This Stunning Australian Story Rivals Philip Roth

Image by Europa Editions
The Golden Age
By Joan London
Europa Editions, 256 pages, $17
Where has Joan London been all my life? In Perth, Australia, apparently, at the outer edge of the earth, and completely off my radar. Which is a shame, because her third novel, “The Golden Age” — which takes its name from a pub-turned-convalescent home for children recovering from polio in the 1950s — is one of the finest I’ve encountered in a good long while.
The antipodal irrelevance of Perth looms large in “The Golden Age,” which centers on Frank (né Ferenc) Gold, a precocious 13-year-old Jewish refugee from Hungary who manages to survive the war with his immediate family intact, only to be struck down by polio shortly after washing up in far-off, provincial Perth. Frank’s parents had been set on immigrating to America, but, as often is the case, the 20th century had other plans for the Golds. In Perth, this “city with no past,” Frank’s mother, Ida, a celebrated concert pianist when war breaks out in Hungary, goes to work for a milliner, while Frank’s father, Meyer, at one time a successful businessman, drives a cold-drink truck for a living. For the Golds, the humiliation and loss of dignity of their son’s polio comes to symbolize a punishment worse than the loss of homeland. As Frank’s mother, who has refused to play piano since her son fell ill, reflects with characteristic pique:
But here they were, in a free, democratic country, and they were gutted, feeble, shellshocked. Frank had been a resilient little fellow, he’d survived cellars, ceilings, bombing, near starvation. Then they came here.
“Ida,” Meyer said. “Polio is in every country in the world.”
And yet for Frank, the hospitals where he’s exiled soon begin to feel a great deal more like home than the rented flat where his mother no longer plays her morning scales. The two medical facilities — the first a hospital for adults, where Frank befriends Sullivan, a would-be poet encased in an iron lung; then, after Sullivan’s sudden death, the Golden Age, where Frank is the oldest patient — are where Frank grows up and discovers his vocation (poetry), and then falls in love for the first time. As he wheels through the halls of the Golden Age, Frank jots down poems on a prescription pad, and when he thinks about his parents, it’s with a new distance: “I refuse to be their only light,” he intones over and over. “I want to be my own reason for living.”
Polio has shunted the children of the Golden Age off from their usual routines, and in many cases it has ostracized them from their former companions. They live in a cloistered, mostly adult-less world, a place of “enchantment” where they trade “onset stories” about the moment when the virus struck them down.
They also develop unusually intense intimacies: The love story of Frank and Elsa Briggs, the Golden Age’s second-oldest patient and a proper Australian is just one of the nuanced relationships portrayed in this book, which seamlessly shifts between points of view from chapter to chapter.
For all its focus on exile and displacement, “The Golden Age” is by no means an angry book. It is a quiet, elegiac story of love and renewal and liberation written in crisp prose that befits Frank’s new vocation. The outside world touches on the narrative occasionally: the visit to Perth from Queen Elizabeth in early 1954, and the subsequent Time magazine cover “Portrait of the Handsome Young Jewish Doctor Jonas Salk” and the words “Is this the year?” It turned out to be so — too late for the children of “The Golden Age,” whose “summer plague would soon be something that happened in the past.”

Joan London Image by Europa Editions
Like this decade’s other great polio novel, Philip Roth’s “Nemesis,” polio doesn’t just cripple the body. It is not, as in Roth, proof of the randomness of retribution from a nonexistent God. As he sarcastically wishes marriage and children and health — all the clichéd trappings of a happiness he once dared wish for himself — on his long-vanquished former fiancée, Bucky Cantor, the protagonist of “Nemesis,” proclaims, “Let’s hope their merciful God will have blessed them with all that before He sticks His shiv in their back.” There is no such shiv in “The Golden Age.” London’s novel suggests that, while polio is a disease that transforms its victims forever, certainly not all transformations — even the most involuntary ones — are always for the worse. Like gaining a new name, or a new homeland, against your will, losing the ability to walk can bring with it unexpected boons: independence, and love, and acceptance.
Laura Moser is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. Twitter, @lcmoser
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 3
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 4
Culture How two Jewish names — Kohen and Mira — are dividing red and blue states
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward ‘Another Jewish warrior’: Fine wins special election for U.S. House seat
-
Fast Forward A Chicagoan wanted to protest Elon Musk — and put a swastika sticker on a Jewish man’s Tesla
-
Fast Forward NY attorney general orders car wash to stop ripping off Jews with antisemitic ‘Passover special’
-
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.