rabbi. Their mother also said that Raphael was a cousin (perhaps separated by some degrees) of Abraham Issac Kook, who in 1921 would become the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine. (Another Oshry from Lithuania, Ephraim, would survive the concentration camps and later publish four volumes of his spiritual instruction to Jews struggling to live by rabbinic law while under the Nazis.12) Sydney writes that another cousin, David Wolffsohn, was a leading early Zionist, and ‘partly responsible for the original design of the Israeli flag’.13
All of these connections formed a part of the family’s sense of its own history. Arthur wrote that ‘in our roots there was a lot of religion. But this was not really followed through in our house.’ Arthur’s mother would later be a South African Zionist leader, who visited Israel annually, and entertained a prominent visiting Israeli, Yigal Allon, in their home. But Arthur would recall that she kept a kosher house not out of conviction but so that others who kept kosher would be able to eat there – while she was quite willing to eat freely in restaurants away from home.14 This too seems to have been quite typical of South African Jews of that era.15
Arthur’s own Jewish practice seems to have been limited. Immediately after their father’s death, his brother Sydney taught Arthur how to say Kaddish, the mourners’ prayer, and they would recite it when they went with their paternal grandfather to the synagogue which he had helped found.16 Arthur would write, around the age of 80, that ‘the prayer has remained fixed in my memory and I can still recite it off by heart when I am in a synagogue and the occasion to do so arises’.17 Some years later, he would have a bar mitzvah, but not long after that he went to a Christian boarding school, where presumably his opportunities for Jewish religious observance were limited. As an adult, Arthur would fast on Yom Kippur, but he would prepare for his cases at the same time.
Anti-Semitism was certainly part of the South African scene. Many Afrikaner nationalists harboured significant hostility towards Jews, and while Jews responded by strongly identifying with English-speaking white South Africans, many English speakers manifested anti-Semitic views as well. The country had virtually cut off Jewish immigration by the time World War II began.18 After 1948, with the accession to power of the Afrikaner National Party, South African Jews would largely accommodate themselves to apartheid, very much to the dismay of critics such as Arthur.19
But in the meantime, as Arthur was growing up, he himself did not seem to be much affected by the anti-Semitism around him. Though he was one of only a few Jewish students at his primary and secondary schools, in each he seems to have encountered little if any anti-Semitism. He would write of his experience at his primary school that being Jewish ‘did not prove to be a major obstacle for me, as I was reasonably clever and quite good at sport. That enabled me to get along relatively unmolested.’ At his secondary school, where his older brother Sydney apparently faced bullying from an anti-Semitic clique of boys, Arthur himself recalled his Jewishness as having been useful, and the cause of envy from the other boys. Being Jewish allowed him to finish his homework while the other students attended mandatory chapel, and enabled him to avoid eating pork whose ‘rind had hairs protruding out of the skin’ – though he was in fact fond of bacon.20
For many young Jews in South Africa in these years, the drama of the building of the state of Israel became a passion, but Arthur did not join any of the Zionist youth groups. It may well be that members of the Chaskalson family who remained in the old country died in the Holocaust – Sydney recalls their father desperately trying to persuade a relative named Leo Schapiro, visiting South Africa in 1933, not to return to Germany. But Arthur was not yet eight when World War II began, not yet fourteen when it ended. He was aware of the war, of course, but the memory he brought with him from his primary school was of one of the children there, ‘older than me and as I remember him, overweight – [who] came from a German family. He became a victim. To make matters worse his father was apparently interned as an enemy alien, and that led to his leaving the school. I often thought about him, thinking how unfair it had been, and wondering what had happened to him. I never knew.’21 His sense of justice was already coming to the fore, and it was a universalist one.
While all South African Jews would learn of the horrors of the Nazi era, it was Sydney who was gripped by photos of the Holocaust, put up in the display windows of a Jewish-owned department store in Johannesburg. (Sydney thinks Arthur never saw this photo display because he was away at boarding school.) Perhaps in part for this reason, Sydney did military training to join the Israeli war of independence – but peace broke out before he could travel there. Years later, Sydney would emigrate with his wife and children to Israel. Arthur, however, didn’t try to join the war (he would have been 17 when the fighting stopped in 1949), and his brother recalled that he was never interested in emigrating to Israel. He would later write, ‘Had I been born in Germany my privileged childhood would have been very different. I would have been a victim of the Nazi laws, forced into a ghetto or children’s concentration camp, and denied the opportunity to practise law or engage in any other fulfilling occupation.’ But the conclusion he drew was about injustice in general and not Jews in particular: ‘As I grew older I gradually came to understand the full implications of this, and also to understand how different my life would have been if, born in South Africa, my parents had been black and not white.’22
As much as Arthur’s actual early life was a life of comfort and privilege, it was also shaped by early loss. His father and mother travelled to England in 1936, when Arthur was four, leaving Arthur and his older brother Sydney to be taken care of in their absence. The ill-fated trip was meant to launch the family’s mattress business on the London Stock Exchange. But Arthur’s father apparently had heart trouble, and he died on that trip, from some combination of heart failure and pneumonia, at the age of 40. Arthur’s mother returned alone to South Africa.
Many years later, Arthur would write about this return:
The day my mother was coming home I was taken for a haircut. After cutting my hair the barber sprayed my hair with scented water and combed it. Later my mother was home. She was sitting in the lounge on a couch with adults around her. She was wearing dark glasses. I assume now that was to hide her tears. I asked her to smell my hair. She did and I told her that my father used to like the smell of my hair after it had been cut. My aunt called me aside. ‘Don’t talk about your father’, she said, ‘it will make your mother unhappy’. I never talked about my father after that.23
His brother also remembers the return. ‘Relatives had been babysitting the two boys, but no one wanted to break the sad news to us. The lot eventually fell to our nurse Janet Thorogood. I still remember crying my eyes out, but Arthur, aged four and a half, could not quite comprehend it.’24
At the age of four, Arthur had lost his father. His only memory of his father turned out to be ‘of him at breakfast one day, eating a soft boiled egg’. That day, Arthur’s older brother Sydney was in the hospital recovering from a tonsillectomy, and Arthur remembered asking his father ‘if I could go to the hospital to visit my brother’. He recalled the question, but not the answer.25 His father was gone, lost not only to death but to the injunction from his aunt never to speak of him again, and to Arthur’s faithful compliance with that harsh rule.
The loss remained with him. ‘When I was more or less grown up,’ he recalled, ‘my mother gave me a gold Elgin pocket watch which had belonged to my father, and which she had kept for me so that I could have something of his. I had it for many years, winding it up regularly to keep it going, looking at it with pleasure from time to time, but seldom “wearing” it’ – until it was stolen.26 Arthur’s older brother recalls Arthur having one more memory, of their father buying their mother a cutlery canteen and saying that it is nice to buy people things. Arthur remembered sorting cutlery into this canteen, and when their mother died, Sydney made sure Arthur inherited it.27
While his mother would later remarry, in adulthood Arthur told his older brother that he
