(Author: Shirley Klein Kantor, Vol. 69, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2014)
Calvinia1 is the place of my birth, the place of my childhood, my first experience with death, the ancestral burial site and my chosen burial space. By digging up and into my past, a narrative emerges which questions family mythology, self and memory. The narrative explores relationships between the different communities in Calvinia around the middle of the 20th Century.
As early as 1891 Jews had moved there – a contemporary report stated that “In Calvinia, Prince Albert, Swellendam, Stellenbosch …and similar dorps, there are likewise many well-to-do Jews.” The graves of my grandparents, who came from Vilna, Lithuania, Max and Anna Klein, and those of my parents, Bennie and Sylvia Klein, born in South Africa, are in the tiny Calvinia Jewish Cemetery, ‘The Home of the Living,’ according to Hassidic Jews. My father and mother owned a shop, B. Klein, groothandelaars. I feel so happy at the sight of our shop sign, still in Calvinia.
My father was the last Jewish man to be buried in Calvinia, in 1958, and my mother’s ashes were put to rest there as well. I too wish to be buried in Calvinia. In 1953 my brother, Max, was the last Jewish boy to have his barmitzvah in the Calvinia Synagogue, now transformed into the Calvinia Museum.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] The former Calvinia synagogue, now a museum (Courtesy: SA Friends of Beth Hatefutsoth) While researching my own family history, I perchance came upon what later proved to be a very important document. My lecturer, Andrew Lamprecht, suggested that the University of Cape Town Library for Rare Books and Manuscripts would be a good place to start my research. Here, much to my surprise, I found my mother’s signature on a faded piece of paper: A contract between the last few remaining Jews of Calvinia and the Calvinia Municipality, dated 1960. The municipality would be given the synagogue, gratis, to establish the Calvinia Museum, on the proviso that they took good care of the Jewish Cemetery in perpetuity. I wondered if they had kept to their side of the bargain. I had not been to Calvinia for about 15 years and had little desire to go back ‘home’ after my last experience there with the police. In 1985, my husband Brian and I took our sons, Charles and Daniel, to Calvinia on a pilgrimage. It was September. It was spring. Carpets of orange ‘gousblomme’ were everywhere, even on the pavements. I got up just as the sun was peeping over the Hantam Berge to take a walk down memory lane with my camera while the kids were still asleep. It was then that I was detained at the police station for five hours, without being granted permission to contact my family. My crime was taking a photograph of the façade of the police station. The building, with its twin glass doors framed in wood and curvaceous brass handles, was a place where as a child I had lots of fun, sliding on my bum along the highly polished red cement prison passages, amusing myself talking to the prisoners while my father drank coffee with his good friend, Captain Botha. Unbeknown to me, it was an offence to take photographs of public buildings or railway stations under the conditions of the then State of Emergency. This experience tainted my feelings about Calvinia. The repeated questions of the ‘sersant’ who interrogated me for five long hours about my family and the nature of my ‘business in Calvinia’ are to this day clearly imprinted on my mind…. ‘Wie was jou ouers en ken jy nog mense in Calvinia’. I had to think hard – almost twenty years had passed. A name of Meneer Anthonissen flashes through my mind. His son Kobus, the naughtiest boy in my sub-A class, was my best friend. He dials Anthonissen’s number. It’s 6am! He says, ‘Jammer, Anthonissen, staan net gou, gou op……, kom maar sommer in jou pijamas,….. ek wil dat jy vir my iemand kom identiviseer’. I still feel the relief at the sound of ‘Sersant’ van der Westhuizen words when he told me that he would not destroy my photographs, and dame jy kan nou gaan. …..lady you are free to go. However, smiling cynically, he added, ‘maar dame, moenie verbaas wees as jy weer van ons in Kaapstad hoor nie’. From that moment, Calvinia was no longer the idealised place of my childhood. A few years ago my sister, Elaine, told me about a painting she had seen in a Cape Town art gallery by a British artist who comes to South Africa every year to paint the beautiful old buildings of our ‘dorps’. The painting she referred to was of a building in Calvinia, which I recognised as Berman’s old shop, which now curiously had our late father’s shop sign, B.KLEIN. GENERAL DEALERS ALGEMENE HANDELAARS positioned above the door. We were both intrigued, as the building was not the old shop we knew. It transpired that the sign, though displayed on the wrong building was authentic, rescued from a rubbish dump in Calvinia by Alta Coetzee. The British artist told me that the building in question was no longer a shop, but the studio of a papermaker. I was astounded. I am also a papermaker. There are so few papermakers in South Africa and the co-incidence of a papermaker’s studio in Calvinia which displays B. Klein’s shop sign was overwhelming. Who was she, and what were her papermaking techniques? I was keen to share ideas with her and see her paper. I developed a compelling, somewhat irrational urge to meet her and started planning a visit to Calvinia immediately. I also wanted to visit the Jewish cemetery to see if the Calvinia Municipality had kept its promise. August is the time for the renowned ‘Calvinia Vleis Fees’. People come from all the surrounding villages, Klaver, van Rhynsdorp, Clanwilliam, Williston, Middelpos (the birth place of Sir Anthony Sher) and to my surprise, busloads of people from as far afield as Cape Town. I packed examples of my artworks on paper and went back to Calvinia. There were thousands of people in Calvinia and the air was thick with smoke and the aroma of ‘braai vleis’. A noisy helicopter was continuously circling overhead and I noticed an unusual number of police. I felt ill at ease. I found a bed for the night with a nurse who lets rooms. The windows and doors were burglar proofed. How things had changed. During my childhood, we left front and back doors open during the hot summers. First to visit the papermaker. I knocked a few times. I could see bits of handmade paper on the table. I was excited though all was eerily quiet. She had gone to the ‘vleis fees’. I planned to return later. But there was no need to. Sadly, she had been brutally murdered the day before by rampaging teenagers, who had been amputating the front legs of sheep and chose her as their next victim. I passed the show grounds, the venue for the ‘vleis fees en boere musiek’ on my way to the cemetery. Dark clouds of smoke from the braai permeated the still, hot air…. I walked into the cemetery slowly. I missed my parents. To my dismay, the beautiful, statuesque Victorian gates of the Jewish Cemetery were hanging off their hinges. Bones, bottles and beer cans were all over the place. The fence, once the boundary between Jewish and Christian cemeteries and now rusted and scattered in pieces, said it all. The graves, many unmarked and sunken, seemed undisturbed. The solitary 200 year old pine tree, still beautifully, growing next to my dad’s grave provided the only shade. Its strong, old roots seemed as a cradle around the Klein graves. So that was drought-stricken Calvinia, August 1999. I came back to Cape Town to continue my studies. I could not concentrate on my own work. I realised that I had to do something about the cemetery. I phoned the Calvinia Municipality and spoke to Deon Engelbrecht. He was not aware of the contract but would look into it. Much to my relief, he phoned me the very next day. He had found the contract and seen the cemetery. He apologised on behalf of the municipality, undertook to raise the matter at the next Council meeting and promised to take personal responsibility for cleaning up and replacing the fence around this small plot of ground, now totally surrounded by the ‘Calvinia Begrafplaas’. Fencing in the Jewish cemetery made no sense to me. I decided that we should not replace the fence. The Jews and Christians got on well during their life-time so why a fence? Surely it would be more appropriate to plant trees to demarcate the boundary, thus shading the graves of Christians and Jews? This would enhance the beauty of both cemeteries. I went back to Calvinia. I met Deon. He had kept his promise. The fence was gone and the Victorian gates were repaired. However, I was surprised to find two newly dug graves in the cemetery. Whose graves were these? The last Jew had left Calvinia almost fifty years before. I am the only person I know who wants to be buried in Calvinia. When I told my brother he tried to dissuade me. “Who wants to shlepyour dead body all the way to Calvinia, of all places? It’s a crazy idea. And besides, it will be very expensive”. I stared at the two graves, the one, closed and covered with a mound of golden brown dry clay, the other, empty, neatly bricked inside, waiting. I became most concerned. Back to Deon. Who is buried there and why the empty grave? Fortunately, there was no record of any recent burial in the Jewish cemetery. It transpired that with the removal of the fence, the boundary between the two cemeteries disappeared. It is customary in Calvinia to prepare graves well ahead of time, as there is no refrigeration for cadavers. Because of extreme temperatures, the clay Karoo soil is terribly hard and it can take up to a week to prepare a grave… I returned to Cape Town and told a friend of mine about the empty graves. She responded that whosoever takes care of a Jewish cemetery is blessed. I should thus consider myself blessed that my work has already been done for me and leave it at that. And so the graves wait patiently…… Part of the refurbished Calvinia Jewish cemetery (Courtesy: SA Friends of Beth Hatefutsoth)
Calvinia continued to haunt me and consequently the practical body of work for my Masters degree took the form of an installation. The dimly lit room comprised a collection of sixty colour images dealing with memory and identity, printed on French archival paper, eight glass vitrines edged in wood containing religious books and other objects pertaining to Jewish life and two videos: an interview with Calvinia residents who knew the Klein family filmed in Calvinia; a more abstract video of an archaeological excavation in the Calvinia cemetery. The 70 taleisim of all sizes, some mouldy with age, displayed, hanging in dimly lit rows was the central exhibit, strongly evocative of lives lived and lost, in South Africa and the Holocaust. Rabbi Moshe Silberhaft and I are now negotiating with the Calvinia Museum to place my art work on permanent exhibition and recreate the Ark, as there is very little evidence of the strong Jewish presence that once existed in Calvinia.
Perhaps one day the story of Jews in Calvinia will be more than twenty one palm trees and ‘hopefully’ a well-cared for cemetery.
Shirley Klein Kantor has an M.A. degree in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town (2005). Entitled ‘History, Memory and Identity’ – ‘A Klein History, maar n Lang Storie’, this focused specific attention on Calvinia, a small village in the Karoo. The lives of her parents, Bennie and Sylvia Klein, and their relationship with the broader community formed the core of her visual and theoretical research.
NOTES
- The history of the Jewish presence in Calvinia, and other small towns in the vicinity, is recorded in Volume Two of Jewish Life in the South African Country Communities, copies of which can be obtained through the SA Friends of Beth Hatefutsoth (enquiries: museum@beyachad.co.za).
