we walk through the wooden door in the high wall surrounding the cement backyard, I slow down. I contemplate Maria’s—we pronounce Ma-reye-ya—room. She is a slight, wiry, coloured woman, older than my mother, who works for us. She adores me. When she asked my father to draw up her will, leaving all her savings to me, he refused, saying that if she insists he can’t act as her lawyer. They settled on £50. The rest was left to her nephew, whom she called a no-good skellum. She would die of a stroke about four years later. Now as I follow my father from the car through the backyard and into the house my new knowledge hones in on another troubling reality I had not thought about before. Maria’s room, off the yard outside the kitchen where the washing is hung on long lines and the garbage pails are set out, is half the size of mine. It’s against the law for her to live in the main house. There is only enough room for a single bed, a small dresser, a narrow wardrobe, and a small rug. She keeps her few possessions in boxes under her bed. It smells of cold cement. Her bathroom has a separate entrance and she must go out into the yard to get to it. In contrast, the rooms of our house, which she keeps spotless, are airy and spacious and glisten with polish and elbow grease. In later years, I would see this as a moment that pierced my protective, privileged skin and led me to think more deeply about inequality and oppression, and ultimately led to my activism. A wake-up moment.
Despite the dissolving film, my young self continues to take much for granted. As I leave childhood behind and enter adolescence, friends and parties and boys become the center of my life. But a chill has settled into my bones, to remain mostly contained until I am seventeen and at university, where I am gripped anew by what my father has told me years before. The word “privilege” latches onto at me like a leech and sucks dry my love for this country.
3 — “You Have to Learn to Think for Yourself”
My parents met at the Lenin Club. They were in their twenties, my mother, Rose, three years younger than my father, Joe. He was one of the founders of the club, whose members supported the ideology of Lenin and Trotsky and opposed the rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and what they saw as the hard-line position of the South African Communist Party.
Their parents—my grandparents—were among the many Jews who fled eastern Europe when the pogroms were at their height at the end of the nineteenth century. Most sought refuge in the United States, but by 1914, there were forty thousand East European Jews in South Africa, the overwhelming majority from Lithuania and Latvia.
I know little about my paternal grandparents. My grandfather was Lithuanian, a shoemaker. He met my grandmother when he went to seek work in Riga, the capital of neighboring Latvia. My grandmother was more educated than he was. Two of his five brothers were born before they immigrated to South Africa. One died in World War I.
I know more about my maternal grandfather, Moses Schur, and his second wife, Leah Stutzen, who was the one grandparent still living when I was born. She was an ornery presence throughout my childhood, a woman fond of her grandchildren as long as she didn’t interact with them too much.
What were my grandmother’s first reactions when she saw Table Mountain from the ship as it neared the docks? She must have felt heavy-hearted. She had left behind her true love, a rabbinical student whom her younger brother had forbidden her to marry. At twenty-four she was not going to easily find a man acceptable to both her and her family. Moses Schur, a rich widower, must have seemed like a better-than-nothing alternative, despite being thirty years older than her, particularly as the older sister she adored already lived in Cape Town and had arranged the marriage in the first place. She never talked about her betrothed back home, nor why the family had prevented the marriage. I suspect he was one of the radical students who organized a strike at the Yeshiva in her town around the time they were engaged. What she made clear to her daughters was that she had no love for this old man, who had five sons around her age and treated her poorly.
Moses Schur arrived in South Africa in 1880, penniless but determined. Starting off as a smous—an itinerant peddler—with no more than a donkey and a back pack, he eventually acquired considerable wealth from the small empire of shops and hotels he built that served the needs of rural Afrikaners in the far reaches of Cape Province. While he was alive they lived well. Photos show her in splendid finery, large and buxom next to an old grizzled man who appears to be half her size. She stares out at the camera, expressionless. When Moses died, he left her with three children—Sam, aged nine; Sophie, aged seven; and Rose, aged five—as well as a small stipend, and a spacious house on the slopes of Table Mountain. His considerable wealth somehow disappeared. According to my father, the executor of the will swindled Leah, the ignorant young woman from the old country, as well as her children, and her stepchildren out of their inheritance. To make ends meet, Leah turned her home into a kosher boarding house for the daughters of Jews who lived in the rural areas and attended school in Cape Town.
“Tell me about your childhood,” I would ask my mother, eager for real-life stories. But besides the games she played, only bitter memories would surface. Some of the parents never paid their bills, and my grandmother could never insist. Rose and Sophie—but not their brother, Sam—never had their own bedroom; there was always the need to house one more boarder. At school, they were taunted mercilessly for being the daughters of the poor, disliked landlady. The taunts still stung: with hurt in her eyes, my mother could still name the worst offenders. I once asked my aunt Sophie, who enjoyed writing and had an occasional piece published in local newspapers, to write about her childhood. She shook her head: “I once tried, but I had such nightmares that I stopped.”
Once her children were in their late teens, Leah offered rooms to young Jewish men—university students, many of them political radicals. They introduced Rose to the Lenin Club and a new world opened up, one in which discussion and debate centered around the evils of apartheid, the struggles of the working class, socialism, and the way to bring about transformation and secure rights for the majority of South Africans. She was immediately drawn to my father, this charming handsome man, who loved an argument, who laughed easily and told silly jokes. They married in 1937. Leonie was born in 1939, and I was born four and a half years later, in 1943.
My parents were atheists, and rejected the strict religious orthodoxy of my grandparents. Nonetheless, from my earliest memory I knew that we were Jewish. What that actually meant was tested on my first day of kindergarten at Oakhurst Primary School. Twenty new girls sat cross-legged in a circle on the carpeted floor, sun flooding in from the windows. My new friend, Lulu, and I sat shoulder to shoulder as our teacher, Miss Hanny, explained the how, what, and wherefore of the school day. This included twice-weekly religious instruction classes, which she called RI.
“Will the Jewish girls please raise your hands,” she said. Four arms went up, including mine and Lulu’s. Ms. Hanny went on to explain that as we were Jewish we were excused from attending RI. I turned to my new friend. “I know why,” I pronounced with four-and-a-half-year-old certainty. “It’s because Jews don’t believe in God.” Lulu, with a look of disbelief, scuttled away from me as if I had morphed into something vile, leaving a wide gap between us.
“Not so!” she protested with much five-year-old indignation. “Of course we believe in God!”
What could she possibly mean? My father and my mother told me that God did not exist. I also knew we were Jewish. Surely that meant Jews did not believe in God? I mulled over Lulu’s reaction for the rest of the short school day. It was the first question I asked my mother when she came to pick me up, ignoring her eager “Did you like school? What did you do?”
“Lulu says Jews believe in God. But that’s not true, is it, Mummy?” A smile spread across my mother’s face. “Most Jews believe in God,” she explained gently. “Granny does, and she goes to synagogue every Saturday morning. So do Daddy’s brothers, your uncles. We don’t. Aunt Sophie doesn’t. But we are still all Jews.” She added an
