The King of Dancing Shoes
This week's blog is not punctuated with injury and death but is one filled with inspiration - and hard work. It is also a tale of displaced migrants making the long journey to Australia to start a new life. JACOB SIMON BLOCH Jacob was born in May 1898 in Lithuania and named Yaacov Shimon, son of Lozer Blochas, painter and cobbler, and his wife Chaja. Shoemaking was in the family's DNA and at the age of 11 Jacob was apprenticed to a shoemaker. Jacob also studied dance until he was 15, when he moved to the larger city of Verniai to work as a cobbler. It was in Varnia that he married Zise Sandler, a bootmaker's daughter, in 1919. Polly, Zise's sister, and her British husband had migrated to Australia in the late 1920's. With their help Jacob arrived in Sydney in 1930, in the middle of the Depression, with the aim to find ample work to allow Zise and his children to follow him here. Determined to make a success of his decision to migrate to these shores, with li...