The Lives of Brian Sherman: entrepreneur, philanthropist, animal activist

• Sharon Verghis

  @SVerghis

  
• 12:00AM August 25, 2018
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Sherman went on to mastermind further corporate feats: managing the finances of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, pulling off a rare profit under intense media pressure, then, as director of the ailing Ten Network, taking it from receiver­ship to record profits.

The Lives of Brian, a memoir written with AM Jonson, maps this life of achievement and entrepreneurialism. We see the many faces of the public Brian: the corporate magician, the wealthy philanthropist, art collector, Olympic torch relay runner, Australian Museum Trust president, passionate animal rights activist and devoted patriarch of one of Australia’s most prominent clans, featuring academic and gallerist wife Gene, Oscar-winning film director son Emile and author and activist daughter Ondine.

But we see, too, another face beneath this patina of success.

Here is the private Brian: self-doubting, vulnerab­le and dealing with all manner of pain. His acute depression and anxiety, his grand­child­ren’s rare genetic disorder, and his devastating physical and cognitive decline late in life.

We see him explore guilt and grief and ­knotty moral and existential questions, such as: Can suffering can be transmitted like a virus? Is his pain physical or psychological in origin?

Boxes, some tightly shut for years or never before looked into, are prised open. Black things fly out.

It is the raw, unfiltered voice of this private Brian that gives this memoir its surprising power and heart.

We begin in 1943 with scenes from an idyllic African childhood. Under the bright, blue skies of the East Rand in the tiny mining town of Brakpan, 40km outside Johannesburg, young Brian and brother Ron enjoy a typical country boyhood: climbing fruit trees, keeping silkworms, carving peashooters out of sugar cane, warring with the local Afrikaner boys. African peddlers ride rickety bikes, vendors sell mielies, or corn on the cob.

But all is not benign. From a young age, Sherman has a visceral awareness of a “dark under­tow” in his life. The Holocaust is a recent memory, hovering over the heavily Jewish streets of his childhood like a dark wing.

Hymie, his father, came to South Africa in 1910 aged nine, part of the diaspora of more than 40,000 Lithuanian Jews drawn by newly discovered goldfields in the East Rand. These so-called Litvaks would enrich the country with their energy and industriousness but remain always in an uneasy relationship with their hosts.

The anti-Semitism that drove Hymie’s ­family out of Lithuania and that would reach its apogee in World War II (up to 95 per cent of Lithuanian Jews were exterminated by the Nazis) had disturbing echoes in South Africa in measures such the Immigration Quota Act of 1930. In the fraught racial landscape of the country, “we are deemed ‘white’ only by the sheerest of margins”, Sherman writes.

Then there is the dark spectre of apartheid and its armoury: guns and pass laws, batons and boots. He writes that, as a child in bed: “I am startled awake by the guttural din of voices shouting orders, cries of resistance, and vicious barking rupturing the Brakpan night. These sounds are seared into my memory.”

We move through more lives: young recruit in the South African army, university student, intrepid traveller (his exploits included buying forged black-market visas in Istanbul, he recount­s gleefully). In 1968, after studying commerc­e at the University of the Witwaters­rand, he meets Gene Tannenbaum — pretty, cultured and formidably whip-smart — at a tenni­s match in Johannesburg. Sparks fly. Their relationship, he writes, seems “already inscribed in some charmed text”.

It would prove to be a union of soulmates: Gene would be by his side at every milestone, from leaving South Africa in August 1976 after the bloody Soweto riots (“there is no doubt that South Africa is broken beyond repair”) to building a life in Sydney with their two young children, to witnessing the mapping of what would become EquitiLink at the family’s kitchen table.

He and Gene would go on to build a charmed life together, rich in art, family, philanthropy, education and culture.

But there is always that dark undertow.

Trauma and loss stud Sherman’s story like red lamps: the suicide of Gene’s mother Mickey in 1968; the stillbirth of their first child in 1971; the death in 1979 of Gene’s brother, Peter, from an overdose after a long battle with schizophrenia and drug addiction.

Sherman is particularly haunted by his brother-in-law’s death. Perhaps, he muses, gentle­ Peter was born with no armour against life. With no carapace, “Peter felt things too acutely. I remember vividly he could not take a bath without gently removing ants and other living creatures from the tub.”

Sherman, too, shares this acute empathy, express­ed most intensely through the animal rights group Voiceless, which he co-founded with daughter Ondine.

Voiceless patrons include Nobel laureate JM Coetzee, primate researcher Jane Goodall and actor Hugo Weaving. For the animals, he says, quoting the great Jewish Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, “it is an eternal Treblinka”. But this same sensitivity is also a liability, he suspect­s. “Is extreme empathy my strength and my downfall?”

More blows come. Gene — that indomitable “pearl of a girl” — suffers an emotional breakdown in 2007; the Shermans’ twin grandsons, Dov and Lev, are diagnosed with the exceptionally rare X-chromosome linked genetic condition AHDS, Allan-Herndon-Dudley syn­drome. Sherman and son-in-law Dror embark on an international search for a cure that could be a book all on its own.

In 2011, a bout of weakness and dizziness leads Sherman to see a neurologist for the first time. Battling increasingly crippling anxiety, fatig­ue, weakness and insomnia, he finds himself on a harrowing diagnostic merry-go-round.

In 2016, he finally gets an answer: he has mild to moderate Parkinson’s disease.

It is a devastating blow, but it is the key strength of this memoir that Sherman doesn’t flinch from charting his slow decline in physical health and cognitive acuity, a quiet husking-out that leaves him stooped and shuffling, and so emotionally frail he is reduced to bouts of weeping on the phone to family and friends.

“I find myself brought low by infirmity,” he writes.

In her poignant essay on sickness, Susan Sontag writes of the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the ill. Now a reluctant citizen of this second kingdom, Sherman battles on.

He paid emotional tribute to Gene, his children and grandchildren at a gathering in the family home recently; to him, they are fellow soldiers in the battle against a disease that continues to ravage and diminish body and mind.

“I am struggling,” he writes simply at the end of the book. But, he continues: “I vow that I will fight. And my resolve is absolute — even ­greater than the aspiration that took me to the highest of my former powers.”

Sharon Verghis is a writer and editor.

The Lives of Brian Sherman: Entrepreneur, Philanthropist, Animal Activist

By Brian Sherman, with AM Jonson

MUP, 322pp, $49.99 (HB)

Sharon Verghis

@SVerghis