by Roger Cohen
It will be quick. It will be better. It will be over. The lark sings—and then falls. Rena-Renata Levin jumps.
When Yaakov, later that afternoon, identifies his sister’s broken body at the Abu Kabir morgue, he finds a note in her bag: “Dad, I love you. Mom, I love you. Yaakov, I love you. Yonatan, I love you. Uri, I love you. Stay gold.”
That is all.
CHAPTER 12
The Ghosts of Repetition
Almost two years after my mother died, we brought her spirit home. At the West Park Jewish cemetery in Johannesburg, where her family is buried, we gathered to honor her. It was a day of blinding sunlight on the high reef. A fragrant storm-washed breeze coursed over the graves, the kind that used to ruffle June’s curls on the prickly grass of Houghton. Beneath our feet, gravel crunched.
We walked to the back of the cemetery. There was the grave of the patriarch, Isaac Michel—“so dearly loved, so sorely missed by his wife, children and relatives.” An urn stood beside it, donated by his “loving grandchildren,” among them my mother. Jennie Michel, Isaac’s long-suffering wife, died on January 15, 1955, six months before I was born. She had survived her beloved tormentor by just eighteen months. Only when she could no longer fight with him did she begin to miss him.
A plaque in a wall was unveiled to my mother’s memory. Absent her ashes, that’s all we could do. Her bravery made me weep. Once again, now in the Southern Hemisphere, I tried to capture some essence of her. “For most people, death succeeds life,” I said. “But for my mother, I believe, life and death coexisted—she could feel and taste one in the other. As she knew death in life, so she now knows life in death.”
Her mental illness, I recalled, would toss my mother this way and that—one minute she was a brisk, assertive, bustling bundle of energy, the next an inert creature crushed by mental pain. These states, each a distorted image of the true June, could provoke bewilderment and anguish in friends and family. In a soul as fragile as hers, it induced torment. She held in contempt the cancer that took her life, for she had known suffering of a far more potent kind.
My mother was home at last, almost half a century after she emigrated. To the land where she fell in love with my father, to her sanctuary, to her sunlight; and the exile that was also an inner exile was over. I thought of the chaos after her death, the scribbled notes discovered in coat pockets, the jewelry hidden here and there, the bequests not bequeathed, the copy of The Joy of Sex found at the bottom of a laundry basket (a cry for help from the bottom of a well), the disarray and black bile of despair. I thought of her cooing with laughter and her small acts of kindness and her tobacco-tinged scent and her delicate hand on the green tasseled rope banister of the last house in Hampstead and the way she wiped the tears from her eyes when she giggled and the confident way she knitted and the postcards she used to send from South Africa of straight-backed black women with jugs on their heads.
I thought of my father, remarried and absent now, and how he had tried to stand by my mother through everything, and the way she had thanked him with her last words, and his shattering grief when she died; and how, as sure as a law of physics, the survival arrangement he had made (and that had now surfaced in the form of his marriage) had held everyone at a distance because there was only so much intimacy such an arrangement could withstand. My parents’ love had been twisted by the manic-depressive scourge, and yet it had persisted. My father was the fixed point of my mother’s life, her one man, her only and forever man. This was not a fashionable idea but it was a powerful idea.
I cast my mind over all the confusion, how June’s brother, Sydney, standing now beside me in the cemetery, short and stout in the Adler mold, had been obliged to intervene discreetly when June in one of her hyper states was caught pilfering lipstick and cosmetics from the Checkers department store in Killarney, and how she had given him hell for the thoughtfulness that got her out of trouble. It was not easy to help June. It could be bruising. Perhaps, since it was Checkers that acquired her grandfather’s OK Bazaars for a single rand, June thought she was entitled to the lipstick—an insult repaid in kind. More likely she did not know what she was doing. I saw my mother in all her turbulence, in all her states, the multiple states whose depths I had to plumb to live.
Whenever June was in the United States, she would visit a cousin in Cleveland, Peta Moskowitz, who had emigrated from South Africa. She and Peta would go to the Cleveland Museum of Art. June had a particular favorite painting there, Van Gogh’s portrait of Adeline Ravoux, finished in June 1890, a month before his death. Adeline is caught in profile, set against the infinite blue night, her gaze inward-looking, consumed by dark thoughts. It is a disturbing work in blacks, yellow, blues, and vibrant citrines. Van Gogh wrote to his sister Willemien, “I would like to do portraits which would look like apparitions to people a century later.” The painting had the force of an apparition for June. She was transfixed before it. She would tell Peta, “I feel her angst”—and then, “Enough! It’s time for a cup of tea.” That was my mother, anguished but stoic.
The day we gathered, June’s mother, Flossie, turned one hundred. My no-nonsense grandmother, with her cash hidden in the hems of curtains and in balls of wool and her belief in De Beers stock and a good broker, had lived the twentieth century from first to last. Her husband, Laurie, the bon viveur in his tank corps black beret with a cognac and a cigar, had died two years earlier at the age of ninety-eight, water never having passed his lips. They never fully grasped their daughter’s illness. Few did.
South Africa was good to them. They never had to boil an egg.
The family is still here, postapartheid, diminished by departures to Australia and the United States and Britain and Israel, but hanging on. South Africa has looked after its Jews. Letting them live through the twentieth century was in itself a considerable gift. They rose steadily. The definition of chutzpah was a Jew who moved from the misery of Doornfontein to Houghton without passing through Highlands North. A cousin recalls his grandmother’s familiar phrase: “Thank God for the blacks. If not for them it would be us, the Jews.”
Now a few affluent blacks have moved into Houghton, as have many affluent Indians. The Michel mansion, where my parents met, has been subdivided. Gated communities with names like The Sky’s the Limit are the rage. Security is the white community’s obsession, not without reason. There is plenty of grumbling among them about the new order, about violent crime and gross inefficiency and rampant corruption in the governing African National Congress, as if they have forgotten the miracle of forgiveness and reconciliation that allowed them to stay on and prosper in this bountiful land of boundless black misery. You shouldn’t complain of the cold on a lifeboat. Zimbabwe demonstrated how easily all might have been lost. I hear the familiar phrases—“You like it here, hey?” “Shame” “He’s a brainbox” “Let me just go and put on my face” “I stopped at the robot”—and realize how deep in me South Africa resides, how necessary to me it is, the sunlit part of my youth even with its shadows. That also I inherited from my mother. Against all logic, it feels deeper in me than England.
At a gathering of the clan over Shabbat dinner, a cousin, Myron Pollack, says, “I feel like a visitor here. The future is for the blacks.” Perhaps that is only right, I suggest. After all, for decades black South Africans were noncitizens barred even from work as bricklayers.
“I feel really angry that they couldn’t lay bricks,” Myron’s wife, Jan, says.
Their son, Brett, a gifted and idealistic young attorney with fierce patriotic feelings about the new rainbow-nation South Africa, shoots back: “Why are you angry now, Mom, when you weren’t thirty years ago?”
“I just am,” Jan says.
“Your anger’s useless now, Mom. Just drop it. When it would have been useful, you didn’t have it.”
Tension ripples over the chicken soup. Brett says, “I was just a Jewish kid who knew nothing. Now I’m starting to have a brain.”
“I preferred you without
one,” Myron says, laughing.
“What is freedom to the blacks?” Brett asks. “It’s just a word. They want sewage systems, houses, and schools. They want justice.”
“Maybe,” Myron says. “All I know is that before things worked.”
“For whom?”
“Okay, for the whites, but they worked.”
Myron and Jan have been tied up at gunpoint and robbed, but they are sticking with South Africa, for all its problems and all their gripes. Conversation turns to how the Parkview and Royal Johannesburg golf clubs are now accepting Jews (“They accepted blacks, so they had to let the Jews in, too”) and how awful the swanky redesign of the Houghton golf course and clubhouse is, and how being a landlord in Yeoville (where my father had his bar mitzvah in 1933) has become impossible; the only thing to do, Myron says, is sell to wealthy black entrepreneurs who know how to deal with the black tenants who have taken over the neighborhood.
The next day I stroll up through Houghton across the rugby ground where my father and uncle spent hours as adolescents attempting drop goals or taking a seven iron and hitting a golf ball between the goalposts (an unorthodox conversion). I reach Second Avenue, where my grandfather Morris, when he sold the Honey Street house, built the family home opposite the golf course. It is gone now. The adjacent school acquired the land and demolished the house. But the three jacarandas planted by my grandmother Polly are still there. I reach over the fence and run my hand down the ridges of the trunks. I feel her presence, the soft touch of her hands, the woods of Žagarė. These lines that come out of the past trace the elusive path to belonging.
A friend takes me one Friday evening to the Great Park Synagogue in Houghton, a short walk from Château Michel. Jews moved north as they grew wealthier, and so in time did their synagogue. The pews here, a century old now, are the originals from the Great Synagogue on Wolmarans Street, where my great-grandfather Sidney Adler was married and where South Africa’s former chief rabbi, Louis Rabinowitz, once called apartheid “an abomination.” The bimah, the ark, and the pulpit are also from the old synagogue, as is the chandelier that hangs from a central dome. The original silverware decorating the Torah scrolls still shines and sparkles, and the synagogue officials still wear top hats and frock coats in the old tradition. The atmosphere is relaxed, familiar, and warm—people chatting among themselves at times, and joining in responses and communal prayers as the spirit moves them. When the time for the sermon comes, in line with the practice at the Great Synagogue, the congregation stands until the rabbi has passed on his way to the pulpit. It is only when the rabbi speaks that there is complete silence among the congregants.
I find myself seated next to Michael Jeffrey Maisels, a physician who lives in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He is the son of Issy Maisels, the legendary attorney who led the defense team at the 1956 treason trial in which Nelson Mandela was among the accused. The trial lasted five years; it ended in acquittal. Another member of the defense team at the trial was Sydney Kentridge, my father’s classmate at King Edward VII School, one of the Jews who had to stand around with him in the courtyard during prayers. Kentridge was deputed to gather information from Mandela (“Accused Number Six”) before the trial. He has told me that “Mandela’s answers were always logical and even under horrible cross-examination in court he was always courteous and dignified, just as he was with me. It was something innate.” This experience would lead Kentridge to the conviction that “both sides would realize that neither could win.”
Maisels says that whenever he returns to South Africa, he likes to come to shul because of the links he feels there with his forebears and the past. I say, yes, I can understand that. It turns out—of course—that his parents were friendly with my grandparents Laurie and Flossie. Community is close and easy among those gathered on the pews of South Africa’s Jewish pioneers in the soft glow of the chandelier and the murmur of prayer. This is what my family, and so many other families like them, left behind, a life of habits in a confined setting where everyone knew each other.
Down in the Cape, at Muizenberg, I find my grandfather’s house, Duxbury, empty, a FOR SALE sign outside. I clamber over the gate and stand for a moment on the patio looking out across the railway line to the ocean and the Cape of Good Hope. Some things do not change. They are the most reassuring things. There are the rock pools where I would dangle a little net, there is Simon’s Town across the water ready to illuminate its necklace of lights at night, and there is the parapet where a black nanny perched me as an infant and told me she was sure I would not want to fall. The fathomless precipice of memory turns out to be a drop of a couple of meters.
Between the railway line and the sea, accessible through a tunnel, is a seawater swimming pool fashioned in the rocks. It was much loved by my great-uncle Willie, the gentle soul and bird-watcher who suffered from manic depression and went through electroshock treatment. He would go out early every morning to swim there. A sign now points to WOOLEY’S POOL. How strange that he should be immortalized in this way, even if the spelling is not quite right. The tidal pool is the most perfect place, never still, washed by tides and winds from the bottom of the world. It is everything and nothing, as true destinations should be. If I am so happy here at Duxbury, in Willie’s Pool, so unreasonably happy, it is also because this is where I remember my beautiful mother laughing.
The other side of the world, the journey in reverse, time’s arrow going backward: I return to Lithuania in the summer of 2012, not quite two years after my first visit. I drive through my grandfather’s drab hometown of Šiauliai, with its tiny Jewish cemetery, and on to Joniškis, where the handsome white and red synagogues (built in 1823 and 1865, respectively) are being restored. On their lunch hour, construction workers sprawl on the floor beside discarded bread crusts. I cannot imagine how a minyan will ever be constituted in these once-crowded places of Jewish worship.
From Joniškis it is a short distance to my grandmother’s Žagarė, where she wandered on the banks of the River Švėtė and ran her fingers along the ridges in the willow trunks and came to love the cranberries. The small town in which thousands of Jews were annihilated on October 2, 1941, retains its otherworldly aura beneath a canopy of trees. The town is full of storks now. They have returned from winter migration to South Africa.
A plaque in the main square in Žagarė commemorating the more than 2,200 Jews killed by Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators on October 2, 1941, was unveiled in 2012. It is the first to occupy such a prominent place in a Lithuanian provincial town. VALDAS BALĆIŪNAS
A few Jews, stranger birds in these parts, have returned with them to attend a ceremony in the main square. The Jewish past has been stirring in Žagarė more than seven decades after Jewish presence died. The square, dilapidated and dismal when I first saw it, is in the midst of repaving and a cleanup (delayed by the discovery during excavation of coins, shoes, and other items from former Jewish stores) in preparation for the unveiling of a memorial.
A plaque inscribed in English, Lithuanian, and Yiddish is to commemorate the slaughter of the town’s Jews. It is something almost unique in Lithuania; a memorial acknowledging Lithuanian collaboration in the destruction of the country’s Jewish community placed in the middle of a small town, rather than deep in the forests where the ditches were dug that collected the heaped bodies of murdered Jews from more than 250 vanished communities.
On lurching gravestones in one of Žagarė’s two disused Jewish cemeteries, Hebrew inscriptions crumble or fade into mildewed illegibility. ROD FREEDMAN
Rose Zwi, the South African–born author whose Last Walk in Naryshkin Park played an important role in summoning her parents’ lost Jewish Žagarė from the shadows of denial, is here from Australia. Rod Freedman, the director of the movie Uncle Chatzkel—about his great-uncle Chatzkel Lemchen, a renowned philologist who survived the war after losing his parents in the Žagarė massacre of 1941—is also here. He has traveled from Australia, too. To our astonishment, we discover that
our mothers were both born in little Krugersdorp, on the South African gold reef.
A small crowd gathers on the square. Žagarė, with the help of the Internet, is reeling in its diaspora children, a far-flung bunch. It is a day of rain and sun, black clouds and bright shafts of light, heat and cool, thunder and quiet. A day like that of my mother’s death, when a blue sky suddenly boiled up in darkness and lightning struck as her body was carried out of our London home.
More than one hundred people are seated on rows of chairs. I have already seen the plaque, lying in the back of the car of Valdas Balćiūnas, a young local entrepreneur appalled by the suppression of Žagarė’s Jewish past. He was the energetic chief instigator and planner of the memorial project. He has picked up the plaque from stonemasons in Šiauliai. Balćiūnas had described his motivation to Freedman in a letter: “My initiative to unveil the plaque is a small step forward to explain to the locals the truth. I do not want my children to grow up in the world of lies. I do not want the future of the town to be built on a curved foundation.”
Now the plaque stands veiled in a just-paved section of the square. The first to speak is Zwi, whose grandparents and other close relatives lie in the mass grave:
More than three thousand Jewish men, women, and children were massacred by the Nazi invaders and their Lithuanian helpers.… To this day there are those who seek to obliterate the memory of this catastrophe.… However, a younger generation has become aware that historical facts cannot be distorted.… With the setting-up of this memorial, on the very place where the massacre began, the first step has been taken toward propitiating the unquiet spirits of the innocent victims and salving the conscience of the perpetrators and bystanders. Perhaps, at last, genuine repentance and reconciliation will be achieved.… My forebears lived in Žagarė for hundreds of years.… It was the place they called Der Heim.