(Reviewer: Rebecca Hodes, Vol. 71, No. 3, Chanukah 2016)
Recent years have seen an upsurge of writing about the diverse histories of Jewish South Africans. Paul Weinberg’s Dear Edward (Jacana, 2012), Sally Swartz’s Homeless wanderers: movement and mental illness in the Cape Colony (UCT Press, 2015) and Steven Robins’ Letters of Stone (Penguin Random House, 2016) provide new insights into the expanse of Jewish life over the last century. All rely on letters as principal sources and, in the case of Weinberg’s book, as their mode of storytelling. In their memoir of Dr Mary Gordon, a physician whose life and career spanned pivotal events and processes of the last century, Jack and Gordon Metz have added to this flourishing literature.
Through piecing together correspondence, photographs, newspaper accounts, interviews and observations, the authors have recuperated the history of a doyen of 20th Cent u r y medicine, whose disappearance into the shadows of the past is in part due to her humility and lifelong eschewal of publicity. In writing her biography, they have recounted how the tale of one relates to the histories of many, framing Gordon’s life history in relation to Jewish experience in the 20thCentury, including the Russian Revolution, emigration from the Pale of Settlement, the tumult of the First and Second World Wars, the rise of apartheid South Africa and the establishment of the State of Israel. They focus in particular on two central developments in politics and profession: contemporary South Africa, and modern medicine.
Gordon’s life is told through the tender frame of memory, providing intimate glimpses of an austere yet charismatic relative. Her professional successes made an indelible impression on her relatives, as did her anomalousness as an unmarried, professional woman.
Gordon’s story is in part one of defiance against various forms of exclusion – of gender, religion, class and nation. The account is peppered with familial anecdotes, the truth of which is sometimes disputed. The veracity of her procurement of a ‘yellow ticket’, a prostitute’s identity stamp to allow her to escape the Pale of Settlement and seek higher education in Russia, is questioned (pp. 27-8).
But assertions of Gordon’s ingenuity, tenacity and resilience, fundamental to Jewish notions of self hood, are central to the narrative, as are accounts of friendship, loyalty and affection. See, for instance, the correspondence between Gordon, Rabbi Moses Hirsch Segal (pp. 33 – 35) and Morison Rutherford (pp. 81-84). The loyalty and admiration that she inspired among her patients is documented in the description of an engraving written for her by the detainees of a displaced persons camp in Cyprus, in acknowledgment of her work as a doctor in the Jewish Wing of the British Medical Hospital (p125).
Co-authorship must be complicated, and the book’s narrative cohesion testifies to the success of the authors’ dual endeavour. But there were moments in which I questioned how descriptions of Gordon’s own character aligned with the views and practices of her ancestors. For instance, the ‘orthodoxy’ of Mary’s father – Mottel/Moses Mordechai is recognised as a celebrated value (p182), while her own practice of Judaism was decidedly unorthodox – cf. the account on p92 of Mary’s attendance of a 1958 production of the musical My Fair Lady, in London, on Yom Kippur.
Gordon’s own ascription of value to different forms of identity seems at times ambiguous. Despite her commitment to medical practice, and to the training of women practitioners, she wrote: “Women are not suited to the medical profession. They are not prepared to devote a lifetime to the study of medicine” (p88). Here I read shades of Elizabeth Thompson Butler, the best-known woman painter of the Victorian era. Thompson Butler created among the most brilliant portraits of war ever committed to oils, but she was never elected to Britain’s Royal Academy – a benchmark for artistic recognition in the 19th Ce nt u r y. T hompson wrote in her autobiography that, although she had missed election to the Academy by only two votes, she thought that, “the door had been closed, and wisely”.
Why did Gordon’s experience of medical practice lead her to believe that women were ill-suited for the profession? This question remains unanswered in the text. But all biographies provide only partial views of any life and, despite Gordon’s ultimate ‘unknowability’ in some senses, this book captures other aspects of her audacious life.
Married to Medicine: Dr Mary Gordon, Pioneer Woman Physician and Humanist, by Jack and Gordon Metz (Adler Museum of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersand, Johannesburg, 2016)
