I know more about my maternal grandfather, Moses Schur, and his second wife, Leah Stutzen, who was the one grandparent still living when I was born. She was an ornery presence throughout my childhood, a woman fond of her grandchildren as long as she didn’t interact with them too much.
What were my grandmother’s first reactions when she saw Table Mountain from the ship as it neared the docks? She must have felt heavy-hearted. She had left behind her true love, a rabbinical student whom her younger brother had forbidden her to marry. At twenty-four she was not going to easily find a man acceptable to both her and her family. Moses Schur, a rich widower, must have seemed like a better-than-nothing alternative, despite being thirty years older than her, particularly as the older sister she adored already lived in Cape Town and had arranged the marriage in the first place. She never talked about her betrothed back home, nor why the family had prevented the marriage. I suspect he was one of the radical students who organized a strike at the Yeshiva in her town around the time they were engaged. What she made clear to her daughters was that she had no love for this old man, who had five sons around her age and treated her poorly.
Moses Schur arrived in South Africa in 1880, penniless but determined. Starting off as a smous—an itinerant peddler—with no more than a donkey and a back pack, he eventually acquired considerable wealth from the small empire of shops and hotels he built that served the needs of rural Afrikaners in the far reaches of Cape Province. While he was alive they lived well. Photos show her in splendid finery, large and buxom next to an old grizzled man who appears to be half her size. She stares out at the camera, expressionless. When Moses died, he left her with three children—Sam, aged nine; Sophie, aged seven; and Rose, aged five—as well as a small stipend, and a spacious house on the slopes of Table Mountain. His considerable wealth somehow disappeared. According to my father, the executor of the will swindled Leah, the ignorant young woman from the old country, as well as her children, and her stepchildren out of their inheritance. To make ends meet, Leah turned her home into a kosher boarding house for the daughters of Jews who lived in the rural areas and attended school in Cape Town.
“Tell me about your childhood,” I would ask my mother, eager for real-life stories. But besides the games she played, only bitter memories would surface. Some of the parents never paid their bills, and my grandmother could never insist. Rose and Sophie—but not their brother, Sam—never had their own bedroom; there was always the need to house one more boarder. At school, they were taunted mercilessly for being the daughters of the poor, disliked landlady. The taunts still stung: with hurt in her eyes, my mother could still name the worst offenders. I once asked my aunt Sophie, who enjoyed writing and had an occasional piece published in local newspapers, to write about her childhood. She shook her head: “I once tried, but I had such nightmares that I stopped.”
Once her children were in their late teens, Leah offered rooms to young Jewish men—university students, many of them political radicals. They introduced Rose to the Lenin Club and a new world opened up, one in which discussion and debate centered around the evils of apartheid, the struggles of the working class, socialism, and the way to bring about transformation and secure rights for the majority of South Africans. She was immediately drawn to my father, this charming handsome man, who loved an argument, who laughed easily and told silly jokes. They married in 1937. Leonie was born in 1939, and I was born four and a half years later, in 1943.
My parents were atheists, and rejected the strict religious orthodoxy of my grandparents. Nonetheless, from my earliest memory I knew that we were Jewish. What that actually meant was tested on my first day of kindergarten at Oakhurst Primary School. Twenty new girls sat cross-legged in a circle on the carpeted floor, sun flooding in from the windows. My new friend, Lulu, and I sat shoulder to shoulder as our teacher, Miss Hanny, explained the how, what, and wherefore of the school day. This included twice-weekly religious instruction classes, which she called RI.
“Will the Jewish girls please raise your hands,” she said. Four arms went up, including mine and Lulu’s. Ms. Hanny went on to explain that as we were Jewish we were excused from attending RI. I turned to my new friend. “I know why,” I pronounced with four-and-a-half-year-old certainty. “It’s because Jews don’t believe in God.” Lulu, with a look of disbelief, scuttled away from me as if I had morphed into something vile, leaving a wide gap between us.
“Not so!” she protested with much five-year-old indignation. “Of course we believe in God!”
What could she possibly mean? My father and my mother told me that God did not exist. I also knew we were Jewish. Surely that meant Jews did not believe in God? I mulled over Lulu’s reaction for the rest of the short school day. It was the first question I asked my mother when she came to pick me up, ignoring her eager “Did you like school? What did you do?”
“Lulu says Jews believe in God. But that’s not true, is it, Mummy?” A smile spread across my mother’s face. “Most Jews believe in God,” she explained gently. “Granny does, and she goes to synagogue every Saturday morning. So do Daddy’s brothers, your uncles. We don’t. Aunt Sophie doesn’t. But we are still all Jews.” She added an intriguing fact: “Many non-Jews also don’t believe in God,” and she listed off, finger by finger, the nonbelievers among our Gentile friends.
I would become familiar with and internalize my father’s refrain: “As long as there is anti-Semitism in the world, we will always claim being Jews.” In keeping with this he closed his law office every major Jewish holiday as an I-am-a-Jew statement to the community. So while my friends dressed in fine new clothes and went with their families to shul on the high holy days—Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur—my mother packed a picnic lunch and my father drove us to the beach or the mountains or Tokai Forest to spend a day of play and relaxation. At dusk on Yom Kippur we would join my father’s oldest brother for the breaking of the fast. I was not yet two when World War II ended. The Holocaust must have been very much on their minds. My parents never ever bought German goods. (Years later, when my husband and I drove out of the Volkswagen dealer with our new station wagon, I was momentarily overcome by a wave of nausea—I had just bought a German car! “Sorry, Dad,” I said, lifting my eyes to the heaven I didn’t believe in.)
A disproportionate number of whites in the anti-apartheid struggle were Jews; many spent time in jail or fled into exile, where they both longed for and worked toward the day that South Africa would be free from apartheid’s yoke. Were they radicalized by their own parents fleeing the pogroms and terrible repression in eastern Europe? By the revolutionary fervor that preceded the Russian Revolution? Or by their unique experience as Jewish immigrants in South Africa, combined with the persecution Jews suffered in Europe during the Second World War?
MY FATHER LOVED TELLING JOKES and funny stories. As a teen, I would find his jokes oh-so-embarrassing. The stories that he brought home from his day, however, often captured the essence of South Africa. One evening it was about Pienaar, an Afrikaner lawyer friend and regular golf partner. “I bumped into Pienaar in the city today,” he announced over dinner one evening. “I told him that Louis Maurice had come for dinner last night.” Louis Maurice was a talented young coloured sculptor and a family friend. A grin began to spread over his face. “He looked a bit horrified and then asked, almost in a whisper”—by then my father was gasping for breath with his signature infectious laughter—“what dishes did you serve his food on, Joe?” He often couldn’t make it to the punch line. By now we were all in stitches.
But wait, what about the mottled blue-and-white enamel mug and plate with a chip of paint missing from its blue rim that had their specific spot in our kitchen cupboard? These were for Amos, our twice-weekly gardener, a polite, elderly African man. The domestic worker would prepare his breakfast—two thick slices of white bread with a substantial layer of butter and bright orange apricot jam and a mug of strong, sweet tea with milk—and later his lunch, invariably mealie pap, a traditional corn porridge, with meat-and-vegetable stew. He would eat sitting on the cement steps that led from the kitchen door to the backyard, his floppy gray felt hat low over his forehead. When he finished his meal, he would hand the plate and mug to the maid,