Acland Street

This guide to Acland Street in Melbourne follows Avram and Masha Zeleznikow, a couple who survived wartime Europe's shifting borders and arrests before opening Cafe Scheherazade here in 1958, feeding refugees, artists and chess players without ever asking what they wanted. It traces the street's run of continental cake shops that grew up around them, starting with a Polish family's Monarch Cakes in 1934, on one of the only streets where Jewish shopkeepers could trade on a Sunday. Sunday mornings once brought solitary men out of the nearby boarding houses, straight to that open door.