by Roger Cohen
Michel had cofounded South Africa’s largest retail chain, the OK Bazaars. “I’ll meet you at the OK” entered the lexicon. The OK was everywhere, from metropolis to dorp, as much part of the landscape as the peppercorn tree or the springbok. Not bad for a former smous.
Isaac’s children knew wealth rather than the struggle to accumulate it. They were the lulled second generation, easing into the new South African Jewish elite of commerce and finance. The “Peruvians” had been pilloried in some quarters upon their arrival in the 1890s, mocked in the “Hoggenheimer” caricatures of Jewish plutocrats in the years after the Boer War, and branded as Bolsheviks in 1917. As in Europe, they were attacked for being capitalists, and they were attacked for being communists. But with its vast black underclass, South Africa afforded ample space for Jews with acumen to get ahead.
Isaac Michel with his wife, Jennie
Michel was not one of the towering figures—they included Schlesinger (movie theaters and insurance), Oppenheimer (mining), Ackerman (retail), Lazarus (maize), and Frankel (food processing and milling)—but Isaac was shrewd enough to make his pile and establish a little dynasty. Rapid assimilation is based on a silent bargain—the erasure of the past in the name of a boundless future—that may be less foolproof than it seems.
By the end of his life, it was scarcely possible to explain, even to imagine, where Michel had come from. Yet certain habits from the Lithuanian shtetl and from the years of struggle as a smous persisted. Isaac would place a cube of sugar in his mouth and let it dissolve as, in a glass with a metal holder, he drank tea drawn from a samovar. The sweet lozenge beneath his tongue, shrinking bit by bit, was Isaac’s spangolių, an open sesame to Lithuanian memory, just as cranberries were to my paternal grandmother, Polly. Other South African immigrants from Lithuania yearned for cherries or, dying, wanted to see the ice skates they had brought with them.
Sometimes Isaac would add a spoon of strawberry jam to the glass. He picked breadcrumbs from the table, pressing his forefinger into them, and when asked why would tell his grandchildren they had no idea what it was to be hungry. After a meal, Havana in hand, black brogues snapping on the polished parquet, he circled the oval mahogany dinner table for his “constitutional.” My mother, as a teenager, feared the footsteps would stop behind her if she had not eaten up.
An inventory of Isaac’s furniture and household effects drawn up at the time of his death in 1953, and found in the South African Archives in Pretoria, gives some idea of the setting: a Louis XV display cabinet with four hand-painted panels and ormolu decorations; a pair of large ceramic Dresden vases; china and Venetian glass; a four-piece Irish silver tea set; an Empire-style escritoire; a three-piece French clock set and two urns; a large Tabriz carpet (twenty-one feet by thirteen); a Buhl folding card table; a silver-plated card tray; couches and a chair in silk damask; an Empire-style cabinet with china insets; an inlaid Empire table with ormolu decorations.
Years later a Jewish family in Johannesburg who had acquired some of the furniture at auction tried to encourage the marriage of their son to one of Michel’s granddaughters. Play your cards right, and you might get all this back. You see those armoires and that painting—they were Isaac’s.
Fortunes are more easily forgone than forgotten. Once lost, they leave the question not only of how such plenty was squandered but of how far they were imagined. They grow in memory, the chimera of an ephemeral ease.
Photographs of Michel evince a nervous energy. He is coiled, resolute, and brisk. The cut of his clothes is as crisp as the line of his parting. In double-breasted dark suit and Borsalino, umbrella clasped below the handle and carried parallel to the sidewalk, he strides through downtown Johannesburg, his right hand clenched. He could be on Michigan Avenue in 1930s Chicago. In a single-breasted charcoal pinstripe, he appears caught from below against a clear sky at an angle that accentuates the line of his jaw. On the beach at Muizenberg in late middle age, seated in a deck chair, leaning forward, hands cupped in front of him, his expression is as intense as his body is lithe. Big eyes, pale and sensual, dominate his face.
Isaac Michel, at the height of his business success, striding down a central Johannesburg street
Michel was a ladies’ man, but appearances were maintained even if, in later years, he and his wife had little to say to each other. His marriage, just before the turn of the century, to Jennie Rosenberg from Newcastle, England, produced six children, three boys and three girls. The oldest was my grandmother, Florence Blanche (Flossie), born in 1900. There followed Lily, Willie, Bertie (“Googoo”), Basil, and beautiful, moody Alethea, known as “Baby.”
After family meals at Château Michel, the men would play whist and the women rummy. A manicured lawn for bowls, a swimming pool, and a rose garden adorned the yard that stretched over two Houghton acres. Old Dad Tomsett, the gardener plucked from England, patrolled with two Irish setters in tow. Michel liked to go hunting with him on weekends. He owned, in the Rivonia area near Johannesburg, a four-hundred-acre farm called Duxbury, the same name he gave to his house in the Cape where I would spend part of my Southern Hemisphere summers. For a while he kept a lion in a cage up there. His favored gun was a Westley Richards twelve-bore with hand-engraved drop lock, cased in oak and leather, a handsome object he bequeathed to his son Googoo, who in turn would teach family members to shoot in his garden, pinning targets to the top of a tomato box among the fruit trees in the orchard. Family legend has it the gun was later sent to Israel to help save the Promised Land. Heaven knows if it ever got there. Like much else, it disappeared.
The gun’s dispatch was consistent with Michel’s desire to help the nascent Jewish homeland. He would attend shul on alternate Saturdays. He loved Yiddish theater. In his will, prepared in 1950, two years after the foundation of the modern state of Israel, he bequeathed £2,500—equivalent to about $100,000 today—to the Talmudical College, Jerusalem, “with the request that the said College shall cause prayers to be offered up in the said College on the anniversary of our respective deaths.” He also left £5,000 to the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, to be invested in such a way as to “devote the annual income to the foundation of a scholarship in such branch of science or learning as they may in their discretion determine, to be known as the Isaac and Jennie Michel Scholarship.” (The Hebrew University told me it could find no trace of such an endowment.)
At this distance from the shtetl, Jewish identity still mattered.
The first OK Bazaar opened its doors at the corner of Eloff and President Streets in downtown Johannesburg on Saturday, June 25, 1927, an emporium of goods—from Wedgwood cups to galvanized iron buckets—unlike anything seen before in South Africa. Police patrolled the crowds outside before opening time. An “OK Jazz Trio” played on a balcony transformed into a tearoom. Ladies wore their finest frocks.
Michel’s partners in the new business were two younger Jewish immigrant entrepreneurs—Sam Cohen from London and Michael Miller from Lithuania. Such was the shopping frenzy that Cohen cabled Miller, then on a purchasing trip to Europe, with a laconic message: “Buy like hell.”
The promise was the fairest and the squarest of fair and square deals. OK would sell goods cheaply but would not sell cheap goods. On opening day everything was priced at threepence, sixpence, or one shilling—a policy soon dropped. New stores followed—in Port Elizabeth, Durban, and Pretoria in 1928; East London in 1929; Bloemfontein and Germiston in 1930; and Springs in 1931. The company went public in 1929, with help from I. W. Schlesinger, who already headed a large business empire. Schlesinger became chairman for several years. Soon people were saying, “You can get it at the OK” or “You can always try the OK.” It became the South African Everyman’s store, or so it styled itself. For many years blacks lined up at separate counters and could not serve themselves.
A brochure created by the company in 1936, headlined “THEY WERE THREE—An Epic of Modern Commerce” and accompanied by photographs of Cohen, Miller, and Michel, gives a sense of the h
eady expansion of the OK Bazaars, which by then had eleven branches:
June 25, 1927, will live in a subcontinent’s commercial history as a red-letter day in Big Business enterprise. On that date, after perspicacious planning, and patient, persevering preparation, three men, then not over-confident that their undertaking would be crowned with success, opened to the public South Africa’s first O.K. Bazaar.
Johannesburg, pulsating metropolis of a subcontinent, and hub of the greatest gold-producing area mankind has ever known, was the birthplace of the business baby, an infant destined speedily to attain to robust, active adolescence, quickly followed by a maturity of surpassing strength.
The three men who rocked the O.K. cradle in a building at the corner of Eloff and President Streets little anticipated, when their infant enterprise was in swaddling clothes, that in the brief space of five years it would develop into the greatest retail stores organization of the Southern Hemisphere.
The “trinity” behind this breakneck expansion was composed of very different men. Miller and Cohen—born in 1893 and 1894, respectively—were almost a generation younger than Michel. Cohen was married to Miller’s sister, Dora; the two men had first worked together in Bloemfontein in 1918, setting up a wholesale business called United Commercial Agencies, which moved to Johannesburg and eventually became the New Commercial Trading Company. Cohen was fiery and explosive, a brilliant merchant driven by fierce competitiveness and a boots-on-the-ground feel for retail. Later in life he had his handkerchiefs inscribed with the letters YCDBSOYA: You can’t do business sitting on your arse.
Miller had a smaller ego, a more even temperament, and a finer sensibility. As the business evolved, he focused on finance, administration, and the design of the stores. Miller’s son, Len, who was chairman of OK at the time of its sale to South African Breweries in 1973, described the difference to me this way: “My father was a very quiet man, deliberative, composed. Sam Cohen had a somewhat violent temper, easily riled, made very quick decisions, not always well considered.”
My great-grandfather, closer to Miller in temperament, aged fifty when the OK opened its doors (his partners were in their early thirties), was always the outsider of the three, tied neither by marriage nor by long business connection.
In 1937 Michel fell out with his two partners and sold his share of the OK Bazaars. It was left to Miller and Cohen, always the driving forces, to build the business. There followed a concerted attempt, pursued over many years by Cohen and Miller, to write Isaac Michel out of the history of the OK Bazaars. From the time of his departure, official accounts of the OK Bazaars were written as if he had never existed. When acknowledged at all, and that was rare, Michel was a “partner” for some years who “subsequently disposed of his shareholding in the company.”
This bizarre insistence led to several corrections in South African newspapers. On March 23, 1980, the South African Jewish Times ran a piece headlined “Isaac Michel Was One of the Three Founders of the OK Bazaars.” It read: “In a special O.K. Bazaars supplement, which appeared in the SA Jewish Times on March 14, it was stated that the O.K. Bazaars was founded in 1927 by Sam Cohen and the late Michael Miller. In fact there were three founders. They were Mr. Sam Cohen, the late Michael Miller and the late Isaac Michel.” Michel’s Johannesburg solicitors, the firm of Edward Nathan, Friedland, Mansell & Lewis, wrote a letter to The Sunday Times that led to a similar correction under the headline “A Trio of Founders.”
Len Miller wrote to me with an attempted explanation. His father and Cohen were the founders of the New Commercial Trading Company. They then met Isaac Michel, whose store was at the corner of Eloff and Market Streets, and agreed to join forces. The OK Bazaars could be viewed as the New Commercial Trading Company under a changed name, so in that sense it might be argued that Cohen and Miller were the founders, even if the three men were the first “directors” of the OK Bazaars.
The problem with this is that the OK Bazaar was a revolutionary retailing concept, a radical innovation: a department store buying directly from manufacturers for cash, so eliminating the middle man and driving down costs and prices. It was founded in 1927, not mutated from a wholesaler similar to countless others in South Africa.
As for Michel’s contentious departure from the OK Bazaars in 1937, Len Miller shed light, quoting from an unpublished memoir of his father’s. The breaking point came over a rival chain store called C.T.C. that Michel tried to acquire without informing his partners. He was asked to leave.
The irascible Cohen never forgave Isaac. He and Miller, and later their U.S.-trained sons, drove the expansion of OK over many years. But Cohen had a flaw: he believed that if he shouted loudest, he would have his way, and that if he insisted long enough, he could change the facts.
His dream of a family retailing empire ended, after Michael Miller’s death in 1971, with the sale of the OK Bazaars to South African Breweries. Ultimately, in 1997 South African Breweries offloaded the OK Bazaars for a symbolic one rand to Shoprite Checkers, a retailing chain that then killed the OK name. The brand that had been a national treasure for seven decades was worth a couple of cents at the last.
The demise of the OK became a national legend, a cautionary political and business tale, as well as a family lament. In 2012 the secretary-general of the ruling African National Congress warned that the ANC could meet the fate of the OK Bazaars. “I normally tell people that any brand is as good as its services,” Gwede Mantashe said. “If you rubbish the ANC you can destroy it that way. OK Bazaars was a strong brand in the retail sector, so strong that it became complacent and it was sold for One Rand to Shoprite Checkers and that brand disappeared.”
Two months after my mother’s death on January 2, 1999, my father wrote to me:
I’m certain you understand that my time with Mum constitutes the deepest and most sacred element of my life. It also comprises the most sensitive part of my spiritual being and, when injured, the pain is deep and enduring. I will never barter or bargain to change anyone’s assessment of my life with Mum. The complex and often tortured web of facts must speak for each individual observer.
Those words were written exactly a half century after he met June. The love that became a “tortured web of facts” began in 1948 in South Africa, on Isaac Michel’s two-acre estate. June, who was always immaculate, nursed a dream of perfect family harmony—the comfort and carelessness of 44 Fourteenth Avenue in Houghton, which is where she spent long spells of her adolescence.
They were from different backgrounds. June was a Michel granddaughter, a catch. The Michels were minor South African Jewish nobility. Sydney, eight years her senior, a doctor recently returned from London, was the son of immigrants who toiled to make their way. He was never much interested in status. Laurie and Flossie, June’s parents, had in mind a different match from the higher echelons of Jewish retail: David Susman, who went on to run Woolworths in South Africa for many years. Flossie would later say the first time she saw June grief-stricken and inert was when Susman dropped her while they were both students at Wits.
Sydney’s father, Morris, from Šiauliai, was good at placing relatives in lucrative businesses. He was less adept at looking after himself. He introduced his brother-in-law Ponk (who had arrived aged eleven in South Africa with his father in 1895) to coal. Ponk thrived as a supplier. For another relative, Morris set up the Ideal clothing company, which prospered. As for Cohen & Sons, his own wholesale grocery, it never generated quite enough income for Morris to stop worrying.
The Michel clan at Château Michel, with June (fifth from right in back row), grandfather Laurie (standing far left), Jennie (seated far left in hat), and Isaac (seated left)
With his beloved wife, Polly, and four children to support—Selma, Ann, Bert, and Sydney—Morris allowed himself only a week of vacation. The rest of the family would go for three weeks to Port Elizabeth and stay at the Pollok Hotel opposite the beach. Sometimes they brought home a wild tortoise to let loose in the yard. A train took them sou
th to the coast. The boys felt terror in the tunnel at Cradock as smoke poured through the window in the dark. At other times they traveled out by car to a small Orange Free State town where Polly’s brother-in-law, Jacob Leverton, owned a general store. Leverton’s principal source of amusement was scattering change for black clients on a counter to which he had nailed three gold sovereigns. He would smirk as they tried to scoop them up.
The roads were terrible. The family car, an Oakland, would break down, mired in black glutinous mud, and have to be pulled out with a winch.
Morris, who left school at thirteen after his father, Shmuel, had a leg amputated, married self-discipline to hard work. He was honest to a fault. Industrious and cautious, he put all the children through college. He would turn down second helpings with a sweep of the hand and the exclamation “One sixty-five!” His weight never fluctuated from 165 pounds.
Money was made the painstaking way, spent with prudence, and not entrusted to brokers. Morris did not take chances. Debt, he liked to say, never sleeps, and nor do those who have it. The Cohens slept well, but they had no Dresden vases or Tabriz carpets. There was no tail-finned Cadillac parked in the driveway.
Polly’s devotion to her husband was unstinting, their marriage one of those rare meetings of souls. She would tend the roses rising on their trellises and take the children to see her father, the humble carpenter from Žagarė, over in the poor district of Troyeville. The boys preferred visits to Morris’s depot, always cluttered with boxes and barrels of herring and cucumber.
Six mules and a horse were kept in the yard at the back, tended by a black man called Elias. The horse was used to solicit orders, the mules to deliver them. Morris would venture out in his trap down the rutted roads and tracks of the Rand to retail stores on the fringes of town. As a young boy, my uncle Bert accompanied him through the heat and dust past the spreading mine dumps—some flat-topped, others pyramid-like—of the churning gold city. His job was to tot up sales.