I was more aware later when my mother and aunt, sitting having tea in my mother’s kitchen in London, bemoaned the plight of a mutual friend whose maid had gone home to the Transkei for a holiday but had not returned or contacted her. My mother said, “I don’t understand it. She was one of the family,” and my aunt responded, “Well, I guess they have different value systems.” I exploded. I had already left South Africa and was well aware of the conditions in the homelands. “Did you not think she might be ill? Dead? Arrested? Not allowed back in Cape Town because her pass wasn’t in order?” I was on a roll. “Such a member of the family and your friend didn’t know where to contact her? So much for being one of the family!”
These contradictions stood out more the older I got, and the more politically aware. Still, I grew up in a home mostly devoid of the willful blindness of whites to the poverty and cruelty around them. More typical was the deep, consistent racism from people who didn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge it in themselves. One night over dinner, the wife of an Afrikaner physics professor, not much older than me, told me about their visit to Spain: “I have never, ever seen such terrible, terrible poverty,” she said, with anguish in her voice. “I found it unbearably distressing.” I listened in disbelief. How could she not regard the poverty in South Africa as “unbearably distressing”? Because in Spain, the poor were white.
Nor was I exempt from such blindness. My twenty-first birthday present from my parents was a trip to Europe. I traveled up the east coast of Africa on a ship that docked in Brindisi. As I looked over the railing at the Italian dockworkers unloading luggage and other goods, working fast, working hard, into my head popped the thought: “Can’t they get a better job?” Even though I caught myself, my first, unpremeditated assumption was that only blacks should do such menial work. Later I would read in Long Walk to Freedom Nelson Mandela’s reaction while traveling clandestinely in Africa before he was arrested: “As I was boarding the plane I saw that the pilot was black. I had never seen a black pilot before, and the instant I did I had to quell my panic. How could a black man fly a plane?” I wasn’t the only one indoctrinated into apartheid’s mind-set.
I AM IN MY MID-TWENTIES, visiting London. Miniskirts are in and I feel good and confident, something I need right now as I get off the bus and head up the street to my parents’ house in north London. I anticipate hovering clouds of tension. Living in New York has helped, but my father’s continuing attempts to dominate and judge me, even if less successful than when I was a teenager, can still leave me mute or belligerent.
Ahead of me I hear full-blown merriment. I recognize my father’s wheezing laughter and see my mother almost doubled up in mirth. She has her arm in his and their body language radiates a deep connection. I stop and stare. I don’t often come across them unawares. “They still really love each other!” I think, surprised that I am surprised. “More than that, they really enjoy each other.” I feel happy for them, and memories of my childhood surface. One of my father’s rhymes, from their betrothal days, pops into my head.
Rosie, oh Rose,
Put on your shabbosdikker clothes.
There’s a young man to see you
With a yiddisher nose.
I think of the scribbled notes my mother has squirreled away in messy drawers—poems and limericks written on the fly. This one, written around the time of a hernia operation:
Despite the troubles in Hibernia,
I got myself a double hernia.
Got myself a load of trouble,
Viscera burst just like a bubble.
Or:
Doctor said, “Don’t make a fuss,
I’m gonna put you in a truss.”
Aesthetic sense against it fought,
But the fight though good did come to naught.
Or the letter he wrote to my mother when she visited my Aunt Sophie in Oudtshoorn when Leonie was a baby.
Business is nice and quiet and it suits me perfectly. I am sorry but no fur coats for you this year. Perhaps next year if a few bears will lose their way and walk into my office. I love you, you rat.—JOE
I am more used to my father’s rages, including against my mother, and tend to remember her as scolding and demanding. I’m at a friend’s house on a play date and she calls: “Come home immediately. Your room is a mess. You have to tidy it.” Or: “You didn’t practice today. Come home right away.” My protestations are ignored. Her voice is to be obeyed. I am humiliated and pouty, but I return home and play my violin for a precise half hour but don’t do the practice, knowing she won’t know the difference. Later I will appreciate that her anger at me is the anger she can’t level at my father. She had her feisty, determined side, head pushed out, lips tight, whether it was digging a hole to plant a tree when she was seven months pregnant or flaring up in outrage at injustice. The poverty in South Africa was a constant source of anger for her.
As a child, I would look hard at photos of my parents in their youth. My father was a handsome, six-foot-tall man in shorts with thick wavy black hair and skinny legs. Some photos show him with a serious expression, others light-hearted. All show his stereotypical Jewish nose, which he was quick to joke about, laughing as he sang along to his LP recordings of Jimmy Durante, the Schnozz, the American comedian renowned for his large proboscis.
Standing next to him, my mother seemed even shorter than her five feet. She was an attractive woman with a bushy head of black hair and a rounded body. She started going gray, as did I, in her thirties, turning completely white by her midfifties. Although she dressed carefully and enjoyed shopping for what she needed, her wardrobe was not large. Consumer goods were not that important to her, but books were. I would often come home from school to find my mother taking an afternoon rest, a book clasped in her hands. She went for the classics, abhorred best sellers, which she considered trashy, but churned through the mysteries such as those of of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. Nothing too violent. Once I graduated to chapter books, I too became an avid reader. Twice a year my mother would take me to Stuttafords department store to choose a hardcover from the children’s book section. “No Enid Blyton!” was her one rule, referring to the popular British author whom I loved but she considered trite. I would spend time savoring the new books, mulling over this or that title until I selected one. Back home I would crack it open, eager to start, intoxicated by the new-paper smell.
While books were my lifeline, classical music was even more so. As I listened to my parents’ records, and to my own growing collection, I escaped from my insecurities and the family tension that seeped out of the walls. I would be transported by the waves rolling through Jascha Heifetz’s Mendelssohn Violin Concerto or Pablo Casals’ Bach Cello Suites.
I COULD SLOUGH OFF MY MOTHER’S demands. Not my father’s. Full of charm and laughter one moment, he could be withdrawn or explosive the next. I feared his foul moods and outbursts of temper. Swayed by his authoritarian assertions that I was too young to have thoughts of my own but should learn from his experience, I adopted his thinking as mine. I tempered what I wanted to say or censored my own opinions until I could suss out what his were and adapt accordingly. When he berated me sharply I would often dissolve into tears. The next morning I would wake to a small peace offering on my bedside table, a chocolate bar or candy—his way of telling me he was sorry. Until the next time.
My mother, too, was intimidated by my father’s anger, and I would absorb her unhappiness when one of his moods descended on our household like a dark cloud. Leonie was more resilient and could stand up to him better than I, but she found it exhausting and annoying. At age twenty-one she emigrated to London, to get away from apartheid but also to break free of our father’s hold.
A turning point came when I was sixteen. It was right after the Sharpeville massacre. I was visiting my Aunt Sophie in Camps Bay, standing in her narrow living room to the right of the piano talking to my cousin, Arnold, who was five years older that I. The salty smell of seaweed and ocean