The Girl from Human Street

by Roger Cohen

  From the trap, Bert sees the blacks on foot, the walkers. Always there is the presence of the other. Whites are in Africa on the rich reef surrounded by blacks. Bert has a Zulu spear called an assegai, and he hurls it at the big succulent leaves of the cactus tree. He and my father listen to Zulu songs in the street outside their windows, where the blacks labor. They hear the warning: Don’t talk in front of the blacks. Their neighbors are called Mandelowitz, Rosen, and Daniel. Some have an anglicized veneer, others the accent of the shtetl. They all get their kosher sausages at Segal’s. None, of course, has any notion of the two main Bantu languages, Zulu and Sesuto. Theirs is the English language of the British imperium. In every white, at some level, conscience twitches. Premonitions stir of the inevitable bloodbath.

  The boys, particularly Bert, love to play with the English that their parents maul. Everyone has a nickname. Polly is Buddy. Sydney is Larky. Potato latkes are “latchkeys.” Matzo is hand-stitched cardboard. When Mrs. Mandelowitz loses her husband, Bert writes a rhyming note to her: “I hear it is said / Your husband is dead / I express my regret / And hope you won’t fret.” Polly can’t stop laughing even as her poor neighbor mourns. When Polly develops a small growth on her ear, Bert writes: “Situated on her ear / You will find a little gear / It’s equipped with Syncromesh / So that it will hurt you less.”

  Sydney would write much later about the family’s Honey Street house in Berea, near the top of the Parktown Ridge:

  Berea was divided into one-eighth acre plots set in rectangular blocks. Our house, with its red, corrugated iron roof and wooden-pillared front verandah, squeezed into this allotted space. On one side a driveway separated the house from our neighbors, the Lees. At the top of the drive were the green painted wooden doors of the garage. Not long after my arrival in 1921, this gave shelter to a canvas-topped Oakland, T.J. 3350, of erect and dignified contour, which replaced Dad’s horse and buggy.

  A graveled yard entered from the top of the driveway separated the back of the house from a row of outhouses. The first of these, adjacent to the garage, was the coal store; its periodic replenishment was a notable event preceded by the arrival of a wooden wagon drawn by a team of broad-chested mules. Several black men, rendered blacker by coal and dust and each with a weighty sack molded to bent back, loped in single file up the gravel drive and emptied his load with a resounding clatter and cloud of black dust into the store. Within minutes the swarthy bearers had re-boarded the wagon and the driver on his tall perch flicked the long leather reins, the mules strained their backs and the wagon rolled away down Honey Street.

  The coal firm belonged to Mum’s brother, our favorite uncle Jack, known as Ponk. On an occasional Sunday Ponk took Bert and me in his Chrysler sedan to the coal depot where we filed along black, smoky paths and faced at close quarters the mules with their blazing eyes and pulsating nostrils.

  Dawn would break around five a.m. Sydney was sometimes awake to hear the sound of the cock crowing in the yard, followed by the distant roar of lions, not free ranging in the highveld but echoing from their enclosure in the Johannesburg zoo. The deep vibrating sound silenced the cock. Soon there followed the powerful thrusts of a steam engine puffing out of Park Station, its increasing tempo crowned by an echoing whistle.

  Mac entered early. His poker clattered as it delved the innards of the small coal stove that heated the hot water. The powdered ash of yesterday was emptied into dustbins in the yard, wood and coal replenished. There followed a satisfying crackle as the fire spread its warmth upward into the cylindrical zinc tank. Morris, up and about by six o’clock, was assured of hot water for his morning bath and shave. Later in the day Mac cleaned and fueled the big, black kitchen stove, swept and polished the floors, kept yard and drive in order, attended to the small front garden, and waited at breakfast and dining room tables. He wore a short white jacket to serve lunch and in the evening matching white pants.

  The room adjoining that of the “boy” Mac belonged to the “maid” Daisy. She dusted, cleaned, and tidied up, made the beds, cooked the meals, and did the washing. Her flat irons, heated on the top of the coal stove, generated a fierce hiss of steam when applied to the damp clothes. Washing involved energetic abrasion on a corrugated zinc washing board, followed by passage through a hand-operated mangle. The mangle’s big wheel allowed Sydney’s imagination to wander: soon, with its help, he would be navigating a battleship or liner through ferocious seas around the Cape of Good Hope.

  Mac and Daisy had one afternoon a week off. Each was paid two pounds a month. Morris maintained that his household of six required an income of one hundred pounds a month. Even for a Jewish immigrant family of modest means, the vast black underclass in South Africa afforded a good standard of living. Because cheap, unskilled black labor abounded, Jews in general avoided manual work and the sweatshop. Jews from Lithuania who headed for the United States rather than South Africa around the same time did not have the same good fortune.

  On High Holidays the Cohen family goes to shul. The synagogue is in Yeoville, adjacent to Berea, both predominantly Jewish neighborhoods in the 1930s. The services are boring; the children do not understand what transpires. The men, who sit downstairs, apart from the women, carry the Torah. They read a portion of the law. Then a material element is introduced: congregants announce the size of their donation to the community. Morris gives something, but always less than Mr. Mandelowitz. He feels awkward about not giving more. Sydney perceives the whole exercise as shot through with hypocrisy.

  Bert and Sydney are prepared for their bar mitzvahs by a Rabbi Wolf. He is a bad teacher, the object of unceasing ridicule from the four children who study with him. The fruit of their long application to the pantheon of Hebrew literature is knowledge of the word for a broom—matateh. (Operation Matateh would be the name given to a Haganah military offensive ten days before the end of the British mandate in 1948; it was aimed at capturing territory between Lake Tiberias and Lake Hula and sweeping it clear of Arabs and Bedouins.) They also learn a single phrase by rote: “Go down from your bed and run to the House of the Book.”

  They plod to synagogue with dull dread. Years of study have yielded only sounds without meaning. The bar mitzvahs at the Yeoville shul (now the Word of Life Church in a predominantly black neighborhood) are followed by receptions at the Stephanie Hotel, where the recurrent competitiveness over Jewish largesse involves presents. An uncle gives one guinea, another two; all the friends of the family offer fountain pens. Prurient gossip flows over jellied tongue. The boys joke about the symbolism of their rite of passage: Today I am a grown-up Jew, tomorrow I am a fountain pen …

  Bert and Sydney, carrying their pens, go to King Edward VII School, known as KES, founded in 1903, a year after the end of the Boer War, and named after the then British monarch. It does its best to mimic on the faraway Rand the customs of the English public school: the green blazer with school crest of crown and lion; the assemblies in the high-ceilinged, wood-paneled chapel; the classrooms set out around a colonnaded quadrangle of redbrick buildings with a World War I memorial at its center; the “Yes, sirs!” and “No, sirs!”; the rugby and cricket coaches sent from England to impart their message of fair play; the school motto Strenue—Strength Going Forward. It would have made a plausible setting for a Harry Potter movie.

  The boys know every score and try of the local rugby teams. Every day they listen to the headmaster: Let us pray. God grant me the courage to accept things I cannot change, to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. They cannot change the fact that each morning, along with the other Jewish pupils, they stand outside in the courtyard during Christian prayers. A tower with a clock rises above the quadrangle. The clock, like the one in Bellagio, has two faces, one overlooking the playing fields, the other the school yard.

  I look up my father’s graduating class of 1938: Kentridge, Kaplan, Meikle, Mendelsohn, Simon. They are huddled there, the excluded Jew Boys. For our sins we were exiled … the fathers ate so
ur grapes and the teeth of the sons are set on edge. They never complain: the wisdom, perhaps, of knowing the difference between what can be changed and what cannot.

  In the school magazine of 1938, an editorial addresses the state of a world at war’s brink:

  We are living in troubled times. This editorial is being written under the shadow of vast inchoate happenings in Europe. The stresses set up by the social changes wrought by the advent of technology are straining the structure of civilization beyond the limits of tolerance. The machine does our work for us and meekly comes and goes at our bidding. But it inexorably demands its wages.

  The machine has brought men face to face as never before in history. Paris and Berlin are closer today than neighboring villages were in the Middle Ages. In one sense distance has been annihilated. We speed on the wings of the wind and carry in our hands weapons more dreadful than the lightning. Europe has been converted into an elbow-rubbing mass.…

  Our social sense is only a little less primitive than that of the Middle Ages. But this is the price the machine demands: that we learn to live together in a world where the distance between us and our neighbor is constantly shrinking. The pity is, judging by the events since the turn of the century, that we are learning our lessons badly and with ill grace.… Rightly seen, the challenge of the machine is the greatest opportunity mankind has yet enjoyed. Out of the rush and swirl of the confusions of our times may yet arise a majestic order of world peace and prosperity.

  Our world of hyperconnectivity, and the strains that accompany it, is not so novel after all. The ghosts of repetition lurk among the preachers of progress. From the “rush and swirl” of 1938 where “distance has been annihilated” and hopes stir of “a majestic order of world peace and prosperity” would follow in short order the slaughter in my grandparents’ Lithuanian hometowns, the mass murder of European Jewry, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the anguish of all humanity.

  The rapid emancipation of European Jewry had offered Hitler rich material for his hateful propaganda. New opportunities opened, and many Jews, through education and industry, seized them. They became conspicuous. Pulled from a self-absorbed shtetl world of Talmudic disputation, they reached the pinnacle of industry and the professions. When frenzied nationalism stirred in a Germany humiliated by the terms of its defeat in World War I, they became targets. The inconceivable proved possible, just when Jews seemed to have broken through the barriers that had long cast them to the margins.

  With Jewish self-improvement had come forgetting, in Europe and in Johannesburg. For centuries, in their wanderings, Jews remembered. Rather than disperse anonymously among the nations of the world, they clung with a singular stubbornness to a messianic dream of return and to the rabbinical injunction: Zakhor! Remember! Ritual and liturgy, in the frozen shtetl, were, in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s words, “orchestrated to transmit a vital past from one generation to the next.”

  The seder dramatized a living past. For Polly and Morris and Isaac Michel, back in Žagarė and in Šiauliai, and even in Johannesburg, these traditions still lived. As the unleavened bread was raised, the words from the Haggadah were read: “This is the bread of affliction which our forefathers ate in the Land of Egypt.” They could still cause a frisson.

  To forget was to fall. To remember was the duty of the Jew. As the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy puts it: “Beware lest you forget the Lord your God so that you do not keep His commandments and judgments and ordinances … lest you lift up your hearts and forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.… And it shall come to pass that if indeed you forget the Lord your God … I bear witness against you this day that you shall utterly perish.”

  Rites and narrative were set down in the Torah and renewed as traditions with meaning. History was revealed, an eternal present rather than a chronology of events. In the year of my father’s graduation from KES, 1938, Freud fled Vienna after the Anschluss and addressed this point in a letter to the Fifteenth International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Paris. He wrote: “The political misfortune of the [Jewish] nation taught them to appreciate the only possession they had retained, their Scripture, at its true value. Immediately after the destruction of the Temple by Titus, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai asked for permission to open at Yabneh the first school for the study of the Torah. From now on it was the Holy Book and the intellectual effort applied to it that kept the people together.”

  Born into the void that comes at the far end of the generational process of forgetting, I can only imagine scripture as riveting, orienting drama. This imagining is also a form of temptation: how consoling it would be to believe in a redemptive God! How comforting to order life around the Torah received by Moses from Sinai and delivered by him to Joshua, and from Joshua to the Elders, and from them to the Prophets, and finally to the Men of the Great Synagogue. So it was for generations—or there would be no Jews.

  It is too late. In the upheavals of a century, the transmission broke down. This was progress, or so it was construed. It was emancipation. Yet I see the price of the loss of Jewish ritual as the progressive emptying of the ceremonies that gave cohesion and purpose. It was not enough, in the end, for my immigrant family in Britain to strive to fit in and be like everyone else and push toward the upper echelons of British society. An emptiness resulted. Already, in the voyage to South Africa from Europe, the world had changed enough for my father and my uncle to come away from years of Judaic study with knowledge of a single thing: the Hebrew for “broom.”

  An antipathy to Jewish learning in my father, and an ambivalence in my uncle, resulted. In his war diary, under an entry dated March 8, 1945, Bert, then twenty-six and fighting in Italy with the Allies, wrote: “In the truck on the way home Ron Young made a remark about ‘fat Jew boys.’ I said in as steely a voice as possible, ‘I don’t like that.’ Tangible awkward silence followed.”

  Six months later, on September 2, 1945, after the Allied victory, Bert visits Berchtesgaden in Austria and goes up to Hitler’s mountain retreat, the Eagle’s Nest, in a U.S.-led convoy. He writes: “We rested and smoked in Hitler’s armchairs. The view from the pinnacle was such that I felt a few months here would make a megalomaniac of anyone. Literally the world lies at one’s feet; how easy then to imagine that it does figuratively as well.”

  Bert etched his name on Hitler’s round table: “Cohen, MJ’s son.” What sweet retribution to have “Cohen” inscribed on the very table where the Führer had presided.

  My uncle, back in Europe from Johannesburg, lounged in one of Hitler’s private rooms three months after the fall of the Jew-murdering Thousand-Year Reich. He had bridled at the anti-Semitic banter of a fellow officer. He had seen on August 24, 1945, in the displaced persons’ camp in Padua, hundreds of desperate Jews sprawled on the floor and felt shame that he could not feel them as kith and kin of mine. He does not know the extent of the Holocaust—the almost six million dead—and his parents’ now almost Jew-free Lithuania is inaccessible under Soviet occupation, but he knows that as a Jew in Europe, his own vulnerability has been of a particular kind. Yet five days after the visit to the Eagle’s Nest, on September 7, 1945, he writes:

  “Tonight is the eve of Rosh Hashanah and a service and dinner is being held in Udine. I declined an invitation to attend; this was not easy and may incur the disfavor of some of my fellow Jews but if I am honest I cannot join in such functions.”

  The intellectual rigor of the nonbeliever prevails over the six million reasons to celebrate Rosh Hashanah with other surviving Jews. I sense some failure of sympathy in my beloved uncle that disappoints me. But I am looking back, and Bert was living forward—and he was acting in accordance with his conscience.

  Three months later, just before shipping out from Italy to Egypt, Bert would begin a passionate love affair with a Polish woman named Chalina. On December 2, 1945, he wrote in his diary:

  She is most violently anti-Communist and political argument between us raged … for her
sympathies in the war lay with the Nazis, although it was the German armies that had first invaded and laid waste her country. Her own adventure during the last six years would make interesting reading. Brief synopsis of why Poles hate Jews is expressed by Chalina: Polish Jews form a state within a state; they live on Polish bread, accumulate Polish money and wear Polish clothes; but they pay no sacrifice of loyalty to the state of Poland. She accuses them of welcoming the invaders both from the West and especially from the East when Poland was attacked. She claims they hid away and did nothing to defend Poland.

  There is no love like love in the ruins. It springs from, and goes, nowhere. For three weeks in northwestern Italy at the end of 1945, a South African Jew and a Polish gentile of anti-Semitic leanings lived their doomed passion. The world had been cut loose from its anchors. Survival involved desperation. An iron curtain had fallen. It cast half of Europe into shadow. Sometimes I imagine that if my father and uncle had been able to return soon after the war to Žagarė and Šiauliai and see what had happened to the Jews in their parents’ former home and throughout the killing fields of central and eastern Europe, where the death camps and the Holocaust were concentrated, they might have felt a stronger Jewish identification. Bert remained childless, and so the transmission of identity became moot. My father had a clear wish: to cast the Yeoville synagogue and Rabbi Wolf into oblivion.

  In the Berea district of Johannesburg, near my father’s former Honey Street home, stands the Barnato Park School, where my mother was a boarder. A portrait of the eponymous Barney Barnato hangs in the entrance. Cigarette in hand, moustache waxed, gold cuff links and gold watch chain glinting, he wears a pince-nez and a wing collar with bow tie. The Randlord exudes a quiet satisfaction.