| Editor’s note: Books by and about Jewish participants in the anti-apartheid movement began rolling off the presses even before the final demise of white minority rule in April 1994 and continue to do so even today. In 2011, the SA Jewish Board of Deputies got into the act with the publication of Jewish Memories of Mandela, telling the story of Mandela’s life and career in relation to the many Jewish community members who were a part of it. The first edition of that book, which was produced under the auspices of the SAJBD and the Umoja Foundation and authored by this writer, has since sold out, but a new, updated edition is currently in progress. This week, the SAJBD launched Mensches in the Trenches, its latest contribution to Jewish ‘Struggle’ literature. Written by Jonathan Ancer in collaboration with the SAJBD professional team, the book tells the stories of some of the ordinary ‘foot soldiers’ of the liberation movement, people working on the ground and largely out of the public eye who in a range of different contexts made a tangible, practical contribution to the advent of democracy in their country. Some were lawyers and educators, others theater impresarios, authors and literary critics, still others student activists, trade unionists, journalists, academics, book dealers and business leaders but all can be termed “mensches” – people who strove to do the right thing under difficult and often dangerous circumstances, without expectation of any reward or recognition. As was the case with the senior, high profile political activists whose names are writ large in the history books, a strikingly disproportionate number of these under-the radar activists were from the Jewish community. In this feature, Jewish Affairs is pleased to publish extracts from Jonathan Ancer’s compelling, engagingly written and meticulously researched exploration of this still largely unexplored aspect of the anti-apartheid struggle. Mensches in the Trenches – Jewish foot soldiers in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle by Jonathan Ancer (Batya Bricker Book Projects) is available at Exclusive Books branches. |
Two of a Kind
Identical twins Norman and Leon Levy began their political activities as schoolboys, and campaigned for freedom and equality all their lives. Both stood in the dock with Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and 150 other leaders of the liberation movement in ‘South Africa’s trial of the 20th Century’ – the Treason Trial 1956-1961. In 1964, Norman was detained under the Suppression of Communism Act and subsequently sentenced to three years imprisonment. The following describes his eventual release and reunification with his family:
On 11 April 1968, four years after he had been arrested, Norman was released. Deborah was nine and Simon five.
‘Deborah, who was five when I went to prison, didn’t really know me. I remember that Simon was in the garden and was very tense. He had found a dead bird, which he held in his hand. I looked at the bird and realised we were all rather frozen and that it would take us time to thaw.’
Simon also recalled that day.
‘I remember the bird, and I remember my father coming into the house and sitting in the lounge, lighting up his pipe, and looking at me and saying, “Simon, what have you been doing with yourself?”’
In her memoir, Things I Don’t Want to Know, Deborah also recalled her father coming home: ‘My father is standing in the garden. His face is pale grey, like dirty snow. Only his eyes move. His arms hang stiffly by his sides. Dad is back, so very still and silent.
He looks like he has been hurt in some way. Very deep inside him. “Daddy, the cat died while you were away.” He squeezes my hand with his cold fingers [and says,] “It’s lovely to be called Daddy again.”’
Brothers in ARM
While the contributions made by ANC/SACP Jewish activists have been recorded in multiple books, they, like the rest of the Mandela generation of activists, are slowly slipping away from the country’s collective memory. Meanwhile, another group of Jewish activists can’t be forgotten, because they aren’t remembered. These activists, through their involvement with the African Resistance Movement (ARM), played a dramatic albeit little-known role in the fight to make South Africa a better place.
The African Resistance Movement (ARM) started in prison and ended four years later with most of its members behind bars. One of its members was Roman Eisenstein (then known as Raymond) who says ARM was a consequence of the Sharpeville Massacre, where police fired on unarmed protesters on 21 March 1960, killing 69 people.
The government clamped down on the liberation movement and responded with a state of emergency that saw thousands of activists detained.
Among the detainees held at Pretoria Local Prison was a group of ‘dissident leftists’, which included Monty Berman and his wife Myrtle.
At that time, the resistance to apartheid was chiefly non-violent defiance. However, according to Roman, while in prison, Monty resolved that the only way to confront apartheid was by doing something ‘more drastic than just talk’.
‘The Communist Party also came to the conclusion that non-violence was no longer practical,’ Roman says, ‘but the two wouldn’t work together because the Communist Party was very Stalinist’.
So Monty and Myrtle, along with other activists who weren’t members of the Communist Party, formed the National Committee for Liberation, which later became ARM, to embark on a sabotage campaign.
‘And I was part of that,’ says Roman.
Roman was born in Warsaw in 1936. As a child he witnessed beatings and killings by the Nazis, and when he was three, his mother hid him in a laundry bag when a death squad raided the Warsaw Ghetto.
The family escaped through city sewers in 1943 and went to live in France, before coming to South Africa in 1955.
Capetonian Michael Schneider was also an active member of ARM:
As a teenager, Michael Schneider had a strong Jewish and Zionist identity and was the national treasurer of the Young Israel Society. In his early 20s he was recruited into ARM, where he was trained on how to fell electricity pylons.
… One day Michael was asked to ‘borrow’ the King David school bus to transport 20 African nurses to the newly independent Tanzania, as a present from the ANC.
‘With a forged letter ostensibly from State President CR Swart, I was disguised as an Anglican priest, and we picked up the nurses in Sophiatown in Johannesburg. An ANC member and I took the King David school bus to the Bechuanaland border (this was before it became independent Botswana). We were met in the middle of nowhere – there was a table and tablecloth, and they sang Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. We drove back to Joburg and got the bus back in one piece before school opened on Monday. The school was an unknowing fellow conspirator.’
After escaping into exile, Michael Schneider went on to have a distinguished career in Jewish communal affairs, inter alia serving for many years as Executive Vice-President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and as secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress from 2007 to 2010.
Solly Sachs earned a reputation as one of the most remarkable trade unionists of the 20th Century. When Nelson Mandela addressed the national conference of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies in 1993, he said Solly’s name was indelibly inscribed in the history of the country’s labour movement because of his contribution to the struggle for workers’ rights.
The Garment Workers’ Union (GWU) may have started with Jewish tailors, but Solly was instrumental in recruiting black and coloured women who worked in clothing factories into the union. He also felt great sympathy for the plight of the poverty-stricken young Afrikaans women who fled the rural areas during the Great Depression to work in factories, and he recruited them too.
The Afrikaans women were the daughters of the Boers who rebelled against the British – and Solly referred to them as ‘the rebels’ daughters’.
Solly mentored two of these women, Anna Scheepers and Johanna Cornelius, who became very prominent trade unionists. He was also a major influence on Lilian Ngoyi, another GWU member, who would go on to play a massive role in the broader political struggle.
Under Solly’s leadership the GWU became the most militant and active union of its time.
Solly married Ray Ginsburg in 1926 and they had two sons, Albie and Johnny .….
In 1941 Albie received a postcard from his father that read: ‘Dear Albert, congratulations on your sixth birthday. May you grow up to be a soldier in the fight for liberation.’
And that’s exactly what happened. Albie became a lifelong freedom fighter, and was a major architect of the post-apartheid constitution and a much revered judge of the Constitutional Court.
Albie remembers his dad as a man of integrity.
‘He used to play cards with the bosses who had come out on the boat with him as a kid. They had been tailors and had now become factory owners, and people used to say: Solly, how can you play cards with the class enemy? And he’d say: Class struggle is class struggle, and poker is poker.’
Jews, jazz and joy
The Jewish contribution to South Africa’s performing arts has been significant. But at 7.30pm on 2 February 1959 when the curtain opened on a sparkling production at Wits University’s Great Hall, something magical happened: a black cast and a Jewish production team came together to defy the colour bar and produce one of the most remarkable performances in the history of South African theatre. The performance was King Kong – the township afro-jazz musical that celebrated the smoky sounds of the sax and the sharp sound of the penny whistle.
‘The impact of King Kong was just incredible,’ theatre doyen and Mr Computicket Percy Tucker tells me.
At the time, the director, Leon Gluckman, said: ‘There has been genuine co-operation between black and white in this venture and in a small way it has brought understanding, which is much better than the fear which informs the relations between the two sectors.’
The musical became Nelson Mandela’s favourite show. In fact, it was just about everyone’s favourite show. It was so popular that when the curtain came down at the end of the opening performance, the audience refused to leave.
Writing in the Mail & Guardian, Hilary Prendini Toffoli explained why the show had captured the public’s imagination: ‘In a country where the majority of the population was being kept down and restricted by draconian laws, King Kong’s effervescent celebration of life, love and muscle was like nothing we’d seen before. It was a gritty musical depiction of [Sophiatown], a place and era whose annihilation by the apartheid government four years previously would remain a haunting element of our troubled history.’
This is how Lionel Slier described opening night: ‘The stage of the Great Hall exploded into life. The energy of the cast was electric, the music alternatively seductive, exhilarating and haunting. The final curtain fell to an ovation rarely heard in any theatre anywhere. The roars grew louder when Leon Gluckman finally appeared on the stage… [Leon] stood for a moment facing the audience, then turned his back and bowed low to his 63 actors. It was one of the most memorable nights and those who had made it possible were rewarded with a monumental hit.’
Man of letters and integrity
Lionel Abrahams, novelist, poet, editor, critic, essayist and publisher, made an enormous contribution to literature and put a colossal effort into nurturing black writing talent and publishing ground-breaking works that launched a number of literary careers. The following extract relates how The Purple Renoster, the literary magazine he launched in 1957, invoked the ire of the Apartheid establishment:
Soon after [The Purple Renoster] went on sale, Lionel’s parents’ home was raided by the Special Branch at 5am one winter’s morning. The cops searched his room and removed seven books and his typewriter.
Two-and-a-half months later, Barney was summoned to the Special Branch offices and questioned in connection with The Purple Renoster.
A few days later the Special Branch came looking for Lionel, and a security policeman questioned him about some of the edition’s contributors. Lionel refused to answer, insisting that the responsibility for the whole magazine was his.
‘The remarkable thing, however, is that he [the security policeman] refrained from asking the one question that cried out to be asked: Who was the author of the anonymous poems?’
The security policeman then quizzed Lionel about ‘the pornography’ they had identified in Barney Simon’s story Dolores, which was published in the magazine.
Lionel’s mother couldn’t suppress her amusement. The cop, however, wasn’t amused.
‘“Have you read [the magazine]?” he demanded of her.
“I helped to collate it,” she replied.
“Did you read this?” he persisted, thrusting one of Barney’s “f*ck”-sprinkled pages under her eyes, whereupon I said something to discourage her from reading it, which caused him to round on me with a triumphant, “Aha! You’re ashamed to let your mother read what you publish.”’
Three months after the interrogation, the issue with Barney’s ‘offensive’ story was banned and the unsold copies of the magazine were confiscated.
The next edition of the magazine boasted: ‘The Special Branch, the Publications Control Board and 39 subscribers can’t be wrong – The Purple Renoster needs looking into.’
The well-read (and well Red) Fanny Klenerman
A lifelong rebel, trade unionist, naturist and Trotskyite, the indefatigable Fanny Klenerman owned the iconic Vanguard Bookshop, a favourite haunt of Joburg leftists from 1931 to 1974.[1]
Fanny acquired a reputation as a discerning bookseller. She stocked the European classics, and made contact with distinguished publishers, who sent her books that might otherwise never have reached South Africa.
Fanny introduced the books of the Left Book Club and subscribed to the Moscow News, an English language newspaper, and the Russian-language newspapers Izvestia (Star) and Pravda (Truth). The readership was small but some students became devotees.
Apart from distributing these books, Fanny, with a few others, organised a Left Book Club discussion group. They hired a room in the Johannesburg Public Library and held regular meetings. Fanny often spoke there herself.
Fanny’s bookshop drew numerous book lovers to its one room on the second floor of Hatfield House. Many patrons became her ardent supporters.
‘This was more than a shop – it was a forum for informed political ideas, and also for the latest currents in philosophy, literature and art,’ wrote activist Baruch Hirson.
[1] This is an edited version of an essay by Veronica Belling that appeared in Jewish Affairs, Vol. 72, #1, Pesach 2017
