by Roger Cohen
Barnato was born Barnett Isaacs in the East End of London, the grandson of a rabbi, the son of a humble shopkeeper. His sister Kate married Joel Joel, the patron of the King of Prussia pub; they had three boys, Isaac, Woolf, and Solly. Barnato, following his brother Harry, left England for South Africa in 1873; formed Barnato Brothers, “dealers in diamonds and brokers in mining property,” the next year; and by 1876, at the age of twenty-five, was well on his way to a vast fortune on the Kimberley diamond fields. His three nephews, the Joels, would eventually follow the lucrative trail to South Africa.
A businessman of great cunning, chutzpah, theatricality, and ruthlessness, Barnato amassed wealth in short order. His reputation was dubious. He was unstable, a manic-depressive given to drunken binges, wild bets, and lavish parties. At 25 Park Lane in London, he built a house on a site acquired from the Duke of Westminster; at the same time he embarked on the construction of an estate in Berea, the Johannesburg district where my father was born. Watercolors at the school capture the beautiful park as it looked in the 1890s: fountains splash; a gazebo overlooks a lake; cypress trees give an Italianate air to the rolling grounds within their gates of wrought iron and gold leaf. In hardscrabble infant Johannesburg, this was a thing of wonder.
The paintings are dated 1897, eleven years after Johannesburg was birthed on its blanket of gold. By then Barnato was in a tailspin. His Barnato Bank had failed, despite his assurances that it never would. His mood swings were more violent, his drinking pronounced, his behavior ever harder for his wife, Fanny, to control. In The Randlords, Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes of Barnato: “He was delirious, sometimes raving, deluded; at night Fanny found him counting imaginary banknotes or trying to claw diamonds from the walls.” At Cape Town, on June 2, 1897, he boarded the Scot, sailing for England and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. On July 23, south of Madeira, in the presence of his nephew Solly Joel, Barnato, aged forty-four, went overboard.
Did he fall, jump, or get pushed? The mystery remains. The verdict was suicide. The Johannesburg stock exchange closed for a day.
My mother, in her uniform of white blouse and dark dress, was a boarder in the mansion of a brilliant, erratic, manic-depressive Jew who killed himself. The place she slept in was known as Joel House, after Barnato’s nephew.
The Johannesburg High School for Girls had been founded in 1887 in a little wattle and daub house, moved from there to a corrugated iron church, been dispersed during the Boer War of 1899–1902, before, in the words of its first principal, Fanny Buckland, finding a “fairy godfather” in the person of Solly Joel, who presented his uncle’s Berea estate to the school. So was born Barnato Park School (known as “Hags’ High” to generations of drooling Johannesburg boys). Its motto was Vincemus—We Shall Triumph.
After her return from a year of boarding at Frensham Heights in England, June was sent as a boarder to Barnato Park. She was just nine. Her parents, Laurie and Flossie, had acquired a taste for life without the children around. The school was fashioned, as KES was for boys, in an image of British tradition: empire, church, sports. If the boys were to learn fair play, the girls were to learn to be ladylike. They were to know their way around the classics, embroidery, and lacrosse.
The disintegrating world impinged little on these priorities. My mother was at Barnato Park, my father a medical student at Wits, as the Jews of Lithuania and all Europe were murdered. Classes went on as usual.
Hockey continued, rugby was played, as Treblinka and Auschwitz and Majdanek and Chełmno and Bełżec and Sobibór and the pits of Babi Yar consumed the wretched corpses of Jews from the world my parents’ parents and grandparents had left behind. Scarcely a word filtered to the bottom of Africa. The Allies hardly wanted things otherwise. In the joint “Statement on Atrocities” of October 1943, issued by Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, there was no mention of the Jews, although by then more than five million had been gassed or shot.
The deepest lesson was thereby lost. As Timothy Snyder writes in Bloodlands, “Jewish resistance in Warsaw was not only about the dignity of the Jews but about the dignity of humanity as such, including those of the Poles, the British, the Americans, the Soviets: of everyone who could have done more and instead did less.” My parents were ignorant of the extent of the horror. Others, with the power to make a difference, looked away.
Around the time my mother went to Barnato Park, the school song, “Vincemus,” was composed:
We’ve a bath for swimming and a hall for gym
For we must be supple and fleet of limb
In a land where such sports are conducted in style
By the springbok, ostrich, and crocodile
And at seasons proper we stake our fate
On a contest grim, but devoid of hate,
And we cheer the victors with this refrain:
“Vincemus! Vincemus! We’ll win yet again.”
Oh years of freedom, how fast ye flee!
We shall yearn for you in the years to be
For the joy of striving with all our might
To play as a team, with the goal in sight;
For the love of a friend who will see us through
Whatever the hazardous things we do;
Yet we’ll greet the future with this refain:
“Vincemus! Vincemus! We’ll win yet again.”
June would indeed yearn for the years of freedom. Joe Teeger, who would go on to a distinguished career as a Johannesburg physician, met her on the beach at Durban in 1942. Her father was a commander in the South African Medical Corps and about to go to Cairo, where he would spend the rest of World War II. Teeger was at KES, knew several of his Barnato Park contemporaries, and was taken with thirteen-year-old June, who was always adjusting her lovely thick hair. “She stood out from the other girls,” he says. “She was intense, clever, direct, ebullient, forceful, and impressive.” They began a correspondence that would endure over several years. Her letters were beautiful, he recalls, and he found it an “intellectual challenge” writing back.
David Lopatie, a family friend of the Michels, also exchanged letters with my mother. He had met June at family gatherings on Sunday evenings. Lopatie was equally struck by June’s burning vitality: “She was vivacious, alert and most intelligent, and a bright, successful, happy future seemed to be ahead for her. There is absolutely no possibility that I would have guessed that she was going to suffer from mental illness.”
The Barnato Park prefects, with June in middle row at right, slightly removed from the rest, 1947
School records from Barnato Park, including June’s transcripts, were lost or destroyed during the last years of apartheid. Berea had become an overwhelmingly black neighborhood by 1990. There were not enough white girls in the area to justify the school’s existence. So it was closed down by the government, and the history of more than a century lost. Barnato Park later reopened as a school for boys and girls of all races.
One school magazine from 1989 that attempts to trace the then-102-year history of the school survived. Its cover reads: “In my end is my beginning.” I have a photograph my mother kept of the twenty-three Barnato Park prefects of 1947. June in her last year stands slightly apart from the others at the right side of the picture. There are many smiles around her. She holds back from one with a detached, knowing air. Her gaze is inward-looking. At the age of eighteen, she is about to step out into the postwar world, a child of privilege. She would always fear abandonment and had hardly known, as a boarding school girl first in England and then in South Africa, the physical reassurance of parental love.
Isaac Michel died on July 9, 1953. More than three years later his solicitors, Edward Nathan, Friedland, Mansell & Lewis, wrote to the master of the South African Supreme Court to explain delays in the settlement of the estate: “The accounts in the Estate I.D. Michel cannot be drawn until such time as the valuation of the deceased’s shareholding in Isaac Michel Holdings (Pty.). In this connection we refer you to our letters of the 29th October in the Esta
te Late I.D. Michel, when we advised you that the Auditors are at present busy upon this valuation—which is a most complicated calculation.”
There were large bequests—to a host of Jewish institutions and to various charities and hospitals (£4,000 for Johannesburg General and £1,000 for the “non-European” hospital). Michel had owned farms sprawling over hundreds of acres and seaside properties in Durban and Cape Town. His wife, Jennie, had valuable jewelry; his “Château Michel” Houghton home had “four brick servants’ rooms.” He had a large interest in a shoe manufacturer, Edworks. He was a partner in the brokerage firm of L. Bowman & Michel, where his son Googoo would work. He had stakes in several South African blue-chip mining companies.
Yet he had contrived to make his liabilities outweigh his assets, an apparent ploy to avoid death duties. He was indebted at the time of his death to the tune of £78,549 to his own holding company, Isaac Michel Holdings, corresponding to “monies expended by the company” for him. His company funded his lifestyle. In all, his official liabilities came to £118,832, exceeding his assets by £1,140, a sum his heirs agreed to pay.
The Michel will mentions various trusts, apparently established well before his death. These were the apparent source of the dolce vita of his offspring, most of whom lived in luxury in Houghton, traveled the world when they wished, and generally chose the path of least resistance to apartheid. But the family scourge that would afflict my mother did not spare them.
Willie, who co-owned an upscale men’s store called Manhattan’s on the corner of Eloff and Jeppe, was a gentle soul, a keen bird-watcher, who suffered from manic depression and periodic breakdowns. Basil was a playboy who liked to buzz the beach at Muizenberg in his private plane to announce his arrival to the babes. He was always fooling around with the shopgirls at the OK Bazaars. Brave and reckless, he was happy to get cut to ribbons in the surf as he searched for lead sinkers off the rocks at Duxbury that he could take into Fish Hoek and sell.
On July 17, 1961, the Johannesburg daily Star carried a story on its front page headlined “Girl Aged 19 and Brother Die as Car Hits Tree.” The dead were Basil’s children, Linda and Brian, my mother’s first cousins. They had gone for a spin with two eighteen-year-old friends, David Aronsohn and Duncan Macdonald, both of whom survived. Their car swerved out of control on Witkoppen Road in Rivonia, the area where Isaac Michel owned property. Basil then took to drink. His marriage broke up, and his mood swings became violent.
Googoo labored on as a stockbroker at L. Bowman & Michel but, like his brothers, lacked the drive and ambition of his father. He found consolation in cricket and bowls, his daughters, and his beautiful home and garden.
As for the three girls, Lily had trouble with her children: her son, Clive, was murdered in the Hillbrow district of Johannesburg, his penis severed, the victim of a crime of passion; her daughter, Yvonne, was mentally unstable and married a half-dozen times; Clive’s youngest son shot himself.
“Baby” Alethea, the youngest of Isaac’s children and the most gifted, pursued her gorgeous, solitary path from Johannesburg to Paris and finally London. Her first husband was killed in Libya in World War II, leaving her with an infant son, Erroll. Her divorce in the late 1940s from her second husband, John Sive, the heir to a pharmaceuticals fortune and father of her daughter, Jane, precipitated a family crisis. Isaac Michel cut her out of his will, then at the last tried to reinstate her, only for his five other children to vote against dividing the patriarch’s estate six ways rather than five. The feud over this vote never abated. Alethea, disinherited and ostracized, once told Erroll how “Googoo walked in front of my car and I could have run him down—but in the end I didn’t.”
June in South Africa (a happy moment) with her parents, Laurie and Flossie
Like my mother, Alethea could keep up appearances in public but was two people, sparkling at times, dark and destructive at others. She went places and ran up bills. If appearances demanded a party she could not afford, she went ahead anyway. Money would take care of itself, except of course that money, like beauty, does not last forever. She was among the top six bridge players in South Africa, a gifted decorator, a charmer; and then her destructive side would come out and she would leave friends dangling and run away to Paris hotels she could not afford. She died of brain cancer in London at the age of sixty-one.
My grandmother Flossie was the most stable of the six. She was also a shrewd investor. A document dated March 9, 1954, shows her marking her independence from the intractable Michel estate. It states that although certain shares had been registered in Isaac’s name only “for the sake of convenience,” they had in fact always been recognized as her property: holdings in West Rand Consolidated, Spring Mines Ltd., Harmony Gold Mining, Grootvlei Proprietary Mines, Edworks, and Blinkpoort Gold Syndicate. She would later acquire a lucrative stake in De Beers. The oldest of Isaac’s children, she outlived them all and died at 104. She also outlived her daughter, my mother, June, whose mental instability curtailed her will to live and left her aching for the sunlit land that had made Isaac Michel, the smous from the shtetl, rich enough to create her African house of dreams.
CHAPTER 6
Picnic in a Cemetery
She is tall with an easy stride. I have passed her on this street before, at about this time, with the trees casting the same etched shadows. There is no sidewalk—only blacks walk in apartheid South Africa. They do not need sidewalks. Yesterday she smiled, I slowed the car, we talked for a moment, and the air between us quickened. From a fenced yard came the barking of a dog.
Today she is there again with that same languor to her gait, in her hips and her arms. Now she looks around—toward the house where she is employed, perhaps. Making up her mind, she signals for me to stop. She slides low on the backseat to conceal herself. Her long slender legs push up against the front seat. I see the outsize inoculation mark in her left arm, the dimple in her cheek. We are caught in the swoon and lull of the middle of the African day and in breach of the color lines set down by racist law.
Her story: She is going to meet her sister in town. They will take a bus together out to one of the townships; their mother is sick, but the bus service has been erratic, and she has to be back at work early tomorrow morning. Hers is the catalog of practical difficulties that is black life in South Africa, the endless back-and-forth imposed by legislation with anodyne names like the Group Areas Act (aka Blacks Out of White Areas Act).
We climb into an expanse of vacant lots, skittering garbage, and unpaved roads. The light is blinding. We pass a white homeowner, red-faced as an oyster shucker outside a Paris brasserie, berating his black gardener. She tells me the way. Her voice is quiet but clear. We turn onto a track and pull up behind dusty shrubs.
I had been at a braai a couple of days earlier, where a Jewish industrialist friend of my mother’s, stoked by a couple of gin and tonics, had begun to expound on the impossibility of desire when it came to the natives, who, after all, were “only just down from the trees.” The phrase was spoken as if it were a self-evident historical fact. In feature and smell, he went on, as he tried to dislodge a piece of beef from between his yellowing teeth, they were closer to animals than humans. “I mean,” he said, withdrawing the toothpick at last with its dangling prize and peering at it through his bifocals, “can you imagine ever touching one of them, let alone—?”
There was more than a touch of thou-doth-protest-too-much in his boozy exposition. He’d probably been daydreaming for years of bedding the maid as he drove out to Houghton golf club. I said that I could very well imagine desiring a black woman—indeed, I did not have to imagine it. He spluttered, smirked, and suggested I could not be serious, at least not about the kaffirs here in South Africa.
Now in the car there is nowhere for us to go, a young white man and a young black woman—no café, cinema, house, or even bench. The businessman’s attitude is enshrined in the Immorality Act of 1957: any white male person who “has or attempts to have unlawful carnal interc
ourse with a colored female person” or any colored female person who “has or attempts to have unlawful carnal intercourse with a while male person” is guilty of a crime.
The offense is punishable by imprisonment with compulsory labor for a period not exceeding seven years. It is, however, “sufficient defense to any charge under this section if it is proved to the satisfaction of the court that the person charged at the time of the commission of the offense had reasonable cause to believe that the person with whom he or she committed the offense was a white person if the person charged is a white person, or a colored person if the person charged is a colored person.”
There is not much latitude there. The chiaroscuro of our intertwined limbs on the car seat offers scant basis for a plea.
In 1955 and 1956, years that my father was dean of the residence for black students at Witwatersrand University and I was in South Africa as an infant, a rabbi named André Ungar caused a stir. Born in Hungary, a Holocaust survivor, he had arrived from London to head the Reform congregation in Port Elizabeth, the coastal town where my father used to vacation with his family. Blacks were then being cleared from white areas under the Group Areas Act. Ungar was appalled.
“There was a sense of déjà-vu in many ways,” Ungar, who lost dozens of family members in the Holocaust, tells me. “I remember being ordered into a ghetto in Budapest in 1944, and the attitudes of racial superiority in South Africa seemed to me to be cut from the same cloth. Even if there was no systematic extermination, black life was cheap. I arrived in January. A few months later Passover came, and I made some comparisons about our slavery in Egypt, liberation and the condition of oppression of black Africans. The parallels seemed inescapable.”