Stella Prize shortlisted author Katia Ariel admits to a “pre-emptive regret” at not being able to include the personal details of each of the thousands of souls relayed to her by Ephraim Finch, director of Melbourne’s Chevra Kadisha – or, Jewish Burial Society. From the mid-1980s to 2015, he buried over ten thousand individuals. The book largely unfolds through a series of deep-dive conversations between Ariel, Finch and his wife, Cas.

Ariel writes that anyone living in the Melbourne Jewish community during this period would “for better or worse” have had something to do with the working-class butcher’s son (originally Geoffrey Finch), a voracious archivist and beloved community figure with a “broad Aussie accent”. In the foreword to her book on Finch, author Arnold Zable calls him a “community ferryman”.

Review: The Ferryman: The Life and Deathwork of Ephraim Finch – Katia Ariel (Wild Dingo Press)

Finch and Cas converted to Judaism when he was in his 20s, some years after she found a guide to modern Orthodox Judaism, Herman Wouk’s This is my God, in a newsagent and felt “the traditions make perfect sense […] nothing else feels as warm, as deep”.

In his three decades in his role, Finch was devoted to holding and guiding thousands of kindred souls to their resting place. He did this by chronicling the lives of each one of them in his personal archive. Many of these souls were Holocaust survivors. Ariel writes:

He will reiterate to me, over and over, how important it is to ask questions, to let people speak, to listen deeply.

Reading Ariel’s work, the reader is at once reassured of the power of story, while bearing the weight of the countless tales left untold.

Ariel notes Finch’s practice of giving each family he encountered at the burial society a copy of Maurice Lamm’s The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning. According to Jewish law, the dead must be buried within 24 hours of dying, where possible. She is particularly intrigued by the ritual of tahara: the sacred act of purifying the body before burial, through washing and prayer.

Ariel pored over Finch’s journal entries, documents, photographs and transcripts of interviews with........

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