Story of family’s ‘black sheep’

Born of a childhood curiosity, a small amount of research, and the free time of lockdown, Solomon’s Satin tells the story of an enigmatic figure in Victorian London.

When Evan Robinson was growing up, there was always one figure his parents were secretive about – his paternal great grandfather Bernard Solomon Drucker.

‘‘All through my childhood, there was this dark character, this black sheep that no one mentioned,’’ he said.

‘‘First of all, he’s German and we’re talking early 1950s … in the 1950s all Germans were Nazis and so any German was unmentionable,’’ he said.

‘‘The fact that my family had a German ancestor and even worse, he was Jewish.’’

When Robinson moved to New Zealand from the United Kingdom in 2008, he set about writing his own autobiography and included a fictionalised version of Bernard’s story.

This prompted he and his brother to dig more deeply into Bernard’s story, which got more interesting the more they delved.

‘‘He stole 150 yards of satin (and that’s like stealing a Lamborghini), he defrauded somebody and he committed bigamy.’’

Robinson discovered he was a member of the Jewish board of guardians, as well as being a vestryman (member of the Christian clergy), which seemed a fascinating contradiction.

‘‘I thought this is an incredible story, and the more I looked at it, the more I thought I’ve got to write this.’’

Most of Solomon’s Satin is fiction, he said, as he sometimes needed to draw his own conclusions between the puzzle pieces of Bernard’s life.

‘‘You start to put all these bits together, and it’s like a jigsaw – you’ve got all these bits and you don’t know how they fit together … [but] you can see there’s a picture.’’

While Robinson had most of the jigsaw in place towards the end of 2019, Covid lockdown gave him the chance to fill in the gaps, and immerse himself in Victorian London without distraction.

‘‘When I’m writing, I’m not in the room,’’ he said.

‘‘I take myself back to wherever I am and I’m living it, I’m feeling it … I am in Victorian London, I am in this shitty, filthy, dark street – dangerous, smelly, smoggy.’’

Robinson liked to believe

Bernard would have been involved in helping women.

‘‘In the early part of the 20th century they had the suffragette movement and a lot of women came off the sex business. I thought he has to have been involved with that.’’

Robinson wanted to write the novel to paint a nicer picture of his ancestor Bernard, while also helping women in trouble today.

‘‘This isn’t for me, it’s for my descendants. For my siblings and their children, I want to set a nicer record for Bernard,’’ he said.

‘‘I don’t want him to be thought of as this nasty, dark, ogre character.

‘‘If he’s anything like me he just wants to be a decent person and help people.’’

He did not intend to make any money from his novel, and would donate proceeds of his book launch to the Blenheim and Nelson Women’s refuge.

‘‘This is about a guy that saved the women, and because I’m his great grandson, if I can do anything at all about saving women who are in trouble,’’ he said.

‘‘The irony is that there are a lot of women in trouble in New Zealand, perhaps more so this year.’’

The book launch of Solomon’s Satin would be held at the Blenheim Library on Sunday, November 15, at 2pm.

SCOTT HAMMOND/ STUFF Evan Robinson had always been fascinated by the ‘black sheep’ of his family, which resulted in his debut novel.