of the past, after Mark discovers a cache of Kerryn’s letters in the laundry cupboard and has to rethink their relationship. It is a book about memory and its uncertainties, as Mark sifts through photos and home movies, as his wife gets sicker, and his search for clues about their relationship grows more desperate. In her last days, Kerryn reveals her traumatic childhood to Mark for the first time. She emerges as the rock of the family, a brave and wise woman, clear-eyed about her treatment, focused on finding the path to a peaceful death. Paradoxically, her dying brings the couple back to the intensity of their first love. In the tradition of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and Cory Taylor’s remarkable memoir, Dying, Mark Baker’s Thirty Days is an inspirational book about death and dying. As well as The Fiftieth Gate, A Journey Through Memory, a seminal book on his parents’ experience during the Holocaust, Mark Raphael Baker has written a compelling memoir, Thirty Days, A Journey to the End of Love, about the recent death of his wife. He is Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the School at Monash University, Melbourne ‘Piercing, unsparing, and sweet, this book will break your heart and put it back together again.’ Miranda Richmond Mouillot, author of A Fifty-year Silence ‘A lament, a wail, a raw confession of suffering and regret, but most of all, of love.’ Ramona Koval ‘During the first thirty days of mourning, as Jewish law decrees it, Mark Baker wrote about his wife Kerryn Baker, who lived an ‘ordinary’ life, as most of us do, but who was extraordinary in the courage, dignity, and above all, the gentle, wise grace of her dying. Few of us will be able to die so well, but every reader of this book will be inspired to do so. Baker recalls their life together and writes of Kerryn’s death and dying in many tones—lyrically, tenderly, with self-deprecating irony, embarrassed candour and more—but one hears in them all pain so raw and need so desperate that it sometimes threatened to unhinge him. He writes of love and grief with power that brings back to our hearts knowledge that is too often only in our heads—that the disappearance of a human personality will forever be mysterious to us because every human being is irreplaceable.’ Raimond Gaita ‘Thirty Days is more than a cancer memoir, it is a searching, courageous, intensely intimate portrait of a marriage, a family, a beloved woman, a man wild with loss. Baker addresses the reader with searing honesty from the very heart of grief. His testimony will leave you devastated, enriched, irrevocably altered.’ Emily Bitto ‘A beautiful memoir, not just about one marriage, but the nature of marriage itself.’ Readings ‘A book characterised by love, empathy and connection to life.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘Baker’s memoir allows his readers to see the magnitude of our existence beneath the surface of our daily lives’ Courier Mail