would become familiar with and internalize my father’s refrain: “As long as there is anti-Semitism in the world, we will always claim being Jews.” In keeping with this he closed his law office every major Jewish holiday as an I-am-a-Jew statement to the community. So while my friends dressed in fine new clothes and went with their families to shul on the high holy days—Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur—my mother packed a picnic lunch and my father drove us to the beach or the mountains or Tokai Forest to spend a day of play and relaxation. At dusk on Yom Kippur we would join my father’s oldest brother for the breaking of the fast. I was not yet two when World War II ended. The Holocaust must have been very much on their minds. My parents never ever bought German goods. (Years later, when my husband and I drove out of the Volkswagen dealer with our new station wagon, I was momentarily overcome by a wave of nausea—I had just bought a German car! “Sorry, Dad,” I said, lifting my eyes to the heaven I didn’t believe in.)
A disproportionate number of whites in the anti-apartheid struggle were Jews; many spent time in jail or fled into exile, where they both longed for and worked toward the day that South Africa would be free from apartheid’s yoke. Were they radicalized by their own parents fleeing the pogroms and terrible repression in eastern Europe? By the revolutionary fervor that preceded the Russian Revolution? Or by their unique experience as Jewish immigrants in South Africa, combined with the persecution Jews suffered in Europe during the Second World War?
MY FATHER LOVED TELLING JOKES and funny stories. As a teen, I would find his jokes oh-so-embarrassing. The stories that he brought home from his day, however, often captured the essence of South Africa. One evening it was about Pienaar, an Afrikaner lawyer friend and regular golf partner. “I bumped into Pienaar in the city today,” he announced over dinner one evening. “I told him that Louis Maurice had come for dinner last night.” Louis Maurice was a talented young coloured sculptor and a family friend. A grin began to spread over his face. “He looked a bit horrified and then asked, almost in a whisper”—by then my father was gasping for breath with his signature infectious laughter—“what dishes did you serve his food on, Joe?” He often couldn’t make it to the punch line. By now we were all in stitches.
But wait, what about the mottled blue-and-white enamel mug and plate with a chip of paint missing from its blue rim that had their specific spot in our kitchen cupboard? These were for Amos, our twice-weekly gardener, a polite, elderly African man. The domestic worker would prepare his breakfast—two thick slices of white bread with a substantial layer of butter and bright orange apricot jam and a mug of strong, sweet tea with milk—and later his lunch, invariably mealie pap, a traditional corn porridge, with meat-and-vegetable stew. He would eat sitting on the cement steps that led from the kitchen door to the backyard, his floppy gray felt hat low over his forehead. When he finished his meal, he would hand the plate and mug to the maid, who would wash and dry them and return them to their place on the shelf next to the green chinaware that we—and Louis Maurice—ate off. At the time, I didn’t think it odd: it was simply part of life as I knew it.
I was more aware later when my mother and aunt, sitting having tea in my mother’s kitchen in London, bemoaned the plight of a mutual friend whose maid had gone home to the Transkei for a holiday but had not returned or contacted her. My mother said, “I don’t understand it. She was one of the family,” and my aunt responded, “Well, I guess they have different value systems.” I exploded. I had already left South Africa and was well aware of the conditions in the homelands. “Did you not think she might be ill? Dead? Arrested? Not allowed back in Cape Town because her pass wasn’t in order?” I was on a roll. “Such a member of the family and your friend didn’t know where to contact her? So much for being one of the family!”
These contradictions stood out more the older I got, and the more politically aware. Still, I grew up in a home mostly devoid of the willful blindness of whites to the poverty and cruelty around them. More typical was the deep, consistent racism from people who didn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge it in themselves. One night over dinner, the wife of an Afrikaner physics professor, not much older than me, told me about their visit to Spain: “I have never, ever seen such terrible, terrible poverty,” she said, with anguish in her voice. “I found it unbearably distressing.” I listened in disbelief. How could she not regard the poverty in South Africa as “unbearably distressing”? Because in Spain, the poor were white.
Nor was I exempt from such blindness. My twenty-first birthday present from my parents was a trip to Europe. I traveled up the east coast of Africa on a ship that docked in Brindisi. As I looked over the railing at the Italian dockworkers unloading luggage and other goods, working fast, working hard, into my head popped the thought: “Can’t they get a better job?” Even though I caught myself, my first, unpremeditated assumption was that only blacks should do such menial work. Later I would read in Long Walk to Freedom Nelson Mandela’s reaction while traveling clandestinely in Africa before he was arrested: “As I was boarding the plane I saw that the pilot was black. I had never seen a black pilot before, and the instant I did I had to quell my panic. How could a black man fly a plane?” I wasn’t the only one indoctrinated into apartheid’s mind-set.
I AM IN MY MID-TWENTIES, visiting London. Miniskirts are in and I feel good and confident, something I need right now as I get off the bus and head up the street to my parents’ house in north London. I anticipate hovering clouds of tension. Living in New York has helped, but my father’s continuing attempts to dominate and judge me, even if less successful than when I was a teenager, can still leave me mute or belligerent.
Ahead of me I hear full-blown merriment. I recognize my father’s wheezing laughter and see my mother almost doubled up in mirth. She has her arm in his and their body language radiates a deep connection. I stop and stare. I don’t often come across them unawares. “They still really love each other!” I think, surprised that I am surprised. “More than that, they really enjoy each other.” I feel happy for them, and memories of my childhood surface. One of my father’s rhymes, from their betrothal days, pops into my head.
Rosie, oh Rose,
Put on your shabbosdikker clothes.
There’s a young man to see you
With a yiddisher nose.
I think of the scribbled notes my mother has squirreled away in messy drawers—poems and limericks written on the fly. This one, written around the time of a hernia operation:
Despite the troubles in Hibernia,
I got myself a double hernia.
Got myself a load of trouble,
Viscera burst just like a bubble.
Or:
Doctor said, “Don’t make a fuss,
I’m gonna put you in a truss.”
Aesthetic sense against it fought,
But the fight though good did come to naught.
Or the letter he wrote to my mother when she visited my Aunt Sophie in Oudtshoorn when Leonie was a baby.
Business is nice and quiet and it suits me perfectly. I am sorry but no fur coats for you this year. Perhaps next year if a few bears will lose their way and walk into my office. I love you, you rat.—JOE
I am more used to my father’s rages, including against my mother, and tend to remember her as scolding and demanding. I’m at a friend’s house on a play date and she calls: “Come home immediately. Your room is a mess. You have to tidy it.” Or: “You didn’t practice today. Come home right away.” My protestations are ignored. Her voice is to be obeyed. I am
