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Rachel Clain: A Jewish Immigrant’s Story

Author: Published on: Published in: Jewish History – South Africa

(Author: Edna Bradlow, Vol. 66, #2, Rosh Hashanah 2011)

 

  • Feature image: Cousins Eli Stein and Eli Katz, Cape Town, 1912 

 

As Joachim Pinz notes,1 Jews have always been immigrants, forced at times to leave centuries-old homelands, rebuilding their lives. Rabbonim ensured that Jewish rituals and beliefs continued to be observed even under changed circumstances. This was the experience of my grandmother Rachel Clain (born Sher), who left Telz, the shtetl (village) in Lithuania where she had been born, to come out to South Africa.

The number of Jewish immigrants to South Africa rose from 900 in 1863 to 12 800 in 1893. That was the year my grandfather arrived, to be followed three years later by his family. This huge migration increase between 1863 and 1893 should be taken in conjunction with the situation in Russia which, as will be explained, deteriorated commensurately.2

It is not necessary to trace the origin of the Jewish population further back than 1772, in Poland. At this stage the Eastern European Ashkenazis (westerners) numbered about a million, and were increasingly coming under Russian control. Though these new Russian Jews were, in the early days, on the whole professionals of varying degrees, the tsarist rulers nevertheless discriminated against them. Language was an important issue. The use of Yiddish (a mixture of German and Hebrew) remained the lingua franca for conducting their affairs, spoken by the majority of Jews. This was however, replaced by the use of Russian, and to a lesser extent, Polish and German, in the promulgation of public documents, or the ability to hold the principal offices.3

Hebrew was the Jews’ literary language; but by 1850, prose in Yiddish was emerging (in writings such as Sholem Aleichem’s). Where Jews formed small town communities, they resuscitated their own traditions, remaining faithful, for example, to their Hasidic (pietist) teachings, and the administration, by secular authorities, of the strict rules of morality. Consequently, the shtetl served to maintain Jewishness;4 and ‘conversion was an unthinkable alternative’.

But with the breakup and partitioning of Poland at the end of the 18th Century, the tsars forced Jews to settle in their own quarters (ghettos), gated communities in the narrow strip of territory stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, known as the Pale of Settlement. Physically of small stature, Jews were readily identifiable, forced to take names and wear clothing which maintained their segregated existence, and forbidden to move about freely.5

By 1897, there were some five million Jews living in the Pale, cut off from the rest of the world and still speaking Yiddish as their mother tongue. Families were crowded into houses (in the worst part of town), which were primitive and rarely clean. Male society was pre-industrial, their cultural premodern, nourished by Jewish sources alone. Prohibited mainly from owning land, exposed to other forms of social and economic discrimination, they made their living by ‘trade and artisanship’.6 The shtetl’s essential concerns were regarded as, and remained communal. The inhabitants developed an exclusive system of education (which will be referred to presently). They found the Bible ‘a solid and enduring source of inspiration’ which gave them assurance they were G–d’s chosen people.7 It took precedence, before enlightened, secularised Jews, over the traditional study of the Talmud (codified oral law). But Jewish piety has two significant aspects8;the home (that is the family – Chaim Bermant’s Walled Garden) where live Judaism flourishes; and the synagogue, home of the intellect, where Jews prayed three times a day, and were sustained by the Torah.

Mention of the synagogue, where the traditions (barmitzvah, religious marriage ceremony and so forth) of Judaism are practised, brings Rachel Clain into focus, largely with reference to her personal background. Telz, her birthplace, was situated in the Kovno gubernya (Russian administrative district), from which the majority of South African Jews of Eastern European origin emigrated. Once a great centre of Jewish learning, it contained one of the major yeshivas  (Talmudic seminaries), and other educational institutions in Russia in the period 1875– 1941.9 Concentrating, as noted in the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Judaism, ‘on the development of acuity in profound logical analysis’ students studied ‘the Bible, the tractates of the Talmud ….. and the commentaries on both.’10

My grandmother’s father was a scribe (Soyfer), ‘a sacred profession’. In ancient times writing was regarded as a divine institution, and the scribes were trained by the priesthood. In modern times their work involved ‘providing the manuscript scrolls of the Torah (the sacred scroll containing the five books of Moses)’, and biblical passages required for Mezuzot (Torah verses attached to a doorpost) and Tefillin (phylacteries).

‘A scribe is guided by strict rules, when writing Torah scrolls and other ritual texts’, which are his chief occupation.11 He wrote the Torah for those who could not do this themselves. A scribe thus occupied an exacting as well as a sacred profession. He was obliged to purify himself at the ritual bath (mikvah) before starting to write. He was required to say a blessing each time he pronounced G-d’s name. His copy of the Torah had to be flawless, for it is against the religious laws to change anything. The letters must be perfect. The page on which the scribe had made a mistake must not be thrown away, but cut out of the scroll, and retained in a special place in the Synagogue.

The top scribes were consequently proud of their workmanship. But the work was slow and costly (both regarding the scribe’s efforts and the acquisition of his material). Thus my grandmother as a young girl in Lithuania had been exposed to what might virtually be described as a strict academic environment, even if by emulation.

Conditions in the ghetto, prior to the emigration of her family at the end of the 19th Century, were unstable. ‘Periodic natural disasters’, such as fires, exacerbated the poverty in which the inhabitants passed their days.12

Other urgent reasons existed (and even possibly precipitated) such emigration. Jews in the ghetto could be ordered to move without prior notice, for example; the imminence or length of military service might be imposed precipitately on Jews and nonJews, but not granted with the same rights as afforded to the latter. Consequently as soon as a Jewish boy had completed his service, he emigrated.

The political and cultural liberalism of Western Europe had not yet replaced the legal discrimination and violence which earned the term ‘antisemitism’, evident in the Russian attitude to Jews as ‘an enemy’. Consequently the continuing harsh treatment meted out to them, particularly in the form of pogroms (‘officially sponsored riots following Alexander II’s assassination’), or other types of persecution such as that caused by the restrictive May Laws, resulted in huge Jewish emigration figures from Russia. Some two million left before the First World War. They headed primarily to the USA, and to a lesser degree to the pioneering villages of Palestine.13

An alternative existed, and it brings me back to my grandmother’s youth. In Lithuania and White Russia, the shtetls’ response to the growing hostility developing towards its members, and their exclusion from the state educational system, was that every male be sent to the community ‘cheder’ (classroom), to learn Hebrew, and thereafter solely to study the Torah. (In other words the importance of traditional learning was perceived by Eastern European Jews as a possible response to the increasing popular hostility they were encountering).14 This attitude, however, involved an accompanying belief in tsarist benevolence towards practising Jews; an attitude which the 1881 pogroms, and the subsequent May Laws, inevitably proved untenable.

Moreover, the inhabitants of the receiving countries (such as Britain, the British Empire, Germany and France) to which thousands of Eastern European Jews fled, were frequently critical of the new arrivals. Gradually, however, the latter began ‘to lose their ‘foreignness’,15 advancing by their own efforts, in the social scale; or failing this, with the rise of industrialisation, becoming trade unionists; and publishing their own newspaper such as the Jewish Daily Forward (in Yiddish Forverts).

Now I return to my grandparents, and fit them into this background. After marrying in Telz, they went to Manchester, where Rachel’s brother owned a raincoat factory. According to the historian Aubrey Newman, these workers used, accidentally, to sniff the glue with which they joined together the seams of the oilskin raincoats, consequently suffering from lung diseases. My aunt maintained my grandfather a carpenter – had been accidentally hurt at his work. But the glue theory was more probable, and is reinforced by the fact that he was a fairly young man when he died during the 1918 flu epidemic.

To repeat; the majority of Jewish migrants to the late 19th Century Cape came from Lithuania, especially from the Kovno gubernya,16 and were known as Litvaks. Emigration involved difficulties. Departure formalities ranged from processing the requisite exit documents, to sufficient funds to cover the cost of travel tickets for a family.

The Litvak arrival at the Cape had, however, been preceded by about a century when, with the First British Occupation in 1795, Jewish settlement officially began.17 There were a few Jews (of English origin) among the 1820 Settlers, such as the Nordens; but by 1859, Jewish numbers were only marginally bigger, comprising in the Cape Colony, outside Cape Town, mostly British and German traders, and a handful of professionals.18 The Transvaal Republic soon followed the Cape’s tolerant policy until after the Jameson Raid.

Thus, in the decade prior to the South African War, European immigrants experienced no entry restrictions on the whole. But near the turn of the 19th Century, as immigrant numbers were increasing (particularly with the exploitation of Transvaal gold), there was less enthusiasm for the new arrivals (especially the ‘peddler Jews’ who tried to sell their products walking the streets).19 Generally, however, it was the Asiatics who bore the brunt of this opposition. The 1904 Census for the whole of Southern Africa had given the Jewish total as 38101. The immigration legislation of 191320 indicated that government policy still obviously avoided discriminating against Jews. Thus, for example, officials did not refuse to recognise fluency in Yiddish as a suitable language for statutory acceptance. Rather, compliance with the law was the determining factor.

The last lap of the journey out of Lithuania to South Africa was the longest, but gave the least trouble. Received initially in England by Jewish institutions which offered useful advice,21 the immigrants proceeded generally in the steerage class of the Union Castle mail ships. This my grandmother did, bringing her four children, Gabriel, Louis, Leah and Harry (all of them under the age of seven). At the Cape, they were joined by the birth of a further four, one of whom died as an infant, having apparently been dropped by his nurse.

My mother’s account of that journey, derived largely from her mother’s memories, recalled the large numbers of soldiers travelling with them, presumably to reinforce the British Army for the anticipated hostilities against the Boers.

A major problem for Jewish travelers was laying in a stock of kosher food for the large numbers of women and children joining their menfolk who had preceded them, in classic migrant pattern. But as the travellers’ numbers increased, so too did the supply of such food.

The statistics for 1906-7 reinforce those of 1904, and show that Jews were increasingly determined to make the various parts of South Africa their permanent homes, not least because of favourable local economic developments (such as the mineral discoveries); and increasing violence in Eastern Europe. This growth in Jewish working class numbers aroused some resentment even among secularly educated, middle-class Anglo-German Jews. But gradually, for example in rural areas, Jews began to mix with their Christian neighbours (compared to their formerly purely Jewish business dealings); or went a step further, emulating the social life of earlier Jewish arrivals. Successful migrants like Sammy Marks, who came from the area close to the Prussian border, gave a positive stimulus for other Lithuanians to follow suit. But it took some time before they participated more widely in civic and public affairs. And inter-marriage with non-Jews was not on any significant scale.

An editorial comment in the Cape Times at the time, more or less, of my grandparent’s arrival, noted that the poor immigrants aimed at educating their sons in order to give them a better start than they themselves had experienced. My grandmother was an excellent example of this attitude subsequently. The modest income she earned from her boarding house enabled her to educate my uncles: a doctor, at Cape Town University Medical School; a dentist at Liverpool University; a bookkeeper locally; and an embryo lawyer at the Magistrates’ Court in King Williamstown. The last, however, abandoned these studies when he misrepresented his age so as to serve in France during the Great War. My mother, Leah, and her only sister, Dinah, both passed Standard Eight at a well-known English language girls’ school in Cape Town. Even in their old age they regarded the ability to recite English poetry like the ‘Pied Piper of Hamlin’; or enjoy adventure books for English children, particularly those written for boys by G. A. Henty, as the acme of achievement.

Rachel Clain initially ran her boarding house in Caledon Street, District Six. It was a modest part of Cape Town, which was virtually a local ghetto as it was largely settled by Jews, and Muslims. The two groups had few dealings with each other. My grandmother worked harder than my grandfather (reinforcing my belief that he was not a healthy man). He would meet immigrants at the docks, and take them to the boarding house where they could experience, in orthodox Jewish surroundings (until they proceeded to their final destination) at least an approximation of the lifestyle they had known in the ‘old country’.

Thus initially, the lives of these new arrivals revolved to a varying extent, around the existing beliefs and institutions which had been the essence of their shtetl existence.22 Many paid for their boarding costs with articles brought from their original homes, such as the silver candlesticks given to my grandmother in 1906 by a Mr S. Nathan. However, the inscription on their base(‘presented to Mrs R. Clain’) suggests a gift rather than payment.

In the 1920s, when she no longer ran the boarding house, my grandmother would serve lunches at a charge of one shilling, to Jewish pupils at the nearby South African College School (SACS) and the Good Hope Seminary, whose doting parents in the (mainly northern) suburbs believed they should get a hot meal at midday. Several of these children, as adults, later fondly remembered those modest lunches.

This was only one minor aspect of Rachel Clain’s domestic influence, and was probably connected with the need still to raise some income. But in her quiet, unobtrusive way, she was the fulcrum of the family.23 As noted previously, as the daughter of a soyfer, in her childhood she had probably received a good Hebrew education. But more importantly, she personally fulfilled Hillel’s injunction, ‘not to do unto others that which was hateful to yourself’. And she practised in Africa the entirety of the pious beliefs and behaviour forged in the Eastern European shtetl. These included respect for the personal feelings and property of others, which subsumed a number of duties, such as tzedakah, that is, the obligation to kindly and positively support the needy with charitable acts. This injunction was to emerge as ‘one of the regular duties of our daily life’. In South Africa, it meant my grandmother privately helped a few needy Jewish families with money and other aid. Nor did her behaviour intend to make those less observant or less charitable feel uncomfortable; or intrude on the privacy of the recipient of her help. And true to the traditional dictum that charity should not be ‘publicised’,24when my grandmother died, none of her family could identify those we labelled in a modest joke, ‘grannies customers’.

She too had her little jokes. On Saturday morning, after synagogue, she would sit on the veranda at Gordon Lodge, the old Cape house which the extended family was now occupying, watching my sister and me going off with hockey sticks or tennis rackets, patently intending to engage in some sporting activity. ‘Edna’ she would say, ‘are you going to shul?’ And I knew she was simply making fun of us.

On the Sabbath, all the main religious holidays such as Rosh Hashanah (New Year) Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) or Passover, she and ‘little’ Mrs Zuckerman – her old friend and member of a well known Cape Town commercial family (and, it might be added, above whom my grandmother, not quite five feet, towered) – walked from home the couple of miles to the Gardens Synagogue, clinging to each other in the slightest breeze.

As a child I regularly observed my grandmother (on Saturday evening) performing havdolah, ‘the ritual of separation’, which denotes the end of the Sabbath. I now possess the silver candlesticks in which she lit the havdolah candles; and I light them at the beginning of the Sabbath.

What other recollections return to my mind? She spoke English with a Manchester accent, acquired in Pimlett Street, next to Strangeways goal; tinged very occasionally with a trace of her original Telz speech. But unlike many of her fellow arrivals, she never spoke Yiddish to her family or acquaintances. The exception was when ‘Yekka’, brought to the early 19th Century house in the Gardens, the eggs and chickens with which he supplied her for the family.

Yekka could not speak English, so none of us wanted to spend any time with him. But he and my grandmother would sit beside each other at the kitchen table, with a copy of Forverts spread before them, discussing, in Yiddish, its contents. Thus I was exposed, at a young age, to the behaviour of a person who never patronised anyone; and my mother learned this behaviour too. Yekka was certainly, in no way, my grandmother’s equal; and this set for me, without realising what I was acquiring, a gracious example. Yekka’s visits were the only occasions when the world of our immaculate school uniforms, team games and English literature, impinged on the world of the Pale of Settlement, from which the majority of the Jewish immigrants at the Cape, and not least our own forebears, had come.

Thus far I have not described Rachel Clain’s appearance. I recall her small stature, dressed always in a plain, somewhat unattractive black garment. Like all Orthodox married Jewish women in the shtetl, she was obliged to cover her head with an equally unattractive wig (called in Yiddish, a Sheitl). Once when she was in bed, ill and therefore without her wig, I saw and identified an old lady with a mass of white hair.25 It in no way resembled the usual headpiece, with its severely stitched centre parting.

Her life, as I have previously hoped to suggest in this account, had not been easy. Her sorrows were dominated by the above-noted death of her infant son in Cape Town, and the loss of my grandfather Joshua Simon Clain, who died in 1918 when my grandparents were both about 55. My uncle Bunny (whose name she pronounced with the flat Lancashire vowel), remembered riding his bicycle behind a cart filled with the corpses of those who, like my grandfather, had not survived the flu epidemic; and in the absence of coffins were being conveyed in this somewhat primitive manner, to the Jewish Cemetery in Woodstock.

Today, from an adult perspective, I am aware how deeply Rachel Clain must have suffered on both these occasions. Yet I don’t recall ever hearing death being referred to, even with a trace of self-pity. ‘Mother’, as she was always called by her children, brought up a close-knit, much loved family; equipped with the qualities required to produce successful human beings in all aspects of their lives.

 

Dr Edna Bradlow, a veteran contributor to Jewish Affairs, is a former lecturer in the Department of History, University of Cape Town. She has published numerous articles, mainly on nineteenth-century social history, in various academic journals.

 

Notes

  1. The Secret Jews, London, Valentine, Mitchell, 1974, p.69.
  2. Saron and L. Hotz (Editors), The Jews in South Africa. A history. (Oxford University Press, 1955.)
  3. Abba Eban, Civilisation and the Jews (London, Weidenfeld &Nicolson, 1985), p.239 ff.
  4. Riedl, ‘Home of Hardship’, in R.Salamander (editor) The Jewish world of Yesterday, (New York, Rizzo/1, 1991.)
  5. For a detailed description of life in these ghettos, see L.Browne, The Story of the Jews (London, Jonathan Cape, 1926; Eban, Heritage, p.189
  6. Riedl, op cit58 ff.
  7. C .Gershater, Chap 4 in Saron and Hotz (eds) The Jews in South Africa (OUP, 1955); Terence Prittie Israel, Miracle in the Desert, (London, Pall Mall Press, 1967), p.115 For a detailed description of life in these ghettos, see L.Browne, The Story of the Jews (London, Jonathan Cape, 1926; Eban, Heritage, p.189 ff.
  8. Chaim Bermant TheWalled Garden. The saga of Jewish Family Life and Tradition, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1974; Schalom Ben–Chorin, ‘The Jewish faith’ in Salamander, The Jewish World.
  9. Edited by Jeffrey Wigoder, Keter Publishing House, Jerusalem; R. Sanders, Shores of Refuge, (New York, Schocken Books, 1988).
  10. Dan Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1998.
  11. Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life is with People.
  12. The culture of the Shtetl, (International Universities Press Inc, 1952)
  13. Gershater, Chapt 4 in Saron and Hotz, The Jews in South Africa Eban, Heritage, pp237 ff, 246; Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol.16, Paul Johnson,A History of the Jews, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1987; Lewis Browne, The Story of the Jews, from the earliest times to the Present Day, London, Cape, 1926.
  14. Browne, The Story of the Jews
  15. Ibid.
  16. Gershater, Chap 4, Saron and Hotz, The Jews in South Africa
  17. Hugh Macmillan and Frank Shapiro, Zion in Africa, The Jews of Zambia, (London and New York, I. B. Tauris Publishers, 1999).
  18. Saron and Hotz, The Jews in South Africa.
  19. Ibid, Chapter 5
  20. 20 Act 22 of 1913, The Immigrants Regulation Act.
  21. Gershater, Chapt.4, Saron and Hotz, The Jews in South Africa.
  22. Rabbi Isidore Epstein, Step by Step in the Jewish religion, London, Soncino, 1958
  23. Edna Bradlow, O! Call Back yesterday, Bid Time Return (Privately printed memoirs)
  24. Rabbi Epstein, Step by Step, p39
  25. See Isaac Bashevis Singer, In my father’s Court, London, Secker and Warburg, 1967, for reference to the head covering.

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