(Author: Margaret Green, Vol. 77, #3, Spring 2022)
A ghost is starting to speak:
“Marginke, fahr vos bist du tsu farnumen mit azay fihl alte mayses? [You’re young – enjoy your life!”]
“I’m 80 Mom.”
“Tahke?” [Really?]
“Un der naye mayses bin niet azay fargenigent – genug naye einingklech ober mir vays niet vos zoln treffen…. [And the new stories are not so pleasurable – plenty of new grandchildren but we don’t know what’s going to happen] …… At least mit der alte mayses vos du hobn unz dertsaylen [we pretty much know what happened in the end]. Anyway, I love delving into your family history now.”
“Marginke! Dayne Yiddish – ich derkennen du niet!” [Your Yiddish – I don’t recognise you!]
“Ich vays Mom. Glaych Yiddish hob ich lieb in di teg…. [I know Mom. Even Yiddish I like these days]
“David, der zun fun Elias hobn far unz a mayse dertsaylen avek Sholem letste vogh… [David, Elias’ son, told us a story about Sholem last week] …. Why did you never tell us that one?”
I sound a little aggrieved.
She doesn’t like not to know – if I kept something from her – which was often – and then told her later, she would say she had a feeling…. She believed that motherhood bestowed telepathic powers. So how could there be a story about her older brother during the events of World War 1 when they lived together, that she didn’t know? With that tone in my voice, she disappears.
The ”alte mayses” (old stories) to which she was referring are stories she related about her life growing up in the Lithuanian part of the Russian Empire, and they were about the wanderings of my maternal grandparents – Avraham Mendel and Judes Manelewitz together with their young family during a time of War and Revolution more than a hundred years ago. These were world-changing events; World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing turmoil that engulfed Eastern Europe. In the following decade, one-by-one their sons and then later the rest of the family emigrated, like many others, to South Africa.
From my mother, who told these tales to me and my siblings, they sounded like adventures akin to those of Enid Blyton’s “Famous Five”; (although here there were mostly four and sometimes six, not counting the grown-ups). My cousins’ versions of these same experiences, remembered also as stories told to them, sound to me somewhat more fearful and on occasion catastrophic. In reality they probably were, but my mother had learnt, by eavesdropping on her own mother, that troubles at home should not be relayed to those far away lest they be unnecessarily burdened by them, and she seemed to apply a similar principle in relation to us, her children.
For her parents, Avraham Mendel and Judes however, it is difficult to imagine how chaotic and tumultuous those times were: navigating children and their needs, borders, countries, languages, schools and financial upheavals. When World War I started, they were leading a comfortable life in a small town in Lithuania. To escape the German occupation, they made their way far into Russia to a city east of Moscow only to find themselves three years later towards the end of the war caught up in the Russian Revolution and back on the trains again.
For the most part the parents and their four younger children were able to stay together through all these vicissitudes. We know from Holocaust and trauma studies that this factor is important in ensuring a good outcome both physically and psychologically. However, for my mother’s two older siblings, Morris and Dora, who had vastly different experiences and for whom the separation from the family was perhaps their greatest loss, it seems that they lived with a kind of sorrow all their lives. Morris had already left to join an uncle in South Africa in 1910 and Dora, with the outbreak of war in 1914, went to study in Russia and stayed there for the rest of her life, sometimes living through periods of great hardship and fear during the Stalinist purges, World War II and beyond.
Yaroslavl 1917-18
I’ll start with the story my mother didn’t tell us. After the outbreak of WWI, the Manelewitz family left Rakeshok (Rokiskis), the small Lithuanian town in which they lived, and at the time of the Revolution and ensuing Russian Civil War in 1917/18 we find them living in Yaroslavl in “the heart of Russia”. Esther, my mother (aged 12), recounted how the revolutionaries came into town to give speeches. “I enjoyed the Revolution! The people would march in the streets singing the Internationale every day and then sometimes Kerensky or Trotsky would speak. Everyone clapped. We were excited by the atmosphere of these events”.
Yaroslavl, important strategically, was being fought over by the Reds and the Whites during the Civil War. These accounts are from two of Elias’ children:
“The Red and White armies were fighting fiercely for control of the town and control swapped every few weeks. As each army took over, they believed that all the young men there were fighting for the other side. They caught some of them, lined them up against a wall and shot them. On one occasion, Sholem (16 at the time) was one of those caught. They started shooting from one side of the line. When they got to one or two from him, the soldiers got tired and told the rest to go home”. (David Manne)
It is possible that the only person to whom Sholem told the full story was his brother, sparing his sisters from the details. According to his daughter Tamara, Elias used his experience of the fighting in Yaroslavl as a cautionary tale to warn his children off from getting involved in politics in apartheid South Africa; thus, “The White Russians would rampage through the town creating havoc, stealing, and caring not a fig for The People. Then the Red Russians would ride through from the other direction causing as much mayhem, only interested in their own desires, again caring nothing for The People”. (Tamara Levine)
Fighting broke out in Yaroslavl in July 1918 following an uprising of White officers against the Bolshevik takeover of the previous year. The officers held Yaroslavl for about two weeks until the Red Army started using aircraft and bombed the town. With this, the situation became much more dangerous. An incendiary bomb fell on the house the Manelewitzes had rented when they first arrived in 1915. At the time, there were only three children there: Sholem (16), Esther (13) and Elias (11). Dora, their eldest sister was in Tsver, working with an uncle who was a chemist. Mendel and Judes (their parents) and youngest sister Fanny were ‘af dacha’ in the woods, on their summer holiday.
The house caught fire. Their part of town was where the bombing started. The family scrabbled around for some valuables, grabbed some jewelry and the samovar still filled with water, and left. It started to rain. Their intention was to head for some relatives of Mendel’s who lived some way away. A Russian neighbour saw them walking and called out to them to come and shelter with them and so the children stayed with them for a few days. But they were strangers and when their house caught fire, they went their separate ways. Some Jewish bakers saw them and took them in. And this is how it continued – wherever the children landed, they brought disaster to the occupants, or so it felt to them.
It’s extraordinary now to have figures for a story which had the quality of myth, told from a child’s view of their little band of three. In fact, 2147 houses were destroyed and 28 000 people rendered homeless. They found father’s relatives and that was marvelous until the shelling started again. Eventually, they made their way to a Catholic church, where more people joined them in the cellar, and they stayed there for quite some time. The uprising and its defeat by the Red Army took about two weeks.
When the Red army won the battle, every man had to report. This was when they took Sholem.[1]
“We didn’t know if we’d see him again. The Reds got tired of going through papers and they also got tired of killing. He returned, but a lot of men didn’t. The Reds did away with them. We needed papers and passports – everything was burnt. We had to go to the police station.”
According to Esther it took 17 days before they were able to send papers to their parents to enable them to join their threesome. Then they could go home. There was no telling if the Civil War would continue but if the Reds won, which was likely – well, the Manelewitzes were in business – and that might not turn out so well for them. They thus decided to leave and make their way to Dvinsk, where they had a property which had belonged to Judes’ father. But first, Mendel had to make some money – the children hadn’t known where their parents had hidden money, and the jewelry they had taken wasn’t worth much. By the time they left it was probably autumn.
On the way to Dvinsk, they stopped in Moscow to say goodbye to Dora, who was engaged to her cousin Sasha. She gave them the address of a relative in Vilna. This was Tobias Westerman, who met them at the train station. He urged them to remain, as he was planning to go to Germany and had found a place for them to stay until he left. When he departed some weeks later, the family moved into his spacious flat on Zawalna Street in December 1918. To my knowledge, no member of the family ever returned to Rakeshok, the town where Avraham Mendel and all his children were born.
Rakeshok – until 1915
The family was always financially comfortable in Rakeshok. They lived off Naye Gas not far from the main boulevard in quite a large property which at one time they “shared with grandfather, two aunties and an uncle. Grandfather’s daughters were in a different business selling cotton wool to the peasants”. In the census of 1908, the household numbered twenty family members: Grandfather Itzik (64) with his wife Sora Dreyza, his six children – three married sons and three unmarried daughters in their 30s, three daughters-in-law, nine grandchildren including the six children of Avraham Mendel and Yudasha (Judes).[2]
They had servants – a Polish woman, a Jewish cook and a Lithuanian maid. There was a cow and a large cellar where vegetables were stored in the winter. Lithuanian peasants worked in the garden. During harvest time the children loved eating potatoes and herring outside with them. The townspeople were mostly Jews with small businesses.
Most Lithuanian Jews were misnagdim (non-Chassidic) but Jews from Rakeshok followed the Lubavitcher rebbe and our grandfather Avraham Mendel was named after the third Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (the ‘Tzemach Tzedek’). Almost all of us first cousins were named first after Judes, and then after Avraham Mendel.
When WW1 broke out, there were only three children living at home. Morris (Yona) had gone to Africa in 1910 at the age of 13. An uncle living in South Africa had sent papers for Avraham Mendel, who didn’t feel he could leave his young family and Morris, who wasn’t enjoying being at his school in another town, decided to go instead. There must have been another concern, in that at the age of 13 Morris would be eligible for conscription. So, the following year, he obtained a White passport and left. On 14 April 1915, when no doubt the Tsar’s army were looking for young men, he was noted as being absent for conscription and probably avoiding it! Around that time, with the upheaval of war there was also an idea going around “that young ladies should be sent into Russia” and so Avraham Mendel sent Dora to high school in Tsver in the heart of Russia, where he had a brother working as a chemist. Sholem went to study Talmud with a different uncle in Mobilov.
As the German invasion came closer, my mother’s immediate family decided to leave. They travelled by train, with no idea where they would end up. They stopped in Dvinsk, then in Kurland. They found a place to live in Orsha for a while but didn’t like it there, so got back on the train. It stopped at every station. Esther always likened it to the train journey in the film Dr Zhivago (1965).
On this journey, or possibly on the one three years later when they travelled south to leave Russia, there was a terrible accident. This story came via Elias:
“Suddenly there was an almighty crash and then the train came to a stop. My father’s father looked out the window to see what had happened. The whole train from one or two carriages ahead had derailed and fallen off into a ravine. This shock of what could have happened to them affected him to such an extent that his hair went overnight”. (David Manne)
“I too heard a tale about the trauma of the family escaping by train, when the carriage flipped onto an angle, almost going right over. Mendel was so affected his hair went white overnight. Where and when they were travelling, I know not”. (Tamara Levine)
Whatever happened, as a photograph taken in Vilna some years later shows (below), Mendel’s hair later regained its normal colour.
A teacher they met on the train had said that Yaroslavl was a good place – it was as haphazard as that. It took weeks of travelling until they reached that destination. And until the end of 1917, they loved being there. They found a place to stay, “father got back into flax, mother continued her business”. The three children went to Russian schools. They learned Russian and lived comfortably.
The family businesses
Since his youth in Rakeshok, Avraham Mendel had worked in the flax business, first with his father Yitzchak Manelewitz, then taking over after he died. During all their travels since leaving their hometown in 1915, he had always managed to find work. It would appear that he and his father acted as independent agents. They didn’t own a business with employees, but they had an office. Perhaps they borrowed money or used some of their profits to send field agents out to buy the flax from the peasants. It was brought back to their office where it was sorted – at which Avraham Mendel was very adept – and then sold. Mom said he was highly respected by everyone in Rakeshok. When they landed up in Vilna, Avraham Mendel did work for a company – the Slutsky Kantoor – also dealing in flax.
Judes never stopped running her soft goods business from home, and it was important to the family’s finances, particularly during the off season in the flax trade. She sold trousseaus and linens and because she came from Latvia and could speak Latvian, she had a faithful clientele wherever they landed up – be it Rakeshok, Yaroslavl or Vilna. So, this wasn’t just selling a few schmattes as I had come to believe. In Yaroslavl when Sholem returned from his Talmudic studies, he first worked in a shoe store and then helped her in the business.
And something comes to mind: In Claremont, Cape Town, there was a linen shop called Levison’s. Mom loved taking us there to buy linens when we visited from overseas. They sold non-iron bedsheets and tablecloths imported from the USA. For many years, each of us has had a similar tablecloth in our homes (mine is beginning to look a little washed out now). That this feels significant has to do with the kind of relationship Mom built up with the owner and staff of this establishment – she felt at home!
Education
Mendel was a fairly progressive father and looked for good secular schools for all the children. Dora had been going to a fairly well-known high school in Tsver in Russia when the others left Rakeshok in 1915. It was the Marensky Gymnasia, and it was she who got Esther and Fanny into the same girl’s school in Yaroslavl. It was a school mostly for Gentiles but there were Jewish refugees there. It is rather ironic – Esther talks about other people as ‘refugees’ but to the interviewer at this point in the early 80s, she talks about leaving home not fleeing the war. In this town, full of churches, the Jewish children attended the prayers led by a male priest but did not kiss the cross. It was in Yaroslavl that Esther revealed that she went, out of curiosity and with some daring, with a school friend into a Russian Orthodox Church for the first time.
During their years in Yaroslavl, Dora finished high school. Bess, my cousin, reports that in order to afford her doing so, the family dismissed a maid. Dora wanted to study pharmacy at university and did so after marrying and moving to Moscow in 1918.
There is a question about Sholem in Yaroslavl. I think that he had been going to a religious school – he was studying the Talmud “with his uncle”. Judy, my elder sister, says that in South Africa he was an autodidact. Other sources say that he was very well versed in Hebrew literature. I don’t think Sholem actually went to secular school; it could be that he had chosen, or been chosen to be the family Yeshiva bocher. This might explain the leadership role he assumed later when the family moved to South Africa, and he started the ABC Shoe business.
Vilna
When they got to Vilna in 1918, Esther and Fanny went to a gender-mixed school with different classes for boys and girls. At first it was Russian-medium and then it was ‘modernised’ and became a Yiddish-medium school – the Yiddishe Wertliche Shul. Elias may have attended it as well, although in a letter to me in 1996, he said he attended the Yiddishe Real Gymnasium. Possibly, it was the same place.
Esther describes the 11 years in which she grew up (aged 13 – 24) in Vilna as the ‘highlight’ of her life. At school, she encountered great teachers, whilst her native Yiddish entered its Golden Age. She could speak at least three languages, was good at Maths and entered young womanhood feeling beautiful and admired by young men. She got into university, there were plenty of friends and dates to concerts and theatre, and wonderful chazans in shul. Elias, just over a year younger, also seemed to love it. They were not very religious but kept a kosher home.
The city of Vilna changed countries a number of times in the years 1918 -23 following WW1 and the Russian Revolution. It involved a number of different treaties, army invasions and some street fighting, but to the Manelewitzes this instability would perhaps have seemed relatively peaceful compared to what they had recently survived in Russia. Eventually Vilna settled to being part of Poland until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, when it was occupied by the Soviet Union. That continued until 1941 when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the eastern part of Poland and the Baltic States.
These were exciting times for the Jews of Vilna. One gets a hint of it from how many times the school changed its name. In my mother’s report document of 1918, it is the Vilner Yiddishe Real Gimnasia, in 1920 it became the Ershste Yiddishe Real Gimnasia and in 21/22, the Yiddishe Real Gimnasia in Vilna. In 23/24 on Esther’s student card – it could be a different school – but it says the Yiddishe Gimnasium – Zofia Gurewicz.
The Manelewitzes prospered. The parents and four children lived in a big first-floor apartment at the edge of the Jewish quarter, overlooking the main thoroughfare – Zawalna Street. Avraham Mendel was working at Slutsky Kantoor, Judes carried on her business. The three youngest were in school. The man of mystery is Sholem. What was he doing? I do know that he went to Berlin to study the shoe trade before leaving for South Africa. Records show that he returned to Vilna to get a passport. Issued 25 June 1921, it records his occupation as bookkeeper. In August he went to Warsaw (probably to get his SA visa) and Disna (in Belarus but not far from Dvinsk – Judes’ birthplace – and Rakeshok – his father’s birthplace), returning 13 September. A month later he departed. The photograph below was taken before he left.
Esther matriculated at the age of 18 in 1923/4. She had been taught Yiddish Literature by the poet Moshe Kulbak. Max Weinreich, who later wrote “The History of the Yiddish Language” and was a co-founder of YIVO, taught them as well; Lerer Brodie taught Latin. All according to Esther were “idealists”. By that she probably meant that they had ideals beyond their individual ambitions. Kulbak was probably a communist and Weinreich was definitely a Yiddishist and socialist.
Many of the students were also idealists. Her friend, Faynka Derczanska, was a Communist activist. Esther didn’t get involved in politics. She was concerned for her parents but did agree to hide a list of names for Faynka. She stuffed it between the chimney bricks
Esther applied to go to Stefana Batorego University but getting in wasn’t a done deal.[3] There may have been a numerus clausus (a fixed maximum number of entrants admissible to an academic institution). Certainly, as a Jew, you couldn’t study medicine unless your father was a doctor or a war invalid. “My heart was on ice if I wouldn’t be accepted” Esther related. But she was, entering the humanities faculty. She did not experience antisemitism as such, but all her friends were Jewish – they did not mix with Gentiles. She also had no time for extra activities, missing lectures sometimes because her mother was ill.
Many of Esther’s school friends went to study in colleges and universities in other European countries. Fania and her older sister Luba, both communists but from a fairly conservative Jewish home, went to study the natural sciences in Berlin. As foreigners, they were not allowed to join the German communist party but were encouraged to become activists within the Indian community. It was through this that Luba met and fell in love with Kwaja Abdul Hamied, a doctoral student of pharmacy. They married in June 1928 at the Ahmadiyya Mosque in Berlin and a year later, came to meet the family in Vilna.
There was great excitement about this romance among the friends and Esther did get to see him, although Fania was by then living in Moscow after being arrested for some activities in France. According to Gerdien Jonker, they did also have a Jewish wedding in Vilna, at the Choral synagogue, just up the road from the Manelewitz apartment.
These were the best years of Esther’s life – “a terrific opportunity and experience”. She studied Polish Literature and History, pedagogy, Greek Literature, Psychology and more. She always loved the Latin “graduation hymn” – Gaudeamus igitur – and very much tried to instill its rejoicing aspects into us when it was each of our turns to go to university. Ironically, she never sang or marched to it as part of her university career – although she was at Stefana Batorego for four years, she never got her degree. Esther joked with her interviewer that she was an “evige student” (an eternal student). There may be more to this than she ever let on, but she had a good excuse – in 1929, Morris, her eldest brother arrived in Vilna to visit his family and to bring his parents to South Africa.
What was happening to the two younger siblings? When Elias graduated from High School, he decided to follow Sholem and Morris to South Africa. He left in 1925 at the age of 18. We are not sure of his route, but he had to cross at least one border: Polish-Lithuanian or Polish-German to catch a boat. There’s a story that an elderly Polish man saved his life plus the lives of others in the line at the border crossing. He shuffled along the line, muttering in Yiddish ostensibly to himself “Give him a pound. Gib im a pfund“. This advice was essential to gain permission to cross the border. (Tammy Levine).
It is unlikely that Elias’ life was on the line, but he was probably saved from having had to try an alternative route. Whether he caught the Kildonan Castle in the Baltic or Southampton, he departed on that liner on 20 February, arriving in Cape Town on 9 March – the day his future wife was born in Bremerhaven, Germany. I love the fact that in the shipping records, he is recorded as a 20-year-old ‘dealer’. I wonder what he could’ve had in mind. A ganser macher of 18! His first job was with Harrison’s Outfitters in Johannesburg.
I don’t know much about what the three bachelor brothers were up to in the years before and after Elias’s arrival. Before Sholem arrived in 1922, Morris had lived on his uncle’s farm, then seemed to travel in the rural areas of South Africa and Rhodesia. At some point in the 20s the brothers started a new family business – the ABC. According to Esther, they first opened a shop in Jeppestown and then moved to Marshall Street. This is the one in Marshall Street, sometime in the 20s.
Morris visits Vilna
Morris had not seen his parents and sisters for almost twenty years. He had instructions from Sholem. The brothers wanted him to bring their parents to South Africa. As for the two unmarried sisters –
“Morris came to look them over to see if his sisters were marketable i.e., that they could marry them off. And the irony was that Esther and Fanny thought the local yokels weren’t up to much. I don’t think they knew Morris planned to take them if they passed muster”. (Judy Yacov).
I guess Morris must have decided they were ok. The sisters enjoyed showing off their handsome older brother and Esther even managed to get papers for Morris to visit Dora in Moscow because of her ‘student hat’. He went to the USSR, where Dora was now married to a distant cousin, Sasha, and returned to escort his parents and two sisters through Europe and on to South Africa.
The journey to South Africa
In October/November 1929, the family was busy getting papers, certificates and documents together in order to travel.[4] In late October, Esther received her Polish passport, valid for a year. Then on 7 November she obtained her South African visa from British Passport Control in Warsaw. On the 15th, she went to the Dean of Humanities at Stefana Batorego University to pick up a certificate of attendance. German and Belgian visas were issued on the 19th, and they left Poland at Zbaszyn the next day. That same day they arrived in Belgium, stayed overnight and left Ostend on the 21st, arriving at Dover later that day. From there they went to London, where Morris took them shopping and generally made a fuss of them. After ten days or so of such excitement, they travelled to Southampton and boarded the Carnarvon Castle for Cape Town. They arrived on 16 December 1929. Esther and Fanny perceived themselves as sophisticated girls; they travelled very comfortably and had a great trip.
Early days in South Africa
At Cape Town docks, Esther was quite shocked to see that black men were black all over. (She had only ever seen a black man in a suit before and perhaps somewhat understandably, had assumed only his face and hands that were black). Once they had disembarked, they spent the day in Cape Town, then left for Johannesburg.
The brothers had made everything comfortable – they had prepared a rented home in Parktown North with everything laid on. “The grocery cupboard was like a shop”; Morris had hired a cook from Rhodesia. The Kramer cousins brought a meal. The only disappointment were the bachelors who came to play bridge with Morris. They were not very good company – grobbe yatels (as Mom sometimes called them). On that basis, the two sisters felt they were prepared to go back to Europe. In any case Fanny was in love and perhaps Esther was too. Sholem was agreeable but said that the parents would have to stay. I guess that didn’t feel viable to the young women because they decided to try and make the best of it.
After they began to settle down, Sholem asked what they wanted to do. Esther said she’d like to continue her studies, but he suggested that perhaps it was time to do something more practical – he could do with them lending a hand in the business. Esther’s chances of meeting the intelligentsia, as she had in Vilna, were thereby dashed. They started going twice a week to Miss Essers for English lessons. Fanny had already started learning English before she left and after about a month, they were helping out cashiering in the shoe shop on Saturdays. Esther’s first Exercise book is rather touchingly filled with the phrases she thought would be most useful. This is page one:
Although Polish has a Latin alphabet, Yiddish and Russian do not – so dictation exercises were important. In May 1931 Esther was still starting her exercise books from the back, but after a few months changed to the front. There is one dictation which starts: “One fine morning, two little birds a robin and a finch, sat side by side on the branch of a tree. ‘Good-day sir,’ said the robin to the finch…….” Oi! My heart goes out to Estherke – what could be more English than that! Thus began the Anglicization of Esther and Fanny in their new little corner of Africa; a process occurring all over the globe in different ways, slowly eroding a culture that ultimately was crushed under the boots of the Nazi war machine.
They began to meet up with landsleit like the Feldman’s and Yudke Schrire. The brothers played cards, went to Johannesburg Musical Society concerts where they heard musicians like Suzanne Margolis and Shura Cherkassy and frequented the café at the Carlton Hotel. (I myself remember Sunday afternoons on visits to 27 Third Street, Lower Houghton, in the 40s – it was open house from about 15h00 until 18h30. Es geven zaye lebedik! – Full of Yiddish sounds and cigarette smoke, washed down with Russian tea. There was a continual replenishing of plates of snacks, nuts, cakes and biscuits).
Sometime in 1931, Esther met Sol Green at a wedding. He lived in Melville and had a grocery store. He fancied her and she, now 26, thought he would make a good husband. Their civil wedding was on 3 May 1932. Their marriage certificate states they were both from Russia, which seemingly is how the immigrants then tended to describe themselves. There are no photographs from the civil or religious marriage. There was a wedding dress because I remember Mom giving it to Judy to use for some event – possibly a theatre production. Their wedding night was spent in separate rooms at the house in Lower Houghton. The next day they left for their honeymoon in Durban.
The couple must have lived for a time in Johannesburg because Ivor was born there in 1933. At the time Dora wrote to say that she hoped Esther was not going to put her new-born son through that “barbaric custom”? Clearly Evgeny, Dora’s son in Moscow had not been circumcised. The division between the Russian sister and South African siblings was growing ever wider. At some point in the 30s, the Manelewitz brothers changed their names to Manne. They invited Sol to join the shoe business because he and Esther moved to Cape Town to open a branch, which they actually called Manne Bros. because there was already a retail business called ABC in Cape Town.
Avraham Mendel died in May 1937, aged 71. His tombstone reads ‘Abram Mendel Manne’. Judes died the following month, aged 67. She is named Judith Manne on her tombstone. After she died, her daughters found the love letters that Fanny’s young man had written to her and which Judes had hidden. He had wanted Fanny to come back to Europe to marry him. Bess says, “As my mother was working in the ABC, it would have been easy to filter the post while she was out of the house. I can understand that Judes did not want Fanny to think of returning to Europe.”
By the time they found the letters, which was probably too late anyway, the Nazis had been transporting Jews to concentration camps for some time. Fanny herself probably realised it wouldn’t have been a good idea for her to have gone back. But she had been lonely after Esther and Sol left for Cape Town and shortly after Judes died, she married Abram Danin. In his youth he had been in Trotsky’s motorcade (the motorcycle escort that preceded Trotsky) and had come to SA in 1921.
Judy, Esther’s first daughter was born in 1938 and was named after Judes. By then the Greens had moved from Cintra flats in Sea Point to their first home in Glen Crescent, Oranjezicht. Julie, Fanny’s eldest daughter was born in Johannesburg in 1940 and also named after her grandmother. Later Abram and Fanny moved to open a branch of the ABC in Port Elizabeth, with Fanny returning to Johannesburg, where her two younger daughters were born.
The first commercial building the family actually bought was at the instigation of my father Sol in 1940. He thought it could be a means of protecting the family in wartime. While Jewish property owners were losing their homes all over Europe, he put his faith in the South African Records Office, believing that the title deeds would be safely kept. The property was on the corner of Strand and Adderley Streets, Cape Town, and the deeds were signed on the day I was born – 27 January 1941.
Five months later, the Nazis broke their non-aggression pact with the Soviets, invaded Eastern Europe and began the mass murder of the Jews of Poland and Lithuania. The Jerusalem de Lita – Vilna – the vibrant beating heart of our parents’ and so many friends and comrades’ lives – was occupied; Jews who had not yet been killed and were deemed useful were confined in a small ghetto until September 1943 when the ghetto was finally liquidated. During the two years of its existence, there were many horrors but also acts of resistance. Only a remnant survived.
These were frightening and dangerous years for our Russian family, not only because of the war but also because of the Stalin dictatorship. Dora lived with her husband, son and daughter-in-law in Moscow, but the letters stopped. It would be many years before the Manelewitzes were in communication again. Judy and I both remember wishing that one day we would see a woman walk up the driveway of Kennebunk – our house in Rondebosch – and that it would be Auntie Dora.
Epilogue
She takes a long time to appear and she arrives first in a dream. She has Sol, her husband with her for support because she doesn’t trust me after the previous occasion when I wrote about her for a booklet published in 1984.[5] I am driving them to their last home (in Kenilworth) and the driveway is very steep. It’s a gear shift car and I can’t get up the driveway without changing gears. I let the car roll back. Luckily there’s no traffic due to the pandemic, because I didn’t even look! I park across the street. We get out and it seems we have to take a narrow path along a crater which is across the road. Not a word is said. (That was the path not taken – past the pits of Ponar; a narrow escape.)
And then later…….
“Adank Marginke, fahr a poh monaten host du mir genumen aheim.” (Thank you Marginke, for a few months you took me home).
“Really Mom? Did you enjoy it?”
“Azay fihl.” (So much.)
“In 1996 vilt ich ech dos fahr Elias machn, ober es gayt niet azay gut. Mit fotografiye – hot dos niet gegangen der zelbicher. Der yidishe gasse hot leidik geven, der ongezenende grobn zaynen derzen zich hinter yeder bild. Er hot zaye geveynen un er frau Esther, vert niet azay tsufrieden mit mir.” (In 1996, I also wanted to do that for Elias, but it didn’t go so well. It’s not the same with photographs. The Jewish streets were empty; the unseen pits were looming behind every picture. He cried a lot and his wife Esther, was not so pleased with me.)
“A’derabe doh host du di shtetlech gefilt mit azay fihl menschen – elteren, mishpokhe, fremder, khaveyrim un lerers. Glaych mit poyerim un a geheime geliebter!” (On the contrary – here you filled the towns with so many people – parents, family, strangers, friends and teachers. Even with peasants and a secret lover!)
“That last one is for the next piece I write!”
“Ober vos fun der universitet se johren?” I ask. (What about the university years?)
“Ah! Narishkaytn! Fahr vos host du dos geshribn? Zayt niet vikhtig. Efsher di leben vos niet azay laycht un freylich geven az ich hob dertsaylt. Zol zayn azay.”(Ah! Trivialities! Why did you write that? It wasn’t important. Maybe life was not as easy and light-hearted as I had said. Let it be like that.)
“Anything you want to add?” It’s a leading question and she knows it.
She gives a little shmeykhel (smile).
“Mer nit. Du vays ……. du host zeyer fayn gemacht.” (Nothing more. You know……. you did very well.)
Ich shmeykhel oych. (I smile too.) “Ich bin tsufriden, maminke.” (I am at peace, little mother.)
I think I’ll let Bess (or perhaps it was Fanny) have the last words: ‘Ibergekumene tzores is gut tzu dertsaylen’ (It’s good to talk about problems that have been overcome).
Margaret Green, M.Sc., is an independent Mental Health Care Professional, Trauma specialist & EMDR Practitioner. Born in Cape Town, she lived for many years in New York and then in London. After returning to South Africa in 1999, she worked part-time at the Trauma Centre doing trauma counselling, working with people who experienced human rights abuses during the apartheid era and also with refugees. She now works part-time in her private practice in Cape Town.
NOTES
[1] I don’t remember ever hearing about this, but my mother does mention it in her interview conducted by The Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies & Research, University of Cape Town, in 1983.
[2] Numbers such as these link to questions which I try to answer in the APPENDIX
[3] Of the 50 immigrant women interviews done by the Kaplan Centre UCT and used by Veronica Belling in her study, Esther was the only one that had been to university.
[4] Esther already had documents, probably for university entrance purposes, stating her place of birth and who her parents were. In 1928 the Rakeshiker town worthies who vouched for their knowledge of Avraham Mendel were Sam-Wulf Krok, Neach-Hirsch Shapiro, Chaim-M Gen and Hirsch Kaplan.
[5] The Jewish Women’s History Group, entitled: “You’d prefer me not to mention it…the lives of four Jewish daughters of refugees”
APPENDIX: Questions, & Some Answers
(1) What happened to these aunts and uncles?
Did they stay in Lithuania during World War One? Did they perish during the Holocaust? I don’t know what happened to all of them but quite a few of them or their descendants ended up in South Africa: in Johannesburg or the smaller Reef towns. It seems that Chaim’s son changed his name to Joe Manne and became a bookmaker in Johannesburg. His daughter Sara Beyla was the mother of our Kramer cousins. Chana Breyner was the mother of the Musikers, and Goda Reysa (Hodda Reisel) married Zvi Hirsch Asimov, gave birth to Chaim Hillel in Rakeshok and died shortly after of breast fever. Chaim Hillel ended up in Paris after the war and fathered a great dynasty of Lubavitcher rabbis and rebbetzins, whose children and grandchildren live all over the Western world. One daughter, Sara, married Adin Steinsaltz – a famous Israeli sage, writer and Jewish activist and lives in Jerusalem.
(2) Why did Sholem go to Berlin?
I often wondered why he went there – how did he know that Germany was a good place to go to study the shoe trade? And was it? Did the woman he worked for in Yaroslavl whose husband was in the army, encourage him?
A partial answer: I found out recently quite by accident that the Berlin fashion industry was run by Jews. By the 1920s, they had dominated dressmaking and fashion for nearly a hundred years. They were the first to invent sizes. It was possibly common knowledge all over the Pale of Settlement. In the 20s a school of fashion and design opened in Berlin – Schule Reimann. Before Nazi antisemitism began to destroy this industry, there were 2700 fashion establishments in the city. At the time of Kristallnacht in 1938, there were only 28 left. Quite a few Jewish owners had immigrated to England and the USA, creating new businesses that still exist and were much needed after the Wall Street crash of 1929. But most Jewish designers, machinery, tailors and seamstresses were transported to labour camps and the Lodz ghetto to make uniforms for the Third Reich.
(3) Why did Morris Manelewitz come to fetch his parents in 1929?
In recent years it was my belief that one compelling reason for bringing Avraham, Judes, Esther and Fanny out to South Africa was the fact that the Immigration Quota Bill was going through parliament during 1929. It was passed the following year. I would imagine that this was causing a great deal of anxiety in families such as ours. (Vic Green)
Vic is probably right. Fanny Klenerman who later ran the Vanguard Bookshop in Johannesburg reported that in 1928 in order to bring in some money, she gave English lessons to the Russian Jewish immigrants “who were streaming into South Africa at that time”. Concurrently she was approached by the Jewish Workers’ Club to organise classes, held at the H.O.D. (Hebrew Order of David) Hall, for the new immigrants.
I think they were also in straitened financial circumstances – not that my mother would have ever told us such a thing! It’s possible that the Wall Street crash affected the flax trade and perhaps Judes was no longer able to run her business, because in a Vilna Business Directory of 1929, Abram Manelewicz is listed as owning a grocery store – a surprising discovery……
(4) Why did the Manelewitzes change their name to Manne?
My brother reminded me that there was a precedent. There was Joe Manne – a cousin – who was a bookmaker. I assume he changed his name for convenience and possibly because of anti-Semitism in the betting industry.
There must have been a combination of pressures: doing business in the far reaches of the British Empire with the concomitant need to assimilate – or at least not to be inviting immediate anti-Semitic or xenophobic responses. The family themselves did not have one single spelling for their surname having lived through Yiddish, Lithuanian, Russian and Polish permutations of it in the space of three decades.
(5) What was Judes like?
It is quite evident that the Manelewitz children revered their mother. Even though Avraham Mendel died a few weeks before her, the children named every one of their next-born children after her (Judy/Judith, Julie, Joy, Jeannette and Dora’s grandchild, Julia). Some of the children that followed were named after Avraham Mendel (Marge, Margot, Victor Arnold Martin, Melanie and David Michael).
I hadn’t intended to write anything about Judes other than what I already have but I actually have a whole page of unused notes about her taken from Esther’s taped interview. I’ve asked myself why I didn’t want to write anything else and I have to acknowledge a prejudice.
I don’t know when Mom first told me the story about her hiding Fanny’s love letters – I probably wasn’t much older than 10, but I was outraged. Most of the family seems to view this action retrospectively in the candlelight of the Holocaust and that Judes saved her daughter’s life. All I could think of at that age was how I would feel if my mother did that to me! I imagine Fanny wondering what had happened, why he’d suddenly stopped writing. They must have been corresponding affectionately while Fanny was still in Europe in 1929 and continued through her early days in Johannesburg because he obviously knew her address. And then suddenly she writes and there’s no reply. What agonies go through a girl’s mind? What did I do wrong? Is he all right? How would I know if something happened to him? Has he met someone else? I’m so far away. Did I write too excitedly about this new life and make him feel redundant? Or alternatively, why did I tell him that without his letters, life in South Africa is very hard for me – was I sounding too dependent? Maybe I should just continue writing and hope to hear……And she never does.
Did Judes intercept Fanny’s letters to him as well? We don’t know but I suppose it’s possible. What about him? How would he be feeling? He gets letters for a while – maybe…… Hopefully he realises that she is not receiving his, and that she is therefore disappointed. He wonders about the postal service. He might try to write more ardently. Fanny doesn’t receive them; so, she cools off and stops writing – assumes it’s over. Eventually he despairs and gives up. There was plenty of opportunity for misunderstandings across continents in those days.
It took 7 years from the time the sisters and their parents arrived in South Africa until Judes’ deception was discovered after she died. That’s a long time in a young woman’s life to wait for the truth.
As a consequence of this story, I closed my ears to Esther’s eulogising of her mother – I didn’t want to hear it. I always thought Judes had done a terrible thing not to trust her youngest daughter’s judgement, and no amount of hindsight makes me feel any different.
To cut my grandmother some slack however, I doubt that she herself was allowed to marry for love. I would imagine it was an arranged marriage in which the parents played an important role. Perhaps it is not so surprising then that she intervened. Her children occupied a transitional space bridging traditional values with those of modernity, finding their own trajectories between the religious and the secular and having to negotiate the Jewish and Gentile worlds in a new country. As modern as she was in many respects for her time, these were not the challenges she had faced when she left her home in Latvia to go and live in her husband’s house in Rakeshok towards the end of the 19th century.
I do also feel an obligation to write what Esther said more formally about Judes at interview because, despite my closed ears, I did hear those stories too. In any case she would never have said anything negative about her mother to a stranger – she certainly did not tell the interviewer about her mother hiding Fanny’s love letters!
Judes was cultured and educated and was cleverer than her husband. She’d come from a comfortable home and was thoughtful and considered in the way that she spoke. The children obeyed her – in fact they were very respectful towards both their parents. Esther mentions that she could speak to her mother but adds that there was also father’s elder sister. It seems that Judes not only ran a successful business from home and could speak Latvian but people sought her advice on many matters. There were later landsleit like Mr Kosseff who came to speak with her and women used to come to have her write letters on their behalf to a husband in Africa or America. At age 8, Esther used to eavesdrop. She remembered once a woman came to dictate a letter to her husband in which she complained bitterly about her stepchildren. Judes wrote it all down and then asked the stepmother if she wanted her to read back what she’d written. What Judes had written was that everything was fine at home and that the children were behaving well etc. Mrs Kvetch objected, and Esther never forgot the wisdom in her mother’s patient explanation of why she had written a different letter from the one dictated to her.
I’m not sure what one can tell from a photograph – but in the one on p10, Judes would’ve been about 49 – a very handsome woman still, a bit of a grand dame, self-possessed.
