(Author: Marge Clouts, Vol. 74, No. 1, Pesach 2019)
My mother Sarah Leftwich (1898-1997) was a tireless and dedicated member of WIZO in Johannesburg from the early thirties onwards. She also lectured to many Zionist groups, wrote articles for the WIZO News and Views and was an active member of the Women’s Council. Her father, like so many other Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, was likewise a passionate Zionist and he and Sarah had many fervent discussions on the subject. Their hero was Theodor Herzl.
Sarah’s parents, Israel Pincus and Rebecca (Rivke) Hellmann first lived in Riga, Latvia, a dangerous proceeding without permission to settle permanently. They later moved to Talsen, Courland, where life was freer. In 1902, Israel immigrated to South Africa, settling in Brandfort in the then Orange River Colony, and in 1904 was finally able to send for his wife and six children (two more would be born in South Africa). He had been a tailor by trade, but was a most enterprising man, trying various ways of making a living.
What follows is a brief but poignant memoir by Sarah of her early years in Talsen and eventual departure for South Africa.
Sarah’s Memoir
“Where’s Sarah? Sarah is not here”, my mother cried in anguished tones. She looked round the cellar and made a swift count of her five other children standing among the agitated group of adult neighbours taking refuge with her. “I must look for her”, she said, and was up the steps before outstretched detaining hands could stop her.
Doors had been locked, windows shuttered, sticks and pepper in paper bags on tables were ready for defence against attackers – I had heard the dreaded word ‘Cossacks’. Tired of several days of confinement within the darkened house, I had slipped out of the kitchen door into the large empty yard open on one side to a distant hill, from where shots were being fired.I didn›t remember the sequence of events, but what I then witnessed, at the age of seven, remained sharply etched in my memory forever.
An old man fell to the ground with a cry of pain; his wife dragged him up the stairs. She put him on a bed, and I saw the deep wound in his thigh from which blood was gushing. Two Russian soldiers with rif les entered the bedroom from the front door. The old woman pointed to her wounded husband and held out her hands in entreaty. The soldiers stepped back into the dining-room, where they began jabbing at the furniture with their bayonets. They splintered the glass door of a bookcase and books tumbled out onto the f loor. I ran – through the bedroom, down the stairs, across the yard, and there, coming out of our own door, was my mother. I was bundled into the cellar.How long the frightened group huddled there I don’t know, but I understood that a warning had come that our house was on fire. We hurried out of the cellar and stood bewildered in the snow and frost-covered yard.
Then began a long and slow trudging through the empty wintry streets, my mother carrying the youngest child, Max, in her arms, the other five children clustering round her. We came to a big house where others had also taken refuge. An old bearded man met us with a Torah scroll in his arms, uttering comforting words of faith and courage.
Looking out of a window, I saw a group of soldiers dash up to a big house nearby and hurl something – it looked like a little bottle – at it. At once the house burst into a mass of f lames. Our place of shelter became unsafe, and our trudging began again, this time along a snow-covered country road, silent and lonely, till at last a farmhouse came into view. The few days there were like a picnic, eating country food at long tables with many men, women and children, and sleeping on straw on the floors.
The revolutionaries were suppressed and the fighting ceased. The pogrom feared by the Jews during the uprising had not taken place, and the refugees returned to Talsen in carts, through the streets of burnt-down and still burning houses.A further memory of my birthplace is of my standing on the charred remains of where our house had stood, and my mother instructing a workman where to dig. Out of the hole he dug, my mother lifted boxes filled with blackened gold jewellery and silver cutlery.
The next event in my young life was a train journey to my grandparents› house in Kovno.. Everything was so different from Talsen. The little town of Novoaleksandrovski was rather dreary, without Talsen›s beauties of nature and its higher standard of living: No boating on a lovely lake, no music in a park, no strawberry-picking in the woods, no rolling down grass-covered hills, few trees and f lowers and the houses were simple and poor. The language was Russian, not German, and the Yiddish spoken by my grandparents was full of unfamiliar words. Despite this, the few months that we stayed there were full of interest and excitement.
It was a peaceful interlude before the new excitement of a train journey to Riga and then to Libau, on a ship to London, a longer voyage to Cape Town, a train journey to Brandfort in the Orange Free State, and reunion with my father who had preceded his family ‘to Africa’ two years earlier.
Brandfort
‘To the older generation of Orthodox Jews from Russia, Eretz Yisroel was part of the warp and woof of life, unknown, remote, but woven into the very fabric of their thoughts and hopes”. Thus begins Sarah Leftwich’s ‘How Zionism Came to Our Free State Dorp’, published in The Zionist Record Annual of September 1956. Zionism, she continues, was “a perpetual dream”, and Russian Jews brought this outlook to South Africa, “reinforced during the eight brief years when Jewish periodicals reported and commented on Dr Herzl’s comings and goings, his meetings and negotiations with kings and statesmen, his Zionist capturing and alerting of communities both near and far from the scene of his physical presence….” Back then, she notes, organised Zionism as it then existed in the 1950s was entirely absent. There were “no Zionist societies, no Zionist meetings, no Zionist cultural gatherings, and no Zionist fund-raising functions”. And yet, she could not remember a time, even in very early childhood, when she did not know of Dr Herzl.
Zionism was something one lived through one’s reading, as Sarah goes on to elaborate:
Friday nights stand out as belonging pre-eminently to the printed word…. The Sabbath meal over, the dining-room became the whole family’s reading room. Round the large table covered with a white cloth, under the ornamental hanging paraffin lamp with its shining glass pendants and the Sabbath candles, parents and children, relaxed and pleasurably expectant, began to read. My father had stopped poring over the gemorah in his leisure time, and now read smaller volumes, mostly in Yiddish, that were ordered in batches from America – Jewish histories, and I remember isolated books: Spinoza, Heine’s prose writings….Before setting down to a book he would read the articles in American Yiddish weeklies….The elder children, self-consciously intellectual, read the English classical poets, essayists and novelists. My favourite reading was first the Young Israel page of the London Jewish Chronicle, and then with a sense of duty and pleasure mixed, Graetz’s History of the Jews…
Later, at about the time of the Balfour Declaration, most of the sixteen Jewish families in our village, children and grownups, assembled in the small synagogue to hear the first Zionist emissary I remember – Benzion Hersch. His impassioned oratory moved his audience deeply: ‘Feier un Flamm’ was the verdict on him.
The next Zionist speech in a Free State dorp that I heard soon afterwards was in English, by Mr A. M. Abrahams.1 It was
Sarah with her two South Africa-born siblings, Bella and Lionel, Brandfort circa 1918.
the first in a long chain of ‘Impressions of Israel’ to which South African audiences, avid for news and pictures of Palestine, have listened to throughout the years.
Reading, Teaching, Writing
My Yiddish-speaking mother did not learn to read English before she was nine, but reading very soon became her ‘chiefest joy’. She started taking out books from the Brandfort School library – books set in England, which presented little-understood ideas and conditions. George Eliot’s Adam Bede, she recorded later in her journal, “aroused the impression of great fear, even terror. The horror of the ‘fall’ of Hetty, for reasons not understood, created an indelible and frightening impression”. Her later voracious reading, she wrote, “led to my special desire for universal knowledge and my inclination for real literature”.
In 1917, Sarah spent a year in Bloemfontein at a Teachers Training College (there were very few careers open to women, and university for her was a longed-for but impossible dream) and then a long slog at teaching in cultural deserts like Jagersfontein, Ladybrand, Ficksburg, Zastron and Kroonstad. It was in Kroonstad that she met Irene Geffen, later to become the first female law graduate in South Africa, and they became lifelong friends.
Sarah Hellman shortly before her marriage, Johannesburg 1928
In 1921, Israel Helmann bought a house in Joel Road, Berea, Johannesburg, so that his wife and at least four members of their family could be together. My mother was then able to live a fuller life as a Zionist, a reader, and an aspiring writer. She frequented the Johannesburg Library, and there met a very friendly woman, Mrs Raie Jacobson, who just happened to have a very eligible bachelor brother, Sam Leftwich. Sarah and Sam duly met over bridge games at the Jacobson’s house. They married in January 1929. It was the year when the Great Depression began, and “frugal living became the norm”.
Domestic duties and bringing up her only child did not stop the f low of Sarah’s journalism. She published book reviews and many articles on Jewish, Zionist and literary subjects, mainly in the Zionist Record, while working for WIZO – endless meetings, fund-raising events, talks to WIZO groups in smaller towns, eventually taking her place in the Council. I grew up hearing names such as Anna Franks, Nettie Davidoff, Sylvia Nel, Sadie Fredman and Fanny Raphael among many others. My mother greatly valued the many friendships which this comradeship in work engendered.
Israel and Later Years
At last, in 1949, it became possible for Sarah to visit this place of passionate focus, and the subject of many of her talks and articles – Israel. Her purpose was threefold: she wanted to find her father’s grave – he had spent the last two years of
Mother and daughter, Tel Aviv, 1949
his life there, in Ramat Gan, dying in 1941 (this proved frustratingly impossible). She wanted to visit me on my kibbutz, Bet Keshet, and after her initial shock at our primitive conditions, engaged the few English speakers there in interesting discussions arising out of her searching questions. And of course, she longed to see for herself various WIZO projects and to experience Israel as fully as possible in the short time of two months that she was there.
Executive of the Women’s Zionist Council, 1956. Sarah Leftwich, Vice-President and Campaign Convener, is seated third from right, next to WJC President Inez Gordon.
I remember going with her to Ra’anana Immigrant Reception, her eager questioning of the WIZO workers there, and her speaking in German and Yiddish to some of the refugees. Many WIZO colleagues who had already made aliyah were most helpful and hospitable to her, making her stay so much more manageable and memorable. She returned with a new confidence to WIZO educational work, fundraising and many more informed and knowledgeable talks. She continued writing for WIZO’s News and Views and also for the newly founded Jewish Affairs, edited by her great friend Millie Levy.
In later years my parents were able to visit me, my husband and their three grandsons in London, and to enjoy several world cruises. They also visited Israel, where they were invited to meet the President, and were taken to see the many projects which all the WIZO fundraising had made possible. There is a hospital ward in Israel named in my mother’s honour.
After my father’s death in 1989, Sarah went to live in Our Parents’ Home, amongst people who valued her for her intellect and her achievements in the world of South African Judaism. She died there in 1997, aged 99.
Marge Clouts was born and educated in South Africa, going on to spend two and a half years in the newly established State of Israel. Following her return, she married the poet, Sydney Clouts, with whom she had three sons. After Sharpeville in March 1960, the couple moved to London, where they started a literary agency. Marge also taught English as a Foreign Language, English literature in various London colleges and Creative Writing in the Cotswolds. She has written many literary reviews for Jewish Renaissance and other publications.
NOTES
- Abraham Mark Abrahams, later President of the SA Zionist Federation and Principal of the Jewish Government School in Johannesburg.
