Читать книгу Mapping My Way Home - Stephanie Urdang - Страница 11

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 intriguing fact: “Many non-Jews also don’t believe in God,” and she listed off, finger by finger, the nonbelievers among our Gentile friends.

I 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 humiliated and pouty, but I return home and play my violin for a precise half hour but don’t do the practice, knowing she won’t know the difference. Later I will appreciate that her anger at me is the anger she can’t level at my father. She had her feisty, determined side, head pushed out, lips tight, whether it was digging a hole to plant a tree when she was seven months pregnant or flaring up in outrage at injustice. The poverty in South Africa was a constant source of anger for her.

As a child, I would look hard at photos of my parents in their youth. My father was a handsome, six-foot-tall man in shorts with thick wavy black hair and skinny legs. Some photos show him with a serious expression, others light-hearted. All show his stereotypical Jewish nose, which he was quick to joke about, laughing as he sang along to his LP recordings of Jimmy Durante, the Schnozz, the American comedian renowned for his large proboscis.

Standing next to him, my mother seemed even shorter than her five feet. She was an attractive woman with a bushy head of black hair and a rounded body. She started going gray, as did I, in her thirties, turning completely white by her midfifties. Although she dressed carefully and enjoyed shopping for what she needed, her wardrobe was not large. Consumer goods were not that important to her, but books were. I would often come home from school to find my mother taking an afternoon rest, a book clasped in her hands. She went for the classics, abhorred best sellers, which she considered trashy, but churned through the mysteries such as those of of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. Nothing too violent. Once I graduated to chapter books, I too became an avid reader. Twice a year my mother would take me to Stuttafords department store to choose a hardcover from the children’s book section. “No Enid Blyton!” was her one rule, referring to the popular British author whom I loved but she considered trite. I would spend time savoring the new books, mulling over this or that title until I selected one. Back home I would crack it open, eager to start, intoxicated by the new-paper smell.

While books were my lifeline, classical music was even more so. As I listened to my parents’ records, and to my own growing collection, I escaped from my insecurities and the family tension that seeped out of the walls. I would be transported by the waves rolling through Jascha Heifetz’s Mendelssohn Violin Concerto or Pablo Casals’ Bach Cello Suites.

I COULD SLOUGH OFF MY MOTHER’S demands. Not my father’s. Full of charm and laughter one moment, he could be withdrawn or explosive the next. I feared his foul moods and outbursts of temper. Swayed by his authoritarian assertions that I was too young to have thoughts of my own but should learn from his experience, I adopted his thinking as mine. I tempered what I wanted to say or censored my own opinions until I could suss out what his were and adapt accordingly. When he berated me sharply I would often dissolve into tears. The next morning I would wake to a small peace offering on my bedside table, a chocolate bar or candy—his way of telling me he was sorry. Until the next time.

My mother, too, was intimidated by my father’s anger, and I would absorb her unhappiness when one of his moods descended on our household like a dark cloud. Leonie was more resilient and could stand up to him better than I, but she found it exhausting and annoying. At age twenty-one she emigrated to London, to get away from apartheid but also to break free of our father’s hold.

A turning point came when I was sixteen. It was right after the Sharpeville massacre. I was visiting my Aunt Sophie in Camps Bay, standing in her narrow living room to the right of the piano talking to my cousin, Arnold, who was five years older that I. The salty smell of seaweed and ocean entered the room through the open windows, and from beyond the playing fields I could hear its steady ebb and flow and catch the sparkle from the rippled surf.

“What do you think about all that has been happening?” Arnold asked. I felt a tightening in my chest, something I was used to when asked for my opinion. I froze. I assumed my cousins and my sister could only agree that my father’s strong opinions as the family intellect were to be learned from, not challenged.

“I don’t really know,” I spluttered. “I haven’t discussed it with Joe yet.” I had recently started calling my father Joe, a first unconscious effort to distance myself. Arnold contemplated me for a long minute. I shifted on my feet, rolling them onto the outer edge and back again while scrunching my toes in discomfort as I waited for him to respond to my statement with approval.

“You know, Stephanie,” he said, with some condescension in his voice. “Joe is a very smart and knowledgeable man. But he doesn’t know everything. You have to learn to think for yourself. You are certainly bright enough.”

The ground suddenly shifted. How could Arnold be so dismissive of Joe’s opinions? I was truly shocked. At the same time, his words became the catalyst that enabled me to eventually break away from my father’s hold, even though it would take many more years to do so. What I did not give up were the values he passed on to me. He was a man passionately intolerant of racism and anti-Semitism, of injustice and inequality. Most of all, he taught me to hate apartheid, a hatred that would define my life.