Darling, doesn’t Rupert look just like Jesus Christ!
For my self of the 1940s, 50s, 60s, there was a need at times to escape the stifling blandness of ethnically self-contained, self-satisfied Anglo culture, specially the colonial version.
I was born, in Pretoria, into a South African baptised-Anglican family both sides, from English Australian New Zealand origins. But there were little admixtures here and there, thin chinks in the ethnic stitching that allowed in a little light to glimpse other angles by, a few hints of more pungent tastes and scents. There was Jewish, out there. I was never seeking to be a Jew, but Jew Ish, I liked.
My father, who sold properties for Saul Berman’s agency in Pretoria, loved telling Jewish jokes with the full accent more than anyone, except Saul Berman himself, and later, my Jewish father in law. Do you remember the one about Abie in the train, who had a headache? Among my own later favourites were Marty Feldman as Jewish mother – you didn’t like the other shirt? And of course, the great political one: I should apologise? Which requires you to do Trotsky in full Yiddishe cadence.
My youngest raunchy experience, aged about six, and my raunchiest experience ever, ten years later, were both with Saul Berman’s daughter. A bracketing of my entire boyhood sex life. Nothing memorable, in any self-respecting Freudian sense, happened in between.
My mother in her sundowner state, sometimes boasted of a New Zealand Jewish grandmother. My father’s more starchy Anglo family had to admit to a big big otherness; in fact Indian, not Jewish. My grandfather’s sister sailed from Bristol out to India to marry the Household Comptroller of the Maharajah of Madya Pradesh, named (not Kahn or Carne) but Khan – a Mughal courtier; and when she died of yellow fever, his other sister went out and married him, and brought their child back to Bristol. This was not an easy family connection for white South Africans to reveal. I learned about it very late.
My best friend at primary school, at secondary school, at university the first year, was a Jew – the same boy, called Michael Berger, who drifted off to do engineering, which was beyond the pale for an arts undergraduate like me.
I was in Pretoria throughout my schooldays. Then we moved to Johannesburg, all of 36 miles and a sophisticated world away, and to Wits University. There I met my first real love, my enduring love. She was jewish. She was Not-Jewish, because her mother wasn’t, even though her father was, and her school friends and family friends were, her milieu was. She left Leo Havermann broken-hearted when she fell for me, and I for her. But Leo’s father had been ready to go into full mourning if they married, because she was Not-Jewish. He ended up marrying a French Catholic, later divorced her. Serve his father right. Leo was a violinist, looked to me a nice guy, reminds me, looking back, of the Adrienne Brody figure in The Piano.
My love’s father was indifferent about Leo and didn’t mind me – as long as she didn’t go all out for the huge muscly blond German Karl, who used to go whaling in the South Atlantic during university vacs.
- “Don’t bring that fascist into the house” he would command; just as he would never let a Volkswagen or a Benz into the driveway, let alone own one. No German person or thing could be bourne, he would rail illogically at his beautiful blonde German wife, who I would hear meekly reply: “ja puppie, ja puppie.”
We courted, studied, engaged and wedded in one of the world’s most Jewish towns, Johannesburg. To this day, more than 50 years later, WIZO, pronounced whizzo, can only mean the Women’s International Zionist Organisation. The boy scouts around town in blue berets on Friday were destined one day to do time on a kibbutz – and maybe get caught up in 1956 or 1967, or 1973.
We went to bioscope on Friday night, to the Colosseum or His Majesty’s, and afterwards joined the window-shoppers strolling along Commissioner and Eloff Street.
We held hands as we watched Hill 64 Does Not Answer, with Kirk Douglas playing the brave Sabra defending the last outpost against the invading Egyptians.
We pored over Exodus and other Leon Uris novels, and we got to know that Haganah was the liberation movement, the Stern Gang beyond the pale. That was an apt phrase perhaps to describe a group led among others by Polish Jews such as Menachem Begin), whom we could never imagine would years later become the first prime minister not to be a good Ashkenazi Labourite from within the Omsk region; and would lead an extreme party like Likud, with the support of the Yemenites, and other vulgar Sephardim, into an uncompromising mission of more settlements, and a renewed vision of Eretz Israel.
In that 1950s Johannesburg, the cultural pace-setters of Jo’burg society may have rather looked down from their sophisticated world view on the more parochial do-gooders of WIZO and the Zionist scout movement.
Taubie Kushlik was the doyenne of Johannesburg theatre, bringing in the best of the West End and Broadway, and promoting local satire. I remember her swooping down on my future mother in law at a big Jewish wedding, effusively praising her handsome goateed son:
“Darling, doesn’t Rupert look just like Jesus Christ!”
Heidi Kassel cut the same larger than life figure in Cape Town theatre; one of her daughters had moved on from the local art scene to become the Rome-based personal curator of the Paul Getty collection.
Wits University was Jewish in its more vivid undergraduate personae. The students’ parking lot, in the days when few undergraduates owned cars, was littered with the BCom students’ flashy Alfa-Romeos. One Alfa driver was Mervyn King, who became one of South Africa’s flashiest most able corporate bosses, during and beyond the apartheid years. Ronnie Bethlehem was a bodybuilding ‘Mr Wits’ who became a busy spokesman for big money to support the transition full on.
Sometimes the annual University Rag Queen, always at least one of her princesses, was a shirtwaist skirted, multi-petticoated Jewish girl.
The best actresses in University players were Janet Suzman and Judith Abel, destined for RADA and Central School, and Janet for West End stardom. She lent her celebrity later to the founding of the Newtown theatre complex, which blossomed in the converted buildings of the old flower market and became, under Barney Simon a wonderful venue for everything that crossed the barriers.
Among the leading left intellectuals draped on the University Great Steps in the Fifties were Stan Trapido, Rose Rappaport, Michael Picardie. All on the way at some time to Oxford or Harvard.
At one point, I was the apparent non-leftie, promoted alongside a fellow student from an Orthodox family – she and I to be co-editors of the student newspaper, in a ploy to keep out the threat of Trotskyist Harry Barolsky. I remember going to her house for the first time, for an editorial planning meeting, and wondering at the separate meat and milk crockery and cutlery sets in the kitchen. Much of Joburg society was Reform in those pre-fundamental days.
In the suburbs, moved from the old Jewish quarters like Doornfontein, where their parents had settled when they first came from Lithuania, were those who were already, or to become, the great icons of the South African liberation struggle, the promoters and allies of the ANC and its communist and trade union comrades. There were Rusty and Hilda Bernstein, Mike Harmel, Jack and Ray Simons, the Foremans, the Weinbergs, Rica Hodgson and so many more, who were harassed, jailed and exiled. Joe Slovo and Ruth First were the younger dynamic political couple of The Movement, who gave their lives to it. Joe topped the law graduates of his year and was a leading Communist and ANC member. Ruth was a great and independent-minded marxist writer-journalist and crusader.
Among the young legal defenders of the Cause crusaders were Joel Joffe, now Lord Joffe in Britain, Harold Wolpe, who became a leading UK academic, Arthur Chaskalson, later second Chief Justice of the country’s Constitutional Court, Albie Sachs, longtime struggler, at home and through years of exile, victim of a near fatal car bombing by apartheid terrorists, now one of the Court’s Justices.
The lists are endless...
21st January 2008
Tony Hall
Jo'burg's Jewish suburb, beautiful with Jacarandas
For my self of the 1940s, 50s, 60s, there was a need at times to escape the stifling blandness of ethnically self-contained, self-satisfied Anglo culture, specially the colonial version.
I was born, in Pretoria, into a South African baptised-Anglican family both sides, from English Australian New Zealand origins. But there were little admixtures here and there, thin chinks in the ethnic stitching that allowed in a little light to glimpse other angles by, a few hints of more pungent tastes and scents. There was Jewish, out there. I was never seeking to be a Jew, but Jew Ish, I liked.
My father, who sold properties for Saul Berman’s agency in Pretoria, loved telling Jewish jokes with the full accent more than anyone, except Saul Berman himself, and later, my Jewish father in law. Do you remember the one about Abie in the train, who had a headache? Among my own later favourites were Marty Feldman as Jewish mother – you didn’t like the other shirt? And of course, the great political one: I should apologise? Which requires you to do Trotsky in full Yiddishe cadence.
My youngest raunchy experience, aged about six, and my raunchiest experience ever, ten years later, were both with Saul Berman’s daughter. A bracketing of my entire boyhood sex life. Nothing memorable, in any self-respecting Freudian sense, happened in between.
My mother in her sundowner state, sometimes boasted of a New Zealand Jewish grandmother. My father’s more starchy Anglo family had to admit to a big big otherness; in fact Indian, not Jewish. My grandfather’s sister sailed from Bristol out to India to marry the Household Comptroller of the Maharajah of Madya Pradesh, named (not Kahn or Carne) but Khan – a Mughal courtier; and when she died of yellow fever, his other sister went out and married him, and brought their child back to Bristol. This was not an easy family connection for white South Africans to reveal. I learned about it very late.
My best friend at primary school, at secondary school, at university the first year, was a Jew – the same boy, called Michael Berger, who drifted off to do engineering, which was beyond the pale for an arts undergraduate like me.
I was in Pretoria throughout my schooldays. Then we moved to Johannesburg, all of 36 miles and a sophisticated world away, and to Wits University. There I met my first real love, my enduring love. She was jewish. She was Not-Jewish, because her mother wasn’t, even though her father was, and her school friends and family friends were, her milieu was. She left Leo Havermann broken-hearted when she fell for me, and I for her. But Leo’s father had been ready to go into full mourning if they married, because she was Not-Jewish. He ended up marrying a French Catholic, later divorced her. Serve his father right. Leo was a violinist, looked to me a nice guy, reminds me, looking back, of the Adrienne Brody figure in The Piano.
My love’s father was indifferent about Leo and didn’t mind me – as long as she didn’t go all out for the huge muscly blond German Karl, who used to go whaling in the South Atlantic during university vacs.
- “Don’t bring that fascist into the house” he would command; just as he would never let a Volkswagen or a Benz into the driveway, let alone own one. No German person or thing could be bourne, he would rail illogically at his beautiful blonde German wife, who I would hear meekly reply: “ja puppie, ja puppie.”
We courted, studied, engaged and wedded in one of the world’s most Jewish towns, Johannesburg. To this day, more than 50 years later, WIZO, pronounced whizzo, can only mean the Women’s International Zionist Organisation. The boy scouts around town in blue berets on Friday were destined one day to do time on a kibbutz – and maybe get caught up in 1956 or 1967, or 1973.
We went to bioscope on Friday night, to the Colosseum or His Majesty’s, and afterwards joined the window-shoppers strolling along Commissioner and Eloff Street.
We held hands as we watched Hill 64 Does Not Answer, with Kirk Douglas playing the brave Sabra defending the last outpost against the invading Egyptians.
We pored over Exodus and other Leon Uris novels, and we got to know that Haganah was the liberation movement, the Stern Gang beyond the pale. That was an apt phrase perhaps to describe a group led among others by Polish Jews such as Menachem Begin), whom we could never imagine would years later become the first prime minister not to be a good Ashkenazi Labourite from within the Omsk region; and would lead an extreme party like Likud, with the support of the Yemenites, and other vulgar Sephardim, into an uncompromising mission of more settlements, and a renewed vision of Eretz Israel.
In that 1950s Johannesburg, the cultural pace-setters of Jo’burg society may have rather looked down from their sophisticated world view on the more parochial do-gooders of WIZO and the Zionist scout movement.
Taubie Kushlik was the doyenne of Johannesburg theatre, bringing in the best of the West End and Broadway, and promoting local satire. I remember her swooping down on my future mother in law at a big Jewish wedding, effusively praising her handsome goateed son:
“Darling, doesn’t Rupert look just like Jesus Christ!”
Heidi Kassel cut the same larger than life figure in Cape Town theatre; one of her daughters had moved on from the local art scene to become the Rome-based personal curator of the Paul Getty collection.
Wits University was Jewish in its more vivid undergraduate personae. The students’ parking lot, in the days when few undergraduates owned cars, was littered with the BCom students’ flashy Alfa-Romeos. One Alfa driver was Mervyn King, who became one of South Africa’s flashiest most able corporate bosses, during and beyond the apartheid years. Ronnie Bethlehem was a bodybuilding ‘Mr Wits’ who became a busy spokesman for big money to support the transition full on.
Sometimes the annual University Rag Queen, always at least one of her princesses, was a shirtwaist skirted, multi-petticoated Jewish girl.
The best actresses in University players were Janet Suzman and Judith Abel, destined for RADA and Central School, and Janet for West End stardom. She lent her celebrity later to the founding of the Newtown theatre complex, which blossomed in the converted buildings of the old flower market and became, under Barney Simon a wonderful venue for everything that crossed the barriers.
Among the leading left intellectuals draped on the University Great Steps in the Fifties were Stan Trapido, Rose Rappaport, Michael Picardie. All on the way at some time to Oxford or Harvard.
At one point, I was the apparent non-leftie, promoted alongside a fellow student from an Orthodox family – she and I to be co-editors of the student newspaper, in a ploy to keep out the threat of Trotskyist Harry Barolsky. I remember going to her house for the first time, for an editorial planning meeting, and wondering at the separate meat and milk crockery and cutlery sets in the kitchen. Much of Joburg society was Reform in those pre-fundamental days.
In the suburbs, moved from the old Jewish quarters like Doornfontein, where their parents had settled when they first came from Lithuania, were those who were already, or to become, the great icons of the South African liberation struggle, the promoters and allies of the ANC and its communist and trade union comrades. There were Rusty and Hilda Bernstein, Mike Harmel, Jack and Ray Simons, the Foremans, the Weinbergs, Rica Hodgson and so many more, who were harassed, jailed and exiled. Joe Slovo and Ruth First were the younger dynamic political couple of The Movement, who gave their lives to it. Joe topped the law graduates of his year and was a leading Communist and ANC member. Ruth was a great and independent-minded marxist writer-journalist and crusader.
Among the young legal defenders of the Cause crusaders were Joel Joffe, now Lord Joffe in Britain, Harold Wolpe, who became a leading UK academic, Arthur Chaskalson, later second Chief Justice of the country’s Constitutional Court, Albie Sachs, longtime struggler, at home and through years of exile, victim of a near fatal car bombing by apartheid terrorists, now one of the Court’s Justices.
The lists are endless...
21st January 2008
Tony Hall
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