(Author: Sorrel Kerbel, Vol. 69, No. 1, Pesach 2014)
Readers of Ivan Kapelus’ first publication, Reflections on a Visit to Lithuania, 2009 (revised 2013) will remember the moving account of his ‘roots’ journey to present day Lithuania; the book conveys his sense of shock, more than seventy years after the Nazi invasion of the Baltic States, over the systematic massacre of some 200 000 Jews in the years 1941-1944. Nearly 96% of the total Lithuanian Jewish population was obliterated, a figure higher than in any other state in Europe; the killers, for the most part, were Lithuanians and not Germans.
Fortunately, Kapelus’ ancestors were able to escape the tumultuous history of the Bolshevik revolution, two world wars and its Soviet aftermath by leaving Lithuania in the late 19thand early 20th centuries to settle in South Africa. From the Baltic to the Cape: The Journey of Three Families is a model account of his family’s history, one so typical of those who courageously left the closed, struggling society blighted by antisemitism for a new home in the fairest Cape. In a short time, they and their children were acculturated within the new society, going on to make significant and, as Kapelus points out, numerically disproportionate contributions in many spheres of South African life.
Kapelus tells the story of these immigrant lives, unveiling some intriguing secrets along the way. These are fine portraits of some South African Jewish pioneers, men and women, their children and children’s children. We see their resolute struggle from humble beginnings to occasional splendour; they come to represent the source and spirit of South African Litvak vitality and communal generosity, as demonstrated by those denied basic freedoms in Lithuania, but who for the most part adapted and thrived in their new land.
From the Baltic to the Cape focuses on the journey of three families – the Kapelus family from Plunge (Plungyan), the Dorfmans of Skuodas (Shkud) and the Hotz and Abramson families of Sauliai (Shavl) and Panevezys (Ponevezh) – to Ceres, Van Rhynsdorp and Calvinia in the hinterland of the Cape. Readers are given a feel of life in these remote parts of South Africa, where Jew and Afrikaner were intimately interlinked. In Ceres, for example, where Raphael Kirsch (a Kapelus cousin) returns after a disastrous trip to the goldfields, his response is, “This is a beautiful place! Here anyone could live forever.” He becomes a typical young ‘smous’, a peddler with a horse and cart, seizing opportunities to sell goods to and buy produce from the farming communities in the Bokkeveld. Later, he emerges as a farmer of note, encouraging his family from Plungyan to join him. This story and others like it are full of consoling warmth and optimism, allowing the new immigrants to forget the bitter poverty and hardship endured in the old country, and to prosper in the new. Kapelus’ prose speaks directly to the general reader, and is searching, frank and perceptive, though it largely ignores the dark shadows of Apartheid and the fact that Jews were allowed opportunities that were denied to people of colour around them. I enjoyed his family stories and memories that tap as well into the shared repertoire of my own family experiences. My father, yet another Plungyaner, came with his father, Rabbi E M Stein, to Worcester, di zelbika medina!
The book explores the extraordinary role and records kept by the Union and Castle shipping lines, The Hamburg-American Shipping Company and the Shelter for Poor Jews in London’s East End. Descriptions of the voyage/journey itself summarise much larger accounts, which the general reader will find easy and interesting to access.
Personal family stories are set against the backdrop of a history that reaches deep into the past, to the earliest Jewish immigration during the period of the Dutch settlers, to the British occupation, and the impact of the diamond and gold rushes. The book probes into influences and moral issues for three generations of Jews, describes the growing antisemitism of the Ossewa Brandwag and Greyshirt movements, and the decline of the rural communities as many young people moved to the cities or abroad to countries not blighted by Apartheid.
The book is liberally adorned with fascinating family photographs of people and places, and has many helpful maps, indices and lists. A model of well-documented historical research, it will prove useful to budding genealogists, providing them with access to a wide range of source material and giving them a better understanding of some of the dilemmas and predicaments of East European Jewish immigrants to South Africa.
From the Baltic to the Cape: The Journey of Three Families by Ivan Kapelus; Kadimah Print, South Africa, 2013 (all royalties and proceeds have been gifted to the Jacob Gitlin Library, Cape Town).)
Dr Sorrel Kerbel is editor of The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century, 2003 and 2010. Born and educated in South Africa, she now lives in London, where she is an independent researcher/reviewer and gives classes at the Hendon Holocaust Survivor Centre and at Selig Court, Golders Green.
