The Girl from Human Street

by Roger Cohen

  At night the lights of Simon’s Town glittered, a lovely necklace strung along a promontory. Nobody could tire of that view. A black nanny took me across the road as a small child to the parapet above the rail track beside the sea where the kelp was never still in the tides. She perched me there over a seemingly fathomless precipice. I got the message and can still feel it, although the chasm of my imagination was in reality a drop of no more than a couple of meters.

  “Moenie worry nie,” Laurie would say as he raised a glass of Scotch or gin and tonic. Don’t worry. Everything is fine. Whites are not going to fall off a cliff or over a parapet. Nothing will change. There will always be Sacks deli in Muizenberg, with its salt-cured beef and herring and lox, and there will always be crayfish of finger-licking sweetness. After the second drink—or the “other half,” as he put it—Laurie would lick his lips and murmur: “The game is on!” How he loved it, the game of ever-renewed pleasures and chance. He was just manic enough to take the best of life, never get anxious, and not veer out of control, as his daughter, my mother, would.

  Laurie lost a fortune on horses but somehow always contrived to come out ahead in the end. He had spent the last three years of World War II overseeing an Allied hospital in Al Qassasin, Egypt. The menu at his farewell dinner on August 26, 1945, comprised hors d’oeuvres, potage St. Germain, Welsh rarebit, fish cakes and tomato sauce, noisettes of lamb Portugaise, fried chicken and potato croquettes, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, crème flan and caramel flan. He was the kind of man who managed to end a world war that had devastated Europe and destroyed its Jewish population with a meal like that. On his bedside table, under glass, he kept the cards from his one royal straight flush over the course of countless poker games.

  “I feel like a new man,” he’d say after the “other half” was downed, “and now the new man wants a drink!” He’d clap his hands above his head, and a servant would appear with a refill for the “Baas.” Yes, Master. “Water never passed my lips,” Laurie liked to say. My grandmother Flossie, of cooler temperament, preferred a phrase she learned from her mother: “The things you see when you don’t have a gun.” Asked how a couple’s marriage was doing, she would shoot back, “I don’t know—I’ve never slept under their bed.” Flossie said all the women had affairs during World War II while their men were “up north”—several thousand miles up north—in Egypt. The thing was not to flaunt it. That would have been inexcusable. She was a great believer in discretion, charity, a good broker, and the stock of the De Beers mining company.

  We would go to Kruger National Park, a favorite haunt of Laurie’s. The early mornings were exquisite: lions loping across the road as they made their way to water holes; buck and horned wildebeest springing across the roads; zebra grazing in patterns arrayed across the shimmering grasses; elephants standing and staring and flapping their ears; vultures perched on the branches of dead trees or circling high in the sky over carrion; crocodiles still as logs with a shriek of hideous laughter in their bulging eyes. I watched transfixed as wild dogs tore into the carcass of an impala on the dusty track. The slow passage of a tortoise across the road was no less mesmerizing.

  It seemed to me nature was slow, deliberate, with sudden bursts of acceleration. Nothing much moved as the heat of the day rose. Then the air quickened. An eagle soared, elephants charged, a leopard ripped its prey apart. Life then was a question of waiting and timing. It might idle for several years before packing several into a single one.

  The living for my family was easy. The staff changed the nappies. The houseboys brought the braziers to the right glow for the braai. Two gardeners were employed, one for the roses and one for the rest. When dinner ended, the bell was rung, either by hand or by pressure of a foot on a buzzer beneath the carpet. A black servant would appear dressed in a white outfit, perhaps with a red sash across it, often wearing white gloves. Laurie and his friends donned their whites for Sunday lunch, preceded by a cocktail of “gin and two” (one-third gin, one-third Cinzano Bianco, one-third Cinzano Rosso, and “full to the brim with ice”), before ambling off to play bowls. At picnics on Table Mountain, Laurie, a beret on his head, in pressed khaki shorts and white socks pulled almost up to his knees, would plunge a knife into the pale green watermelons, making a series of incisions before, with a flourish, allowing the fruit to fall open in oozing red bloom. We feasted and left a trail of eggshells and bitten-out watermelon rind. As for Sunday breakfast on the patio, there were always fresh scones with whipped cream.

  Laurie Adler with my sister, Jenny, and his blossoming watermelon

  Elsewhere lay the Africa of the Africans—the natives, as they were often called—the distant kaffir townships of dust and dirt and drudgery where water was drawn from a communal spigot, homes consisted of a single room, clothes were patched together from scraps of passed-down fabric, and the alleys were full of the stale stench of urine. I could smell the hardship in the sweat of the houseboys. I saw it in the yellowish tint of their eyes. I felt the separation in the utensils and cups set apart for use by the staff alone. The blacks were always walking as our cars purred past. There were no sidewalks for them to walk on.

  A relative told me his first political memory from the early 1950s was of a great tide of black walkers streaming from Alexandra township—“like the Jews leaving Egypt,” he said, but of course no liberation awaited. The blacks were protesting against a one-penny hike in bus fares. Moenie worry nie, my grandfather Laurie insisted. He had been born in South Africa in 1899, Flossie in 1900. They should know.

  South Africa was as good a place as any for a Jew to live through the twentieth century, particularly an oyster-shucking bon vivant like Laurie. A friend of the family let slip a sentiment widely felt but seldom articulated: “Thank God for the blacks. If not for them, it would be us.” Jews on the whole kept their heads down; better just to keep stumm. Flossie voted for Helen Suzman’s anti-apartheid Progressive Party and then prayed the National Party remained in power—or she really might need that gun.

  She was far from alone in such genteel hypocrisy. The blacks were a form of protection. If you are busy persecuting tens of millions of blacks, you do not have much left over for tens of thousands of Jews. For South African Jews, aware of the corpse-filled ditches and gas chambers of the Europe they had fled, the knowledge of the sixty-nine blacks cut down at Sharpeville in 1960 or the sight of blacks without passes being bundled into the back of police vans was discomfiting. But this was not genocide, after all. With conspicuous exceptions (more proportionately among Jews than any other white South Africans), Jews preferred to look away.

  I tried to bring the picture into focus: my white mother and black nannies; the signs (once I could read them) on public toilets and train compartments, BLANKES WHITES and NIE-BLANKES NON-WHITES; the soothing abundance and the lip-drying fear. I sometimes found myself in the wrong places, a Blanke among the Nie-Blankes, a “European” among the “non-Europeans,” on the wrong bench or at the wrong counter. I pushed on the surface of things, but it seemed to yield like the bark of an old cork tree. Life had two hemispheres, north and south, cool and heat. It was double, two-faced. Its facets did not dovetail. So I absorbed it and learned to cope with it by partitioning. I was a child who kept to the squares and off the lines of the sidewalk, treading carefully. Trust was a stranger to me. Like Janus, I had to look two ways. The family’s South African homes overflowed with plenty. Yet their foundations were not deep, their history unclear, their future unsure. Only later did I begin to find out where we had come from and grasp the miracle of my mother’s lost South African idyll.

  A beach for whites only not far from Cape Town, January 1, 1970 UN PHOTO/KM

  Let us return to the beginning, to June 1895. First sight of Africa: the teeming dock at Cape Town; the bundles and boxes borne all the way from Lithuania; sun beating down on mountains that soar to a clear sky; a sea of people—black and white and brown—moving between the crates and bags piled on the quayside. Table Mountain tr
aces a line so flat, it seems an apparition. Colors have intensified, scale grown. In the shtetl everything was flat and circumscribed. Wonders had to be willed from the trance of religious devotion. Here the very earth is exuberant, and there are peaks that reach to the heavens.

  The two-week ocean crossing in steerage, or “third saloon,” on a vessel of the Union or Castle Line has been difficult, but arrival on an unknown continent scarcely brings relief from anxiety. I see my paternal great-grandfather, Mateo Soloveychik, in heavy black boots, holding the hand of his eleven-year-old son, Jack (known as “Ponk”), as they make their way through the crowd. Immigration authorities require possession of twenty pounds to approve entry. Perhaps a benevolent landsman, or Lithuanian compatriot, is able to offer a little advice in Yiddish.

  In the first volume of Jewish Migration to South Africa: Passenger Lists from the UK 1890–1905, I found a reference to a Mr. Soloweizik [sic], aged thirty-seven, “foreign,” a carpenter, accompanied by a “Master Soloweizik,” aged eleven, who traveled from London aboard the Arab of the Union Steamship line. That would be my paternal forebears, the father and brother of my grandmother Polly from Žagarė. “I. Michel,” my mother’s grandfather Isaac Michel, from Šiauliai, traveled at age nineteen on the Doune Castle on August 16, 1896. He had been born in Lithuania in March 1877 and listed his occupation as “prospector.” Some 80 percent of the eastern European Jews making their way to South Africa between the 1880s and 1914 were Litvaks, and at least half of them passed through the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter at 82 Leman Street in London’s East End. The shelter was established in 1885 to ease the passage of Jewish transmigrants from eastern Europe to South Africa.

  Rudimentary networks facilitated the journeys of the forty thousand Lithuanian Jews who uprooted themselves to come to South Africa from villages and towns like Žagarė and Šiauliai in the three decades before World War I. Tickets could be bought in advance through agencies in eastern Europe linked to the shipping companies that brought migrants first to London and then on to the African promised land of ostrich feathers and diamonds and gold, where Jews were the right color to have at least an entrée into the privileged caste of an emergent society.

  From Žagarė it was not a great distance to the Baltic port of Libau (now Liepāja in the modern state of Latvia). The need to suborn Russian officials could complicate the journey. Bribes were only the first humiliation. The ships departed twice a week with loads of three hundred to five hundred migrants crammed below deck. In London, bedraggled Jews were met and escorted to the Shelter. A large number of them, 41.58 percent, listed no occupation on arrival. The three next-largest occupations were tradesman or dealer (22.48 percent), tailor (6.23 percent), and bootmaker (5.81 percent). The most skilled profession listed was watchmaker (1.06 percent). The learned—the students of the yeshivas—tended to stay back in the heim. The New World, whether American or African, was suspect.

  The two principal shipping companies—they merged in 1900 to form the Union-Castle Line—paid for accommodation and food at the Shelter for a maximum of fourteen days, before ushering Jews on board at the East India Dock or Southampton. An article in the Jewish World of March 9, 1900, under the headline “Southward Ho!,” quotes Sir Donald Currie on the quality of the kosher food on his ships and the good behavior of the Jews: “Our officers have never had any reason to complain of the conduct of the third saloon passengers, they are well behaved, and are very grateful for anything that is done for them.” The shtetl was not a place that accustomed its inhabitants to even minimal gestures of kindness from men in uniform.

  Soloveychik (he would become Solomon in South Africa) has left everything, including his wife, Sarah, and five of his children, and ventured across the world into the unknown. Perhaps it is the arrival in 1894 of Polly, the last of those children, that prompts the gamble, or word filtering back from fellow Litvaks of the opportunities in the Cape and gold-rush Johannesburg, or some humiliation from a Russian official, or just the inability to feed his family—this carpenter with a young son takes the step Jews have taken for millennia on the road from Babylonia to Egypt, and the Land of Israel and North Africa and the Iberian peninsula and, after the expulsion from Christian Spain in 1492, the Polish expanse and eastern Europe. He moves.

  Behind him lies a Europe where, even as Jewish life in the eastern shtetl has scarcely shifted in its habits, emancipation for Jews is sweeping the lands west of the Elbe. In postrevolutionary France and in the new nation-state of Germany, Jews are rising in the professions, and some are amassing great fortunes in finance and trade. They have benefited from the elimination of old barriers but will suffer from the rise of new nationalisms—as the Dreyfus Affair of 1894 illustrated in France. Jews alone—unlike Serbs or Italians or Germans or Romanians—are being told that the condition of their emancipation is that they define themselves not as a nation but in exclusively religious terms. Some Jews, led by Theodor Herzl (who covered the Dreyfus Affair as a foreign correspondent based in Paris), are concluding that whatever the Jews’ striving for assimilation, Europe will never accept them. The solution to the “Jewish Question” has to be found in a separate independent Jewish state in Palestine, formed through the mass migration of Jews out of Europe. Herzl’s book The Jewish State (1896) was published just as several of my forebears arrived in South Africa from Europe.

  They, too, headed to a state-in-the-making. South Africa was then no more than a patchwork of political units, including the British colonies of the Cape and Natal and two inland Dutch republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. It had been transformed since the late 1860s by the discovery first of diamonds at Kimberley, deep in the interior of the Cape, and then in 1886 of the richest seam of gold in the world on the Witwatersrand (“Ridge of White Water”), so named because Dutch-speaking farmers of the Transvaal had seen streams there on the upland. The Main Reef, a long sheet of ore, was like a rucked-up blanket. It broke the surface at the crest of the Witwatersrand where, at six thousand feet, far from any river, the city of Johannesburg burst into being. To east and west the reef fell away. Initial mining took place where the gold was most accessible, at Johannesburg, but all it took to find gold on either side of the city was to sink a shaft. Countless townships, or dorps, including my mother’s birthplace of Krugersdorp, grew up along the line of the reef around these so-called deep levels. The quantity of ore was extraordinary. No other goldfield on earth was like it. Word of the discovery reached across the world. It filtered even into the small villages of Lithuania.

  My great-grandfathers Michel and Adler and Soloveychik head from Cape Town toward the gold. It is a trek of almost nine hundred miles, but they do not go in a straight line. Opportunity and chance encounters create diversions. All but Adler, who arrives the earliest and has grown up in London’s East End, come from Lithuania. Sometimes they can travel a section by railroad, but much of the time the journey is hard. They advance on foot and in mule-drawn wagons or ox wagons. There are few bridges; some rivers have to be waded or swum through. The mules need constant rest. The heat of the day confines travel to the hours after dawn. Native Africans act as guides and sometimes bearers for these white-skinned “Europeans.” At night, camped near water, guard is kept against wild animals.

  A few Jews like Barney Barnato and David Harris from the East End of London, or Sammy Marks from Lithuania, have already made fortunes in mining, joining the Randlords, but for most life begins as a peddler, or smous. Isaac Michel, who would become a retailing tycoon, started out as a smous. The origin of the word is unclear—perhaps a corruption of Moses or of the German word Mauschel, used for the haggling Jewish trader—but there is no doubt about what the smous did or how important his activity was in early South Africa. He was a roving peddler with all manner of wares providing the link between scattered dorps and far-flung farms. He bought on credit; he bartered and sold. He might start out on foot, graduate to a couple of donkeys laden with goods, and progress to a mule-drawn cart before acq
uiring horses and a covered wagon. The capital amassed could be used after a few years to acquire a general-goods store. The passage from smous to shopkeeper was a natural one.

  Michel bases himself for a while in Leeukop (Lion’s Head), about sixty miles northwest of Johannesburg, before moving to the city, where his first retail store, on the corner of Commissioner and Eloff Streets, is called C-to-C, like his preferred Cape-to-Cairo cigarette. He was always a man who tailored his ambitions to the size of the African continent. Johannesburg was a natural home for an immigrant on the make.

  The city, at first little more than a mining camp with scattered tents and a few huts, grows to the din of the stamp batteries crushing gold ore through the night. The air is tinged with a fine yellow dust. Miners’ lamps sway as they walk through shanties where typhoid sometimes rages. The first streets with brick or stone buildings spread from Market Square. Sickly yellow slag heaps, the color of bad school omelets, grow as the town grows. Like the headgear of the mines—the triangular metal structures fitted to lower cages of miners and haul them to the surface again—these viscous mine dumps composed of tailings are visible signs of the hidden riches that propel a new city into being.

  Men play dominoes in dark cafés. Bars and brothels and prostitutes multiply to cater to the newcomers, known as Uitlanders, or incomers, and to the Boers. In truth, the new city is made up almost entirely of incomers. They are hungry for gold and needy of everything: shelter, water, and food. Meals simmer on braziers, slabs of meat hang on hooks, and from the kaffir eethuis (African canteen) wafts the sweet, heavy smell of tripe and other entrails stewing in cauldrons. Burlap sacks of maize and other staples line the walls of general stores. In wooden casks, pickles float in brine.