Both families must have moved to England in the late 18th century and would have left the London of Charles Dickens to seek a better life in Australia.
[1][2] Author Judah Waten said in his introduction to Troubles (1983) (a critically acclaimed collection of 21 short stories), that "Alan Collins ... has recorded movingly, the lives of Jews without money [without being] cynical or misanthropic".
The archetypal cruel stepmother ill-treated the boy to such a degree that a magistrate ordered that he be sent to the Isabella Lazarus Home that had been established to accommodate Jewish refugee children.
When he was 14, Alan was sent out into the world as an apprentice printer, living on lowly wages in crude rooming houses – and worse followed when he left to work in what he succinctly described as the 'inferno' of a glass factory.
With the dream of having a real home for the first time in his life, he took the family to the raw outer-Melbourne suburb of Box Hill, where his sons Peter and Toby were born, and where he and Ros later fostered a young boy named John from a war-torn background.
In the short story The Value of a Nail (Meanjin, 1984), Collins eulogised that great Australian institution the hardware store, and in real life he gained creative pleasure from woodworking, establishing the 'Toby Toys' range for preschool children.
He wrote articles and short stories for magazines and newspapers, many of which are published in anthologies, and a radio play called Shabbatai!, which is an irreverent take on a bizarre character in Jewish history.
A prize-winning short story, The Balconies, provided the impetus for The Boys from Bondi, published by the University of Queensland Press in 1987.
He also became an enthusiastic student at the Florence Melton Adult Education School where he attended courses in Jewish history, philosophy, literature, and culture.