(Author: Mona Berman, Vol. 66, No. 1, Pesach 2011)
The convoluted route through which I discovered the merit and quality of the Yiddish writings of my father, Richard Feldman, was through an article published by Yiddish scholar Astrid Starck in the Jewish Affairs 1995 Winter issue. Entitled ‘South African Yiddish Literature and the Problem of Apartheid’, it was originally written in French and presented in Accra, Ghana at the 1994 World Conference organized by the African Literature Association. It was translated for publication by Karen Durbach, wife of then Jewish Affairs editor Joseph Sherman and a fluent French speaker and teacher.
On seeing the article, I immediately phoned Joseph to find out who had analysed my father’s stories in such an academic way, likening him to Kafka and Y.L. Peretz. I learned that Starck was a Yiddish lecturer at the University of Alsace in Mulhouse (she has since received a full professorship in Yiddish Literature at Basle University) and wrote to her expressing my surprise at her praise of my father’s writing. It is almost 15 years since we began our correspondence and friendship, and during that time she has visited Johannesburg many times to do research and give lectures. Through her, I have learnt more about my father’s writing than I ever did whilst he was alive.
Feldman’s anthology was first published in Warsaw in 1935, under the title Shwarts un Vays (Black and White). Twenty-two years later, in 1957, it was republished in New York by the Central Yiddish Cultural Organisation (CYCO) and issued in a dust cover designed by the famous artist Irma Stern. It was the only South African Yiddish book to achieve a second edition. Starck regarded the anthology as a “benchmark of Yiddish writing as world literature” which formed part of “the multilingual literary impulse of South Africa”. Thus, it took a French scholar for me start appreciating my father’s literary output in Yiddish and it has motivated my learning Yiddish in order to read his stories in the original.
When Sherman was compiling and editing from A Land Far Off,1 a selection of twenty-seven stories by fourteen different South African Yiddish writers, he asked me to help him choose three of my father’s stories. Two of these he re-translated himself, Gold and Diamonds and She is Different, while The Banjo he retained in its original translation. The anthology had a foreword by Dan Jacobson explaining the variety of views and subjects chosen by the Jews of Eastern Europe after they migrated to South Africa.
From a Land Far Off is an important addition to Yiddish writing as world literature because of its thematic and geographical framework. In her 1995 article, Starck points out that the texts reflect either the history of immigrant Jews, mostly from Lithuania, who came to South Africa towards the end of the 19th Century, or the history and society of their new country as refuge. As a result, a lively Yiddish cultural life and literature developed which, while linked to Eastern Europe, found its own South African voice. She believes that Feldman’s stories express the message of the Enlightenment, and are thus at one with the Yiddish writers of Eastern Europe.
This is important: Feldman’s stories built on the framework of the historical, racial, and social situation in South Africa, expressing the idea of the right to education and equal opportunity for all individuals. Starck maintains that the writers wished to alert their Yiddish readers to the injustice and inequality in South African society and show the plight of “the poor whites” and the inhumane treatment of the blacks. She says that the weight of the South African political situations is depicted in a Kafkaesque manner, including not only the absurd and the tragic, but even the grotesque: “ Whatever the protagonists do or do not do, they cannot protect themselves from a fate over which they have no control and which has determined to crush them.” This theme links these stories to the work of, for example, Y.L. Peretz, who describes “the pathetic and miserable lives of small, poor people, subjected to a merciless destiny that leaves them no hope.”
In Sherman’s Introduction to Feldman’s stories, he points out that when, as a boy of thirteen, he arrived in 1910 (from Skoposhik, Lithuania) with his family in Johannesburg, he was unique among Yiddish writers in South Africa in that he received both a secular and a Jewish education. In Lithuania, he studied at a maskilik Yiddish school; in Johannesburg he attended the Jewish Government School under the inspired headmastership of A.M.
Abrahams. However, after three years at school he felt “so much in the wrong sphere of life” that he preferred to spend his interval time in the lavatory reading, “rather than in the playgrounds among the kids.” He recalls that his school life that year “was really a miserable time, but it was, at the same time, the most important in my life.”
In the evenings, Feldman started attending Business College and in 6½ months, through hard work and sheer determination, managed to pass both the Junior and Senior exams in Bookkeeping. He then was able to start his working life. He became an ardent Zionist, inter alia becoming one of the pioneers of the Young Zionist Society and a prime-mover behind the Jewish War Victims Fund (particularly the Doornfontein branch). After serving as secretary of the SA Labour Party, he became a prominent member and was elected to the Transvaal Provincial Council in 1943. His writings expressed what he passionately felt about social justice.
Like most children growing up in a middle-class Jewish community in Johannesburg in the 1940s and ‘50s, the war in Hitlerite Europe seemed far away to me and hardly affected our daily lives. In those days, we took most things for granted. We lived comfortably in nice houses, went to good schools and were never without food, warm clothing or things that we wanted to make our lives more pleasant. Certainly, though, we were aware of our parent’s involvement in the war effort – their constant fund raising and meetings held in our house to assist survivors of the Holocaust here and abroad. My father and uncle Leibl’s wholesale tobacconist business provided sheltered employment for hundreds of people who could not find employment anywhere else. It became a standard joke in our household when new people were employed because everyone knew that Richard and Leibl, while not the most pragmatic of businessmen, were overly generous and could never say ‘no’ to anyone in need.
My father and mother, Freda’s, beautiful home, Ny-Hame in Houghton, became a haven for Yiddish poets, writers, actors and avant-garde artists living here and abroad. It was the gathering place of Yiddishists determined to keep Yiddish alive and vibrant in their adopted country. There were ongoing arguments, fierce debates and raucous laughter from the Klabejas School. As a child, it seemed to me that the Yiddish speakers and intellectuals were the predominant force in our society. Many of my father’s friends were Bundists, Socialists or Communists, or had their own brand of political convictions. The exchanges between his friends was always heated, with each one being determined to get his voice heard, but invariably they were spiked with Jewish humour.
My parents were actively involved in Jewish community organizations and fund-raising for local programmes to alleviate the plight of the poor. They encouraged a large group of their friends and acquaintances to assist with their efforts to collect money, clothes and food to donate to the needy. Much of their social life was taken up in fund raising functions, premiere film and theatre productions, art exhibitions and musical events. It was during this time that they acquired a love of art, becoming keen collectors and enthusiastic patrons. In the early 1930s, they met Irma Stern, who visited their home in Johannesburg. They admired her painting style and loved the subjects she chose to paint in rural and exotic places. They became ardent collectors of her work at a time when the public was largely indifferent to it. She in turn became dependent on them for their friendship and unwavering loyalty as they helped to sell her paintings to private individuals, galleries and institutions.
I mention this background as examples of the remarkable adaptation of both my father, who came to South Africa as a youth with no knowledge of English, practically no money and no previous access to Western culture, and of my mother, who was raised in the small rural town of Amersfoort somewhere in the backwoods of the Transvaal. Though born in Johannesburg, Freda grew up 300 miles from her birthplace and, as the eldest child, helped her mother bring up her seven sisters and two brothers on the meagre earnings of her father’s small grocery store. At the age of 16, she came back to Johannesburg to live with her grandfather and found work as a cashier in a departmental store. Although they were distant cousins, I have no idea what attracted Richard to Freda, an unsophisticated country girl who did not wear lipstick until she was 25. Nevertheless, they married when she turned twenty and, with Richard’s faith in her potential and his unwavering support, she became an extraordinary personality in the community.
Richard and Freda were determined to make Johannesburg the cultural hub of South Africa. They encouraged actors to come from South America to introduce Yiddish theatre to Johannesburg audiences, organized Jewish art exhibitions, held charity musical evenings and arranged venues where Yiddish poets and writers could talk about their work, recite their poetry, or read extracts from stories they had written. The community was hungry for the Yiddish language and Yiddish theatre and popular musicals became integral to the social life of Johannesburg. The infusion of Yiddish during the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s gave comfort to the life of the immigrants, who were once again able to remember, write or sing about their shtetls.
Being a prolific reader in English and Yiddish, Richard became a fluent writer in both languages, writing English articles about Yiddish for periodicals, journals, magazines and newspapers. In the daily English and Yiddish press, he reviewed art exhibitions, gave his views on the work of various Jewish writer, commented on Yiddish theatre and musicals and covered events and issues that were of interest to the community. Written with force and clarity, these pieces gained acceptance and respect for his views, particularly with the Rand Daily Mail, where his editorials were regularly published. The latter mostly expressed his outspoken left-wing political opinions about the inequality and injustice of the Apartheid regime. Feldman further contributed to the “Letters to the Editor” columns, expressing his outrage at the state of black hospitals, lack of adequate housing for communities in the townships and the conscious neglect of a proper education system for the black community. I recently came across his article entitled ‘Partnership is the Only Answer’. Written in the 1950s, it argued that: “For the White man to survive and for the Black man to advance in the shortest possible time, partnership in its full application is the only way.” Many of the articles he wrote sixty years ago could have appropriately been included in today’s newspapers.
My father realized that in order to actively change the plight of the oppressed and fight for equality and justice for the disenfranchised, he could only do so through legitimate political channels. He chose to join the Labour Party and in time became the representative for Johannesburg City in the Provincial Council. For much of his eleven-year tenure there, he was the party’s only member and representative for Johannesburg City, but his voice was heard regularly through his writings and speeches advocating change on government policy. His passion for education never wavered. In his latter years, he persuaded a friend, Morris Isaacson, to contribute to an educational trust fund which provided bursaries for black students. This subsequently led to the building of the first High School in Soweto, the Morris Isaacson School, still regarded as one of the top academic schools in Soweto.
I now wish that I could have been a more active participant in my father’s life, even while remembering how, much against my will, I would have to sit in the Selbourne Hall (a small hall adjacent to the City Hall) through all those interminable political meetings. My parents also schlepped me to concerts and the Yiddish theatre, which I always thoroughly enjoyed but never fully understood. How I wish he would have insisted that I learn to speak, write and read Yiddish and that he would have spoken to me in Yiddish as my uncle Leibl did with his children! My parents at that time felt that their children, growing up in South Africa, did not need to speak the language of a vanished world, and they further chose not to participate in traditional religious observances. However, we imbibed our Jewish culture and love of Judaism in our minds, bodies and spirit and it still flows fiercely through our veins.
I recently found my father’s book of compositions, neatly written in an exercise book. The first one begins:
I am eighteen today! No more a boy nor a youth, but quite a man, and thoughts of those eighteen years “sweep over the brain”, and also of the future. I will take the past, present and future respectively. How were those days – happy? Yes happy in many major ways and unhappy in quite a few minor. My greatest happiness always lay in having my mother with me and my brothers and sister and knowing that far beyond the seas I had a father who was expecting and longing for us. Even at my birth my father was far away, and when my mother tells the story of my first meeting with my father it makes me sad. I thought that the word tate meant a letter and when preparations were made for my father’s reception I was astonished and asked “What is this day different from other days? We receive tate every week.” And when I knew father, it was to part with him again.
A composition in his diary on his 19th birthday is particularly relevant now in light of the uncomfortable question posed by David Saks [in his ‘Barbaric Yawp’ column] in the 2010 Rosh Hashanah SA Jewish Report as to is whether South African Jewish activists were ‘informed by their Jewish inheritance’ or ‘whether their move to radical leftist activism was a way of escaping from it.’ Richard’s innocent ideology in his late teens would suggest that it came from his moral fervour:
I have no ambition and desire to possess anything which I have not got at present – except knowledge. For money I cannot and yet I dream sometime of being wealthy, and thus enabled to do work of benevolence – in other words I dream of being the treasurer of some poor people – distributing amongst themselves that which has cruelly been stolen from them – the fruit of their labour. I am content with my lot and would not for the world be anything that I am not today. I am the proudest of men to believe in the goodness which mankind is capable, and to believe in universal brotherhood. My pride of my race – my Jewish birth is unlimited …
And yet, I must agree with Saks’ view that when it came to showing concern for basic human rights, there was a pronounced lack of concern in the Jewish community, and the small minority of Jewish antiapartheid activists was hardly embraced at the time for their actions by their fellow Jews.
Feldman submitted his first story in 1917, when he was twenty, and it was published in a magazine called Judaca. He called it ‘A holiday from Cheder’, and marked it as the beginning of his literary career. Guilelessly, he commented, “It is my masterpiece I wrote it for myself, and I am greatly pleased with it. I very much doubt if ever again I shall write anything as good”.
Thirty years later, on his fiftieth birthday, he reminisces about his first day in cheder:
When I was first shown “dem aleph beth” and angels dropped ‘kopeker’ (pennies). It was the usual initiation. I remember the long winter nights when we each had our lanterns to light our way home. In addition, he recalls his lessons in Chumash when he hears about the death of Moses in Exodus: “I cried, as if we had just been bereaved of this great leader. Moses remained my favorite historical character and influenced my outlook on life to this day.
Feldman’s Yiddishkeit was unquestionable, although as an adult he seldom attended a synagogue service. Traditional orthodoxy was part of his growing-up life and he admits that when he was a small child, “I would not, in the middle of the night, drink any water before putting my hat on. But, he says, that must have been when I was about six or seven as I cannot remember having been so froom except religious observance was a routine – we could not imagine any other kind of behavior.”
When the two younger Feldman brothers graduated from cheder, their mother agreed to let them attend the first modern school in Rakishek.
There was no more translating the Hebrew into Yiddish. It was just explained in Hebrew and what happened was that we somehow skipped several thousand years and were transplanted from the life of the Ancient Hebrews of the Bible to the present day life of the Jews who speak and write Hebrew. I think I could fairly well converse in Hebrew and understand the Hebrew books I read. The teacher’s great passion was Hebrew.
But the teacher’s fanaticism drove them away from Hebrew scholarship and they continued with their Yiddish schooling. After his mother’s death in 1919, he wrote a memoir in Yiddish in a black leather bound book which still holds a prominent place in my bookshelf. It is about his mother, her life and upbringing, the hardships she endured and her struggle to bring up her four children in her husband’s family home while he was in South Africa. It became unbearable for her living with a family with whom she had little in common and she finally plucked up courage and moved with her four children to Rakishek where she had relatives. They lived there for several years until the tickets arrived for them to embark on the long sea journey to the goldene medina.
In the Rakishek Yiskor Book, which now refers to the shtetl by its modern name Rakiskis, Feldman writes of his “Childhood Joys”:
There are people who remember well their youthful years, remember their childhood and their experiences … my memories of childhood are few in number and foggy. Perhaps, because the new life in Johannesburg eclipsed the experiences in Rokiskis, and because the new homeland accepted me so maternally and warmly… When a tree is transplanted, its success depends on how young the tree is, how deep its roots have grown, and the quality of the soil into which it is transplanted. My roots in Lithuanian soil were not deep.
When I was ten years old, the conflict arose between the cheder, the Jewish school, and the Russian school, it was a mixture of languages – Yiddish at home and in the street, Hebrew in the Jewish school and on the printed page, Russian among the intelligentsia, and Lithuanian at the marketplace and in the village. As a boy, I saw no farther than the shtetl and practical matters. One did not yet think about what one would want to do. And yet, sparks flicker in my memory and light up my childhood years in Rokiskis.
For a long time I have yearned for the joy of the four seasons in Lithuania with the pleasures of summer and winter, spring and fall. And in general, I have longed for the cornfields that were near our cheder – Moshe of Meshtzansk’s cheder – and for the forests that surrounded Rokiskis.
My first written works in English were stimulated by yearning for the Lithuanian fields and forests and for the snow-white winters. Until this day, when I see large green apples, I recall the early mornings in the late summer in the courtyard of Zalman Nahman, where they would pack apples into crates for export. The smell of apples woke us up before sunrise, and Zalman Nahman would joke with us about getting out of bed so early…
A small selection of flowers and plants grew in and around Rokiskis. In Johannesburg the number of different flowers is vast; and yet to this day I feel closer to the daisy, the nasturtium, and the blue cornflowers than to the beautiful rose, the splendid gladiola, and the exotic strelitzia.
The joy of the holidays in Rokiskis is unforgettable. The New Year would start with Passover, not on Rosh Hashana, because then the world would be filled with brightness and warmth. By Passover the mud had almost dried, and the trees would clothe themselves again in green.
Who can measure the excitement of the day when our matzah was baked in ‘Pardiad’ – cutting the dough, making punctures in the matzahs, and then the procession home from “Pardiad” with the matzahs. And that’s how it was every holiday, each with its special joy. My holiday would be a bit disturbed because I was the third of three boys in the family, and I always received an older brother’s handed down suit of clothes instead of a new one. The only gloomy and difficult days I remember are the most tragic – the days when we expected a pogrom in Rokiskis. Many times we came through with just a scare. But years later, under Hitler’s rule, the Germans – with the help of Lithuanian hooligans – carried out the pogrom that annihilated the Jews of Rokiskis and of all Lithuania.
Today I see a Roskiskis where every stone and bit of earth in the street is wet with Jewish blood, and one wants to curse the fields that soaked up the blood of our murdered brothers and sisters.
And yet, and yet, one remembers the childhood joys because it is part of us and of our past.
As an adolescent, I read most of the Yiddish stories my father translated himself into English from Shvartz un Vays and, while I enjoyed them, I did not think they were of great literary merit. He had photocopied the translations, stapled them together and put them into soft blue folders, dedicating them to his children and grandchildren. The stories we read had little context for us. They were not particularly good translations and their modest presentation on inferior typing paper did not invite serious consideration.
Most of the Yiddish writers on arrival in South Africa wrote longingly of their lives in their shtetls in Lithuania, yet when my father arrived in South Africa his thoughts and ideas were focused on his adopted land. He immersed himself in the culture of the indigenous people and tried to learn as much as he could about their traditions and culture. In Shvartz un Vays, he tells stories of rural Africans coming to seek work in Johannesburg, the hardships suffered by the immigrant Jews from Lithuania, the relationship between black and white and the inevitable exploitation of the poverty-stricken black people who were forced to work for little pay in the most menial jobs.
The first story in the collection – Dos Gekestlite Rekl (The Checked Jacket) – is about a rural African man Jackson, who comes to Johannesburg to take the place of his deceased father as a “kitchen boy.” On his last day in the city after he has decided to go home and “live as a man among men, as his father did and his father’s father” he is arrested for a “pass offence”. It is a Monday morning, after a weekend, when he is led handcuffed in a procession to jail with other pass offenders. A large crowd gathers to watch and whisper that there are “so many criminals” and that “it is good that the law is so vigilant: that gives the citizens a feeling of security.” In an identity parade, he is picked out by a white woman as her would-be rapist and because he is wearing a checked jacket, he looks different from the other offenders. He is locked up in jail for three years. When he is finally released and his clothes returned to him, he refuses to take the jacket back from the warders because it has caused him such grief and humiliation. The narrator comments: “They do not know that in each check is hidden an evil spirit and these spirits had played a terrible game with him.”
This short story illustrates the dramatic intensity of the author’s technique, which is both graphic and poignant. The jacket is a metaphor that invites different readings of the text. While it situates Jackson directly with his new surroundings, it soon becomes a hindrance for him both in the white world and the world of his own. It illustrates the alienation and loss of identity of the protagonist. The jacket becomes a metaphor of otherness, but instead of allowing for invisibility it achieves the opposite.
In many of the stories, the omniscient narrator slides into the skin of his characters to show the dehumanizing effect of work on farms or in the mines. They illustrate the hostile world of the whites and their ignorance of the traditional world of the tribal village. The workers come from the villages to earn money for their families and work in the fields, in the mines or as servants. In the story Ja Baas (‘Yes, master’), the narrator first introduces the reader to the Afrikaans farmer Hendrik Lasthuizen, who employs black workers on his farm although he dislikes them intensely and treats them with contempt.
At the slightest provocation, he hits them with his ‘schambock’ (whip) to further humiliate them. When it is time for the laborers to be paid so that they can go home to their families, they discover that their employer has deducted rainy days from their wages as well as money for the few meagre necessities they are forced to buy, with the result that are in debt to the farmer. They are forced to repay him before returning home. The author introduces the reader to Piet N’dali, a hard-working young Swazi, obedient and seemingly docile, as he always answers the farmer’s harsh words with “Ja Baas”. A fight ensues when the farmer, realizes that Piet is involved in the Workers Union. He takes out his revolver and shoots him in cold blood. Needless to say, the police are in cahoots with the farmers in the district, so that when Hendrik reports the incident to them and asserts it was a case of self defense, no charge is laid against him.
In Masike der nachtvechter (‘Masika the Night Watchman’), the narrative examines the question of identity when the protagonist’s place of origin is made the antithesis of the hostile world of the whites. The narrator explains, “The world of the whites was for Masika an upside down world” because the white world is the world of the night, whereas the black world is the world of the day. Masika’s life in his village is one of harmony, discussion and meaningful relationships, the opposite of his working life on the gold mine. These evocations are brief, forming a background that serves as a memory of the past or a vision of the future, but is the reverse of the real situation of the present.
Gold un Diamantn, one of the stories Joseph Sherman chose for From a Land Far Off, is one of the most powerful short stories in the section dealing with the hardships of immigrant Jews arriving in South Africa. The narrator is the brother of a sister waiting impatiently at home for the riches he is going to earn on the Diamond fields and on the Gold Reef. She imagines that the diamonds are easily accessible and that her brother, being a bright young lad, will have little trouble accumulating wealth. She is thus surprised when she does not hear good news from him and receives only a few pounds a month from the Goldene Medina. He then tells her of the hardships of the new immigrants, who have no money, skills and no one to help them.
On arrival, the narrator describes visiting his cousin, the son of his father’s brother, to help him find work and advise him how to make a living. The cousin, who has become a wealthy man, is arrogant, mean, selfish and a braggart. He tells the young man that he hates grines (greenhorns), who he regards as lazy, uncouth and a burden on society, and sends him away empty-handed. The young man, desperate for work, does not mind doing any kind of menial work but is told that those jobs are reserved for the blacks. He would have to employ a black worker if he wants to dig. Obviously, with no money he is unable to consider prospecting for diamonds. He is fortunate to find work in a shop on the minefields, albeit with very little pay and hardly any chance of advancement. He tells his sister that this is the plight of the immigrant Jew without family or funds.
Many of the stories in the anthology offer a window into the lives of people who have been alienated, exploited and displaced by circumstances beyond their control. There are narratives about poor whites, rural and urban blacks, immigrant Jews and prospectors seeking their fortunes in the gold mines. Some of the narratives are concerned with the hopeless plight of the poor, while others describe the joyful atmosphere of a Zulu wedding or the haunting sounds of a banjo being played in the hills of Swaziland. One story tells of the Kafferitniks. A purely South African Yiddish coinage, this refers to concession stores mostly run by immigrant Jews without any other way of earning a living, which sold basic supplies and poor quality food to black workers.
Another purely South African Yiddish coinage is the word ‘tryers’. Feldman includes in the anthology a three-act play called “The Tryers”. It is about Jewish immigrants coming to the “goldene medina” trying to earn their living “by trying this and trying that.”
‘Carbide Ash’ is another tragic story, describing the helplessness and decay of a once healthy and virile young Zulu man returning to his village in The Valley of a Thousand Hills. There, “the sun shone bright and warm” but digging for gold underground for many years has destroyed his lungs and his life, and he no longer has any connection with his family. The longest and most developed story in the anthology is Der Vayse Kafir (‘The White Nigger’). It is a powerful account of an Englishman who, disillusioned with the greed of the prospectors on the Rand, leaves the country after making and losing a fortune and finally finds peace in the hills of Swaziland. Here, he marries and has children with a Swazi woman. People who once admired his success come to regard him with contempt and hate, calling him by the pejorative term der vayse kafir, and he too, having lost all self esteem, adopts and lives by that name. He is between worlds, despised by whites and not accepted by the Swazis. He finds, too, that he has little affection for his own children and the plans he once had to educate and free them from oppression never materialize. Alcohol becomes his only solace. However, the story ends with a glimmer of hope as he visualizes that his favorite son, Tommy, might one day become a leader in the African National Congress and help free his people from poverty, injustice and oppression.
I hope one day to have Richard Feldman’s stories well translated into English and compiled in an anthology, called Black and White. It would be an important contribution to our historical archives and an invaluable incentive to further literary investigation.
Mona Berman, a veteran South African journalist and author, has contributed numerous articles and book reviews to Jewish Affairs over many years, as well as writing a regular column for the former SA Jewish Times. She holds four degrees and has authored four books, including Silence in the Fiction of Elie Wiesel (2001) and Irma Stern: a memoir with letters (2003).
NOTES
- From a Land Far Off, Jewish Publications – South Africa, 1987
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