by Trevor Sacks
The concrete in Shadrack’s room was smoother and cooler than outside, so my feet throbbed from the heat of the courtyard. There was the old springy bed covered with the crocheted blanket; a riempie chair; a square battery hanging outside the carcass of a black radio, which sat on a plastic tablecloth with a print of colourful fruit; a black-and-white TV set on a wooden chair; and a wardrobe with fragile panels.
It was an ordinary backroom, ‘the servants’ quarters’, like so many in town. As close as Shadrack was to us, through my father’s death, my brothers’ fights, the nannying, the feeding, it was here in the backroom, not in our house, and not with his own family, that he lived. Which is to say, his living circumstances were normal for the day, however appalling they seem to me now; but the past is another country (or so it seems, some days).
Under the riempie chair I could see the miniature yellow tins of shoe glue as well as the tricorn cobbler’s iron, which always stood with a leg in the air, and the ladylike hammer with the slender neck.
Shadrack would have a steady stream of visitors to his backroom from the occupiers of other backrooms around town. Inside the dark quarters, he’d repair their shoes while they sat against the wall on his sprung bed, creaking it as they shifted and spoke, their shoeless feet hovering.
Since Shadrack didn’t mind me visiting, or never let on that he did, the smell of glue, camphor and eucalyptus was familiar to me. I knew the objects that lay around the room, too, from these visits, but since he wasn’t in I was freed from modesty and could inspect them more intently.
My inspection uncovered something I’d never seen before. Behind the radio, next to the large battery with the red and black wires, lay something I had no idea Shadrack possessed.
It was a simple name badge, the kind salespeople wear. It was made from steel and had a mangled, wavy pin at the back and in black capital letters on the front, my father’s name: Eddie Aronbach.
Seeing my father’s name there among objects so familiar to me in Shadrack’s room gave me a small shock. I picked up the badge and squeezed it in my palm, making sure the edges didn’t protrude.
Having just ridden the victorious two-man crime wave of the robbery on Roy’s Uptown Liquor, I had the momentum of a bandit. But this was no ordinary booty; it was my father’s name. It was an heirloom and I – so I reasoned – surely the rightful heir. This is what prompted me to leave the room with the badge in my hand, walking fast enough to remove myself but not so fast as to arouse suspicion.
In my bedroom I opened the drawer that contained my collection of keyrings, stickers and patches and dropped it inside. I scrambled the collection and arranged a patch over my father’s name. I wasn’t sure what to do with the buried treasure, but suspected I should, for the moment, continue my day as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
But I hadn’t quite rubbed away the impression of the badge. I still felt it in my palm, and thought about it sitting in my drawer among the things I’d collected and put away, feeling that once they’ve been collected, they lose their magic.
* * *
My father had belonged to that singular branch of mankind they used to call ‘businessmen’, and he was readying himself for a great opportunity in a small town when he met my mother. If Eddie Aronbach liked something, he bought six of them. It was in Asper’s window that my father asked my mother for the last black, size medium, long-sleeved polo shirt to add to the other five resting on his forearm. There was only one Margot Hirsch, though, and my father never tried to add another five to his inventory, to the best of my knowledge (for you can never be entirely sure of these things).
My mother had studied fine art and was a promising ceramicist, but she’d taken work dressing mannequins to get by. Margot packed up her fettling knives, pottery needles and loops and moved to the town where my father had established himself in business. The pottery put aside, Margot bore first William, then Elliot, and then me, while my father built Great North Diesel and Auto Electric to sustain us all.
After his death, Ma tried to keep the architecture of our lives as intact as possible. We’d continue to live in the same house; we’d each receive a bicycle, modest pocket money, birthday presents; we’d complete our bar mitzvahs; we’d study after school. These were immovable.
To maintain the architecture, Ma fell into the empty seat at the family business, with Morgan the accountant at one elbow, Hans the sales manager at the other and, ever increasingly, Will looming over her.
Business was not what my mother was made for, but she did it. Every day she’d go in to Great North Diesel and Auto Electric and Hans would show her the figures for orders and supplies and talk over the personal problems of staff, stock shortages, impending strikes and client disputes.
For the sake of her three bar mitzvah boys, Ma ironed down her own creases of rebellion. Still, like Elliot, she couldn’t help marking herself out: a five-foot-two bastion against the narrow-minded, the ungenerous, the racist, sexist and religious in town.
We all regarded bar mitzvahs as tribute to our father’s side of the family, an unpleasant but compulsory procedure, like lancing a boil; the bar mitzvahs became recurring campaigns, waged by Ma with just enough force to press each of us into service (but not so much that she’d actually have to be involved herself).
Will had completed his without too much fuss; it was only later that he began to pull at our mother, striking new deals on monthly allowances and holiday funds. Ma put up with it because in a way Will was her great hope. He harassed and demanded, sure, but he brought his girlfriends home to meet her, he studied practical business subjects at university and, over and above the deals and demands, he worked holiday jobs for extra cash. Will was industrious and promising.
That Ma succeeded in getting Elliot through his bar mitzvah, two years after our father’s death, was perhaps her greatest victory. Elliot mocked and complained, skipped cheder lessons, but never, ultimately, refused to go through with it. Still, throughout the bar mitzvah we were on tenterhooks, waiting for an outburst, a sub-machine-gun spray of insults or a manifesto from the bimah: they never came.
Because of my brothers’ considerable demands upon our mother I tended to hang back, in sympathy for her. For her part, she was always much softer with me, indulging my indecisiveness, my sulking, my laziness, my refusal to play with unfamiliar children just because they were children (I had my own brand of rebellion, you see).
We were attached to each other, it’s true, until I reached an age when boys would rather not show attachment and I’d keep her at arm’s length. Some might accuse me of being a mama’s boy; to them I say, there are worse things.
* * *
On Tuesday afternoon, Carol Richler and her daughter fetched me for cheder. ‘I’ve got a miii-graine,’ said Potato Latke. She suffered attacks that felt as if her brains were being strangled, she said. A me-graine: how debilitating to be afflicted with oneself, I thought, especially if one were her. I sat staring out the window of the rust-riddled Mitsubishi Colt.
‘Mommy’s also got a migraine, baby,’ said Carol, rubbing her temple.
Everyone in the Mitsubishi was in agony. For me, there was the Richler women’s voices, those air-raid sirens warning of impending headaches; the cool depression of the awaiting cheder room at the end of the ride; and the spectre of Carol bringing up the subject of Will.
‘Did you see the black man in shul the other night?’ I asked Carol from the back of the Colt.
‘Meshuge,’ said Carol. ‘Must have thought he was somewhere else.’
I’d gone with the Dorfmans to shul the Friday night after the raid on Roy’s, hoping to meet Leo Fein again.
Those first Sabbath nights the synagogue was a wondrous place for me. In our shul the builders had used wood for the bimah, the pews, the floors – and in a town where so much was tiled and welded.
The punched-out stars in the black steel lampshades of the chandeliers glittered at us all, the deep blue curtain blazed with lions embroi
dered in gold and, behind the curtain, a secret place, a sliding door for a cabinet that held rolls of parchment, wrapped with white linen and swaddled in velvet.
That Friday, Leo Fein wasn’t among the men who talked business in the back rows. But the appearance of the black man was enough of a marvel to partly distract me.
He was thin, perhaps in his fifties, dressed in old navy-blue trousers with turn-ups, a white collared shirt and a cream cardigan. The black man in shul was wearing a yarmulke atop his bony head and drew a wide almost painful, smile across his face as he jerked forwards and back.
Julian Gross grabbed his hand after the service and pulled him aside while the rest of the congregation shuffled out. Joss and I wanted to know if the man was Jewish.
How could he be, Joss’s father had said, but we had our reply – the black Jews of Ethiopia. Everyone knew Israel flew them out of there when they were starving.
This isn’t Ethiopia, Joss’s father had said, nor Israel, his mother had added.
‘He said he was Jewish,’ I said to Carol as the Mitsubishi rumbled to a stop.
‘Mommee,’ said Potato Latke in the front seat.
‘How can he be Jewish? A black? No, no,’ said Carol. ‘I don’t know where they get these ideas. You know, Ben, some people just see an opportunity when they see Jews.’
‘What if he’s Ethiopian?’
‘I’ve got a migraine,’ said Potato Latke.
‘It’s not a migraine, baby,’ said Carol. The car pulled up outside the compact shul. ‘Shoshana – aren’t you forgetting?’ Carol asked, her eyes pointing to a can of Charlie deodorant on the seat. Potato Latke snatched at it and dropped it into her canvas satchel. Tears welled in her eyes and she massaged her temples as her mother drove away.
We joined the others in the small classroom attached to the shul. There were usually only four or five of us there, all children under the age of thirteen. Joss had already had his bar mitzvah, so he didn’t come to cheder any more; I was the oldest in class.
Compared with me, the others were steeped in Judaism. They’d caught the kosher drippings of their Jewish home life. I, on the other hand, had to learn Judaism the same way I was learning Hebrew: as a foreign language. Not even the black-and-blue covers of the Encyclopedia Americana, the highest authority in my house and a particular addiction of mine, knew the stuff I learnt in cheder.
I sat at one of the dark wooden desks, the old kind with the bench seats attached to black iron frames and a waxy grime deep in the desktop grain. The grime, I imagined, was the source of that sour smell that became associated with the depression of cheder.
It was here I felt most alone. My resistance to cheder came more from my bewilderment at the syllabus than antagonism towards the Rabbi. I liked our rabbi. In my household of unbelievers there’d often been an excuse for me and my brothers before me to skip cheder, whether feigned illness, holidays, or more pressing schoolwork, yet the Rabbi never once used guilt to force my mother’s hand, nor did he threaten, as he might have, to stop teaching us.
He’d said nothing in objection to my brothers’ desertion of the minyans straight after their bar mitzvahs. He knew, then, what to expect from me, the third Aronbach, but I don’t remember him ever trying to convince me of the religion beyond the bounds of the lessons.
It’s not customary for Jews to make confession, but I do so now. While my family was steadfastly atheist, I was a believer. At least, I tried to be. It’s no fun growing up in a household of sensible thoughts, reasonableness and reason. Every kid wants to rebel and, in the land of the secular, it’s the believers who are the radicals. So, I kept this rebellious little dagger in my heart for my family.
This does not, however, suggest that I felt any sort of allegiance to my fellow cheder-goers. I disdained them, for the way they kept themselves apart from the bulk of kids in school, but mostly for the way they treated the Rabbi.
The Rabbi was in his early thirties and what we would have called spastic if our parents had let us. For the Rabbi, just turning a page meant a battle between opposing forces in his arms. With even the simplest of movements, his muscles strained and contorted his limbs. And I hated the other children more and more ferociously with every snigger they let slip at his scrawling handwriting up on the chalkboard.
I was desperate for the Rabbi to speak about the black man who’d been in shul on Friday night but he was talking kashrut and what good Jews avoid. Meanwhile, I was wondering where the black man had come from, and why.
Had it been a political act? A statement of some kind? Or was it possible he was from a lost tribe of Israel? A convert? How do you explain Sammy Davis, Jr?
The Rabbi was talking about owls, that they’re not kosher. I watched a boy in a Disney yarmulke draw the word ‘FUCK’ in deliberate wavy lines in his notebook.
‘Why did that black man come to shul on Friday night?’ asked Potato Latke.
I was immediately annoyed that she’d had the courage to ask the question.
‘Well, Shoshana,’ said the Rabbi, ‘I think it was some kind of a misunderstanding, that’s all.’
‘Is he Jewish?’ she asked.
Disney Yarmulke honked a laugh.
‘He thinks he’s Jewish,’ said the Rabbi. ‘Who knows? Maybe he is, but I think it’s unlikely.’
‘How do you know he’s not Jewish?’ she asked.
‘Well, he doesn’t read Hebrew, or speak it. He knows some of the laws and customs, I think, but that’s not enough.’
‘Ben doesn’t speak Hebrew,’ said Shoshana. Of course she was right, but there was no need to point it out, I felt.
‘He’s learning, though, and we know where Ben comes from. But I think the man who came on Friday night is confused about things. There’s some explanation for it. For instance, maybe at one time he worked for a Jewish family and now he misses those things, Jewish things, that remind him of them.’
‘What if he wanted to be Jewish?’ I asked. ‘Couldn’t you help him?’
‘If he wanted to convert, you mean,’ said the Rabbi. ‘It can be done. But, you know, Jews don’t go out and convert. It’s not our way of doing things. You have to really commit to it. We don’t make it easy.’
I thought that was good. I liked it, as if it were a character trait one feels affection for, a sort of humility, even if I didn’t particularly care for the automatic inclusion of being one of The Chosen, and I wondered how it was I’d been chosen but not the black man in shul.
After two thousand years of suffering, we Jews found ourselves on the other side of the fence in South Africa. While we were still shut out of certain clubs and inner circles, called names and made fun of from time to time, we had none of the hardships a brown skin would have got us.
I know Ma saw parallels between the long histories of tribulations of blacks and Jews, though Elliot was the only one among us to express an opinion that Jews had a responsibility to relieve the suffering of black people. Our own people’s suffering sharpened our faculties for sensing injustice, but these seemed to be body-bound, insensate to suffering beyond them.
Perhaps it was just a relief to know that, if there were horrors happening, at least this time they weren’t happening to us. After all, Gail Dorfman’s father had jumped from a train to escape the death camps and lost his parents, two sisters and a brother in Poland; Julian Gross had fought off Nazi sympathisers of the Ossewa Brandwag who had attacked his parents’ shop with crowbars and beaten Julian with chains, right here in our town in the 1940s. Whatever family of ours had been left behind in Lithuania had been led into a forest and shot.
Though we weren’t a family of the struggle, Ma was one of the few people I saw intervening, albeit in modest ways, in the everyday humiliations she’d see black people suffer in shops or waiting rooms, or counter racist remarks in what passed for polite conversation. Perhaps she had the safety of being a woman and a widow.
I knew from Ma that being a Jew was complicated: there wasn’t just one type. There w
ere the communist plotters, and there were the secret admirers of Afrikaners – both nations recognising in one another the respective laagers they’d drawn, Volk and Zion. In town, we seldom heard any other resistance to apartheid from Gentiles or Jews, and whatever liberal noises were being made by the Jewish Board of Deputies in Joburg never trickled down to my ears in any Shabbes service.
Yes, being a Jew was complicated, difficult at times, but ultimately safer than being black. Maybe some Jewish Wallenberg or Schindler could have officiated over the conversion of black people to Judaism to save them from apartheid; it’s unlikely the Department of Bantu Administration would have taken them off their books.
And some black people didn’t need converting at all, though it didn’t exempt them from apartheid. The Lemba people, a hundred kilometres to the north of town, look like their black Venda neighbours and speak the same language, but slaughter their animals the kosher way, refrain from eating pork, won’t intermarry, and worship one god. They pass on to their children a history that says they originated in Yemen, and left the land with the ancient and holy Ark of the Covenant.
Their priestly clan has DNA of the Cohen strand: it seems they’re Jews, the same as me.
* * *
What could I do with the badge now besides take it out and look upon it in secret? I mulled over this question in the car on the way back from cheder. I couldn’t wear it without Shadrack knowing about it, or Ma asking about it, or Elliot freaking out about it. For all I knew, Ma may even have given it to Shadrack.
Even if it was my father’s name on the badge, Shadrack had known him better, certainly longer, and deserved it more: he was no thief.
After Carol dropped me off at home, I came to Shadrack’s room with my fist clenched. I could hear soft rapping and scraping inside, and knocked after a hesitation. I opened the door and found him tapping a nail into the heel of a yellowish women’s boot with the slender hammer.