South African Yiddish Literature and the Problem of Apartheid

(Author: Astrid Starck¹, Vol. 65 #1, Pesach 2010. First published Jewish Affairs, Winter, 1995. Translated from the French by Karen-Anne Durbach)

Editor’s Note: Many of the stories discussed in this essay have been published in English translation, together with a detailed introduction to the history and development of South African Yiddish literature, in Sherman, J. (trans. and ed.) From a Land Far Off, Cape Town 1987.

In 1971, an anthology of writings entitled ‘In South Africa’ appeared in Buenos Aires². It forms the fiftieth volume of the series, ‘Models of Yiddish Literature’, published by YIVO, the Yiddish Research Institute in Argentina

Consisting of articles, extracts from novels, and poems written in South Africa, this anthology was compiled to offer a composite view of this unique body of Yiddish creativity. At the end of the volume is a selection of essays on both literary and sociopolitical topics by a variety of South African Yiddish writers and critics. This volume made accessible for the first time to the international Yiddish-reading public a representative sample of the range and variety of South African Yiddish writing. Indeed, the extracts published provide information on its origins and its evolution, on its different literary periods and on the individual authors and their work.³ However, they also emphasise the fact that these examples can only be seen as initial pointers to a far deeper study still awaiting investigation.

It is important to bear in mind that the South African Yiddish writers represented here do not regard the literature they have produced as a phenomenon unfolding in isolation. Rather we must re-situate it in its multilingual context and appreciate it in a comparative way.⁴ First, the influence of Eastern European Yiddish literature and its leading exponents, especially that of Yitskhok Leib Peretz, is central. In talking of Yiddish writing, too, we are discussing young literature, since its formative modern writers date only from the second half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, Yiddish was the language of Ashkenazi Jews–the Jews living in Western and Eastern Europe–and first developed in German-speaking areas, only later moving to Slavicspeaking areas. Spoken by thirteen million people before World War 2, Yiddish was irreparably diminished after the Holocaust.

The anthology under discussion here covers a period from 1904⁵ to 1971⁶ smile– effectively from the beginning to the end of Yiddish literary activity in South Africa, since 1904 was the year in which the first weekly Yiddish newspaper appeared in the Cape.⁷ These seven decades correspond to the different stages of international literary production in Yiddish, the most productive period of which was unquestionably the era between the two wars. Most of the texts collected here were first published in the Yiddish periodical press in Johannesburg before appearing in book form, either in Johannesburg or Cape Town for South Africa, or in Vilna or Warsaw for Europe.⁸ The writers represented were almost all born at the end of the nineteenth or at the beginning of the twentieth century. By virtue of its language, this anthology stands as a benchmark of Yiddish writing as world literature; by virtue of its thematic and geographical framework, it forms part of the multilingual literary impulse of South Africa.

The texts are grouped in chapters according to themes that reflect either the history of immigrant Jews who came to South Africa towards the end of the nineteenth century, fleeing the pogroms of Tsarist Russia, or reflect the history of their new country of refuge and its society. Generally speaking, most of these immigrants originally hailed from Lithuania. After World War 1 they developed in South Africa a lively Yiddish cultural life and literature, which, though linked to the literary and political developments in their home country, nevertheless found a particular and individualistic South African tone. There was a very active press most of the stories were first published in newspapers. The literature includes themes of great diversity, while its active theatre companies included in their repertoire plays originally written in Yiddish as well as Yiddish translations of classical or modern European works. To my knowledge there does not exist any intensive study on these different aspects; though known and appreciated in its time, South African Yiddish literature is hardly explored today.⁹

The writers themselves, only some of whom are listed in the most comprehensive modern dictionary of Yiddish authors,¹⁰ have contributed handsomely to the rise of Yiddish literature in South Africa; they bring to life characters of different class origins and very different social backgrounds: the Boers, the English, the Jews, the coloureds, the blacks. The chief Jewish characters are those who have just arrived in a strange world and who remember with or without nostalgia the Home Country and members of their family left behind, or those who, in an effort to find employment, struggle in the same daily misery as they did in the country they have just left; also presented are those who gradually succeeded in making a competent living, even though they remain outcasts in the wider social world they inhabit. The marginalization of the white man in this white society is caused either by his egalitarian attitude towards the black population – he acts fairly and nobly towards black workers,¹¹ behaviour regarded as undermining the hegemony of the white ruling class¹² – or as a result of his own lifestyle through marriage to, or life shared with, a black woman.¹³ Extensively dramatized is the marginalization imposed on the Jewish immigrants by the wider white population, which aims to exclude yet another category of human beings. A large percentage of South African Yiddish writings and poems have as their themes interracial contacts or tensions,¹⁴ relationships that the Yiddish writers, belonging themselves to an oppressed minority, knew in Europe and from which they were not completely sheltered in South Africa.¹⁵ The problems of this multiracial society are evoked in a long epic poem entitled Baym rand fun gold (1966), in which the evil institution of apartheid is attacked.¹⁶

Often the experience of the Home Country is juxtaposed against that of South Africa as a basic point of comparison, or as a striking parallel relevant to the time, or as a reflection of the resultant tragedy, for after 1945 the Jewish ‘Home Country’ was wiped out by the Nazis. In his article on ‘The Yiddish Literary Contribution of South Africa: Heritage and Influences’, David Fram, himself both a writer and a poet,¹⁷ despairs that one of the South African Yiddish novels that he cites, In Land fun gold un zunshayn (In the Land of Gold and Sunshine) by Jacob Mordechai Sherman¹⁸ reflects Lithuania more strongly than the warmth of South Africa.¹⁹ Several other writers dwell on their country of birth far more eagerly once they have left it.

My examination will focus on those writings found in the third section of the anthology under the title Tsvishn vays un shvarts (Between White and Black). In particular it emphasizes the writing of Rachmiel Feldman, author of the collection of short stories entitled Shvarts un vays (Black and White), first published in Warsaw in 1935 and re-issued in New York in 1957,²⁰ and on those of Nehemiah Levinsky, author of the anthology Der regn hot farshpetikt (The Rains Came Late), first published in Bloemfontein in 1959 but including earlier writings.²¹ Two stories of each author have been included in the anthology: Feldman’s Yan un piet and Ya, baas, and Levinsky’s Der regn hot farshpetikt and Gebitn dem nomen. In addition, I shall examine some of Feldman’s writings published in his own collection.

Within what literary framework can these stories be classified? Inspired by the naturalism of the 19th Century, they also give expression to the search for, or the loss of, identity so central to the literature of the beginning of the 20th Century. Their message is that of the Enlightenment: the right to education and equality among people that will allow each individual to experience a better life. In this respect they are at one with the Yiddish writing from Eastern Europe. Later, both in Europe and South Africa, a new theme is developed: the organization of the masses and the drive towards freedom from bondage and exploitation, either in the country or in the town. The tales under discussion here are built on the framework of the historical, social and racial situation of South Africa, one difficult for the ‘poor whites’,²² but inhuman for blacks. Their writers wanted to alert their Yiddish readers to the injustice and inequality so prevalent in South African society. Emphasis is placed on the insecure conditions under which their black protagonists exist all the time, and their total destitution when they live in the city where, totally isolated, they are subject to the whims of white people. The transition from the country to the town, from traditional to modern ways of life, the problems of assimilation or of marginalisation, are all explored. The weight of South African political and social institutions is depicted in a Kafkaesque manner, including both absurdity and tragedy, and sometimes even the grotesque.²³ 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 is what links these stories to the work of Peretz, for example, who describes the pathetic and miserable lives of small and poor people, subjected to a merciless destiny that leaves them no hope.

An Inhuman Reality

In his story Der regn hot farshpetikt (The Rains Came Late), the writer Nehemiah Levinsky, ‘Yiddish spokesman of the black man and of his life’,²⁴ describes a man called Joseph who loses his job because of the drought. Joseph’s Jewish employer, Solomon, who runs a little shop and owns a patch of land, dismisses him while waiting for the rains when, he promises, he will take him back. Solomon himself dreams of leaving his small shop in order to devote himself to farming his land.²⁵ For three months Joseph is unemployed. He is dying of hunger. One evening, aroused by the barking of a dog, he goes outside and finds the dog has killed a sheep next to his hut. He eats some of this dead sheep, but tries to dispose of the carcass so that he will not be accused of theft and of slaughter. He is stopped by a policeman, beaten, and taken to be jailed. En route, the policeman stops at the trader’s stall; the trader recognises his former employee, covered with blood. He knows that he is innocent, but he can do nothing for him. Ironically, that very night it starts to rain again.

The situation of the different characters is metaphorically illustrated by the rain. For Solomon, the trader, the rain is synonymous with a better future; for the policeman, it is simply foul weather in which he has to work: it increases his cruelty towards Joseph, whom he holds responsible for everything. For Joseph, finally, and for him alone, the events unfold in all their absurdity. Surely it is significant that this Joseph is given a first name that recalls Kafka’s victim? This moment of the coming of the rain, so long awaited, is now stripped of meaning: it simply defines the authoritarian behaviour to which Joseph is subjected. On to this natural occurrence, over which man has no control, is grafted human violence. Faced with these two situations, Joseph is powerless. Rain as the harbinger of discrimination against blacks is also emphasised in the story ‘Ja, Baas’. When farm workers ask to be paid for their labour in order to return home, their employer deducts the rainy days – when working was impossible – from their wages. Since even half a day of rain counts for a full day, the length of docked time is so high that by the end of the calculations, the labourers end up owing money to their employer. The police, to whom they turn for justice but who are in collusion with the white farmers, order them to return to work so that they can repay their debts; to prevent them from escaping, they are beaten. Is it a greater crime to break one’s contract, or to owe money to one’s master?²⁶

In these stories, where the omniscient narrator slides into the skin of his characters, the emphasis is placed primarily on the dehumanising world of work, either in the fields or in the mines, on the lonely world of men – the number of women is minimal and generally they are peripheral figures – and on the hostile and cruel universe of the whites, both in the town and in the country, who know nothing about the traditional world of the village. The characters of the tales have a multiple identity: they are simultaneously part of the traditional world and part of the modern world, and they live a see-saw existence between the two. Having come from the villages to labour on the farms, on the mines or as servants-of-all-work, they remain for longer or shorter periods earning money with which to support their families who have remained in the original rural areas, or to save enough for a dowry so that they can get married.²⁷ Every three years, both motives lead these men to leave home for several months, and then return. The time they spend in the working world is painful and often fatal: either a man falls ill and returns to his village to die there,²⁸ or is imprisoned or killed.²⁹

In ‘The Checked Jacket’, Jackson, the oldest son of his family, must work as a ‘kitchen boy’ in Johannesburg to replace his dead father as the breadwinner of his family. But he is imprisoned: in order to avoid humiliation in the eyes of her neighbours, a white woman accuses him unjustly. All this is a result of his ‘checked jacket’, a garment that he had just acquired and that people said suited him so well. Dos gekestlte rekl (The Checked Jacket) well illustrates Feldman’s writing technique: it has a dramatic intensity, it is short, and the description is graphic and suggestive. Aggressiveness or bald statement of fact is followed by sentimentality. An analysis of social issues is made through the reactions of the characters. Through the juxtaposition of telling clauses or phrases the author succeeds in creating critical tension. Every day, the ‘criminals’ are brought to court. In order to do this, it is necessary to stop the traffic: on Monday, the first day after the weekend, the procession is even more spectacular and the crowd, watching all these handcuffed people pass, whisper to each other with shivers of terror: ‘So many criminals? Others ‘think it is good that the law is so vigilant: that gives the citizens a feeling of security’. Among these prisoners is Jackson, who was preparing to leave the world of the whites permanently in order to go and ‘live as a man among men, as his father did and his father’s father’.

After his inexplicable arrest, the two worlds he inhabits collide: the white world immediately becomes instinct with the emanation of the ancestral spirits of his village which have come to punish him – but for what? Because his experience revolves around various levels of incomprehensible elements, it is consequently hostile. When Jackson is released after three years and his clothes are returned to him, the warders do not understand why he refuses to take his jacket back: ‘They do not know that in each check is hidden an evil spirit and that these spirits had played a terrible game with him.’³⁰

Like the rain in the previous tale, the jacket becomes a metaphor that allows different readings of the text. If in the beginning it situates Jackson directly within his surroundings, it quickly becomes fatal for him both in the white world and in his own. It serves as a vision at once anthropomorphic and surrealist, depending on whichever world one situates oneself; it illustrates the alienation and the foreignness of the individual against whom it discriminates blindly. One might respond to this story as the reverse of a myth: in effect, in myths, clothes allow for invisibility and allow the hero to escape from danger. Here, one is left with total loss of identity.

Origin as an Insuperable Force

Identity is made to define itself only according to the terms of the individual’s area of origin, a place that, mentioned repeatedly, is made the antithesis of the hostile world of work in the white world.³¹ This world is synonymous with hell. The workers, who seem to come from beyond, gather there with burntout expressions like shadows round a dead body.³² The narrative voice in ‘Masika the Night Watchman’ articulates this vision of two worlds, the latter different and perverted: ‘The world of the whites was for [Masika] an upside down world’³³ because the white world is the world of the night, where the black world is the world of the day. Masika understands nothing about the world of the whites. Moreover, while they are apparently at war (the story is set during World War 1), do they at least know why and for what they are fighting? Masika had lived for years among the whites, but their way of life interested him very little.’ In addition, although he understands what is said to him, Masika only speaks his native tongue, Zulu: the whites speak to each other in their language – either English or Afrikaans – but address him in Zulu, since they would be hostile to any attempt on the part of an African to speak a ‘white’ language. In dress, Masika has adopted a personal and harmonious symbiosis between traditional Zulu ornaments and European-style clothing: he wears wooden rings in his ears and an assortment of waistcoats with a shirt hanging over his trousers, always barefooted and never jacketed. Life with his family in the country is the opposite of his life in the city: there he finds harmony, slowness, discussion, and meaningful human relationships, all absent from the gold mine on which he earns his money. 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 in the present. The tribal world, the world of the village is, as noted, a world that one either leaves or to which one returns. One is always en route to it, one is never there.

In Samuel Leibowitz’s Mkize,³⁴ a young black man is impatient to seek work in the city, and his mother gives him last-minute advice before he arrives at the station after a long walk. The landscape he is so anxious to leave behind is barely mentioned. In Chaim Sacks’s Der boss un johanes (The Boss and Johannes)³⁵ Johannes returns home after long years spent toiling in the city, but after all those years he feels himself a stranger in the country. His entire family has disappeared. He returns to his ‘location’ where he feels at home and where he is going to practice his vocation as a pastor. In Fayvl Zygielboim’s Di uhamas,³⁶ Bennet returns to his village to encourage its inhabitants to rid themselves of their superstitions and come to work in town. In Feldman’s Der vayser kafer (The White Kaffir),³⁷ the hero, an aristocratic Englishman, forsakes his home country for Africa. After long travels and different trades he settles in Swaziland with his black bride. Descriptions of the landscape, the evocation of children and adults who sing and dance should give a depth to the reality of life. But these are too concise and too stereotypical. No one really ever again finds the country he has left; the one in which he exists from day to day, by contrast, is everpresent. The different black characters in these tales consequently live in a no-man’s land, perpetually searching for an identity.

The Displaced Person, or the Identity Questioned

The dissensions and divisions at the heart of a society predicated on a racist and antisemitic ideology are exposed through the names of the characters. One’s name is the ‘entrance ticket into social acceptance’.³⁸ ‘A name is the tiniest gift that a man possesses,’ says the narrator in ‘The boss and Johannes’.³⁹ This recognition is made the theme of Levinsky’s Gebitn dem nomen (Changed his Name)⁴⁰ in which two characters, otherwise totally sundered, find themselves united under the most ironic circumstances: a coloured man with an African name, and a Jew with an unmistakably Eastern European name are both forced into collision with the social formation because of these very surnames. Their destinies unfold in a parallel way. This story develops a theme that will recur in ‘The White Kaffir’ – that of a mixed marriage between a Jew and a Christian – and in Di kam alts eydes (The Comb as Witness)⁴¹ which deals with a coloured with a European name who loses in his rights. ‘Changed his Name’ is the story of Johannes, a small-time coloured hawker of fruit and vegetables who travels round to his customers’ houses and ekes out an uncertain livelihood. Because of his name, he collides head-on with the absurdity of the racial situation in South Africa. He would like his son to attend a school in order to get the necessary education to enable him to avoid his father’s miserable fate. The first school, in which his illiterate father wants to enrol him, refuses little Jimmy, because although the boy has a light skin, like his father, he bears the surname of his maternal family, an African name, Mokatlane. The second, a school for black children, advises the father against putting his son there: he would be exposed to the ridicule of his fellow students. Desperate, the father returns home. Some time later, Johannes speaks about his dilemma to one of his white customers, Evelyn, who advises him to put his son into a Catholic mission school, but the father does not want his son to change his religion. At the same time, Evelyn’s husband, a Jewish bank employee, has already changed his first name of ‘Chaim’ to ‘Kenneth’ in order to be treated with more respect at work and to have chances of promotion. Although she is practicing Catholic, Evelyn, the Aryan, has agreed to marry her husband on condition that their children are brought up as Catholics. Because of this, Kenneth has been rejected by his family. One lovely day, an overjoyed Johannes Mokatlane comes to see Evelyn and shows her a cutting from the Government Gazette that publishes announcements of official changes of name. She reads:

I, Johannes Mokatlane, coloured dealer in fruit and vegetables, apply to the Government to change my name Mokatlane to the name of my father Matthew, who was a white man. I wish to change my present name because it sounds like the name of a black man, for which reason I cannot enrol my children in a school for coloureds. Secondly, because of his light complexion, my son will not be accepted in a school for blacks.

Reading a little further on, Evelyn’s attention is attracted by another insert:

I, Kenneth (Chaim) Babentchinsky, a bank employee, wish to change my name to Bell, firstly because I do not belong to the Jewish community;

secondly, my wife is a Christian and my present name causes her unpleasantness.

An individual’s name can also be that which differentiates and sunders from each other children of the same parents. In Feldman’s ‘The Comb as Witness’, Edward Fraser is a young coloured who has been educated in a mission school, and then trained to be a carpenter. He has taken the name of his father, James Fraser, even though his brothers and sisters, all of whom are black, bear their mother’s name, Dinaka. Edward severs all ties with his mother and the rest of his family. Through his marriage to Martha, an educated coloured woman, he tries to integrate into the coloured society of Cape Town. Then he returns to Johannesburg where his brother, Tommy Dinaka, formerly a teacher but now a staunch trade unionist and member of the African National Congress, finds him again after several attempts.⁴² Edward is shocked, and receives his brother with great uneasiness, desperately anxious that his wife should never see them together. As a result of this meeting, however, and in consequence of the Population Registration Act of 1956, which demanded the exact racial classification of all South Africans, Edward is reclassified as black. His wife, horrified at the social degradation she now faces, takes their children and leaves him to return to Cape, because she refuses to accept for her children the appalling future reserved for blacks. Edward takes his case on appeal to the Race Classification Board, where the court passes a comb through his frizzy hair to prove that he is black. With the help of a lawyer, who produces the certificate of the legal marriage between his mother and an Englishman, Edward regains his status as a coloured. He immediately leaves Johannesburg for the Cape with the intention of finding his wife and family in order to tell them the good news, but she and his children have completely disappeared.

If the characters discussed up until now have ‘chosen’ their names, this does not eliminate the situation of some others who are burdened with a nickname that depersonalises or dehumanises them. This is the situation of a young child who comes to the city with his mother and to whom the pass-office official gives the name of ‘Tickey’, an old threepenny bit, the smallest denomination of South African coinage, explaining to the mother that in order to enter white society, every black person needs a suitable (white) name.⁴³ In his feverish condition, the child hears this name echo like the ticking of a clock mechanical, itself soulless but with the power to seal human destiny. In the same category a Zulu worker, whose first name is Johannes, has his identity erased by a taller fellow worker of the same name who stigmatizes him with the sobriquet ‘Sixpence’ because of his short stature.⁴⁴ Short Johannes cannot cope with the shame of this public insult from a fellow black; significantly, it hardly matters that the whites call him by that moniker, since he has no real interaction with them.

In the same way as the individual’s place of birth defines the process of self-identity, so an individual’s name reveals characteristics of the absurd and is made grotesque: it introduces a sharp division of self into the heart of the individual.

The Identity Rediscovered

If most of the stories in this anthology describe a situation of powerlessness and desperation, they also include a marked eschatological dimension. This dimension has three degrees: tragic, in which the story ends with the death or imprisonment of the main character; prospective, in which one of the children is destined to succeed in escaping his preordained social role; or eschatological, in which future generations will enjoy a better fate. Either willingly or unwillingly, this is linked to a crisis of conscience and emanates from the decision of the chief character to react to his seemingly unavoidable lot. Masika the night watchman is much undecided about what his attitude should be during the miners’ strike. But he is certain of one thing: he will not help the police against his own people. At the end, he finds himself in the front line of the protest and is killed by bullets. The tribal stick that he held in his hand becomes for the oppressors conclusive evidence of a bloody, violent and murderous attitude on the part the protestors.⁴⁵ Piet Ndali, a worker beyond reproach, has aroused the hatred of his racist boss, Hendrik Lasthausen, in consequence of his total innocence. He is finally destroyed by Lasthausen when the latter learns that he has joined the committee of the agricultural workers’ union.⁴⁶ Bennet is killed after he has walked into the road to protest against apartheid.⁴⁷ Piet is led to prison on Dingaan’s Day as a result of his protest against the pass system.⁴⁸ Time spent in prison is the shared fate of everyone who opposes unjust and discriminatory situations. Thus Edward Fraser, the coloured, initially only knows his black brother, Tommy, from press reports of his frequent imprisonments. Edward will end by clinging to his reactionary revised ideas about racial discrimination, and will lose his wife and his children in consequence.

Certain characters hope for a change as a result of their personal circumstances. They think that through education, their children will be able to rise in the social hierarchy. This is the situation of Johannes Mokatlane, who saves every cent to buy his son education, just as he had earlier saved every cent to buy the hand-cart from which he earns his living, only to encounter the rejections already noted.⁴⁹ In ‘The White Kaffir’, this idea is represented in an eschatological vision based on the idea of a saviour or a redeemer through whose instrumentality the liberation of the black people will occur. One can call it messianic. The ‘white kaffir’, who bears no other surname and who has for many years been outcast from society because he has married a Swazi woman, imagines in several recurring dreams the future of his youngest son Tommy, either as a miner, an agricultural worker, or a ‘boy’, all images that are totally unacceptable to him. Then he imagines him leading a large black protest, shaking off the yoke of the whites, just like the heroes of the liberation struggle. For Feldman, a politically committed writer, this text, placed at the end of his collection, can perhaps be regarded as his message. Moreover, since it is the longest story and involves a lengthy historical picture of South Africa presented through its principal character, it is the only tale that ends with a glimmer of hope.

This study has attempted to consider South African Yiddish literature as reflections, and within the perspective, of racial and political discrimination and its repercussions on social behaviour. Such an examination reveals a politically committed literature that, if it does not entirely avoid certain clichés – which are much more evident for women, but that is not our concern here – offers up an interesting manifestation of artistic creativity both on a literary level and on the level of ideas.

NOTES

1. At the time of writing this article, Astrid Starck was Assistant Dean in the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, University of Haute Alsace, France, where she taught and researched Yiddish literature.
2. Rozhansky, S. (ed.) Antologie: Dorem-afrikanish. Musterverk fun der yidisher literatur, Vol. 50. Buenos Aires, 1971
3. ‘Tsu der kharakteristik fun dorem-afrikanish’, Section 6 in Antologie, pp.296-357.
4. By examining it in relation to, for example, the novels written in English by SA writers who deal with inter-racial relationships and with the evils of apartheid, like Sara Gertrude Millin, William Plomer, Alan Paton, Laurens van der Post, Nadine Gordimer, Peter Abrahams, Es’kia Mphahlele. This is only a brief list.
5. Matuson, J., Dos yidishe lebn in afrike. Warsaw, 1904.
6. Zygielboim, F., Di uhamas. Tel-Aviv, 1971.
7. Der yidisher advokat, edited by David Goldblatt. This newspaper appeared until 1914.
8. It is not always easy to establish the date of the first appearance of a text because the publication date is not always given in the book itself.
9. Wolpe, D. ‘Yiddish loshn un vortshafung in dorem-Afrike’, Antologie, p.313.
10. Leksikon fun der nayer yiddisher literatur. 8 vols. New York, 1956.
11. See Tabatznik, M. ‘In a “pey-dey” in kaferita’, Antologie, pp.147-58. This is an extract from his largely autobiographical novel Kalman Bulan, 3 vols. Johannesburg, 1968-1971. It is published in an English Translation under the title ‘EatingHouse Payday’. See Editor’s Note. Mendel Tabatznik (18941975) was born in Kletsk, Byelorussia. He was trained as a teacher of Yiddish and directed plays. In 1927 he emigrated to South Africa, and became a leading figure in the Yiddish cultural life of Johannesburg.
12. See Plomer, W., Turbot Wolfe (125). In this novel, written in English, the chief character, who treats blacks as equals, attracts the hostility of white society.
13. In Turbot Wolfe, again, the deep love between a white man and black woman calls attention to the fundamental attitude of the whites for whom it can only be a short-lived distraction.
14. ‘Tsvishn vays un shvarts’, Section 3 in Antologie, pp.11692.
15. See Levinsky, N. ‘Gebitn dem nomen’, Antologie, 17586. In this story, the protagonist seeks to have his name changed because his Jewish surname prevents him from rising in the social hierarchy.
16. See Berger, N., ‘A shtot vakst’, extract from his epic poem Baym rand fun gold (Johannesburg, 1966), Antologie, pp.15862.
17. David Fram (1903-1988), one of the first South African Yiddish poets to achieve international recognition, was born in Lithuania and emigrated to South Africa in 1927. His first book of verse, Lider un poemes, was published in Vilna in 1931.
18. M. Sherman was born in Lithuania in 1885 and died in Johannesburg in 1958. In 1903 he immigrated to South Africa and is considered one of the founders of Yiddish literature in this country. His novel In land fun gold un zunshayn, the first novel in South African Yiddish writing, was published in Johannesburg in 1956.
19. Fram, D. ‘Yerushe un hashpoes in yidishn vort-tsushtayer fun dorem-afrike’, Antologie, p.319
20. Rachmiel (Richard) Feldman published Trayers, another anthology containing a play, several stories and some essays, in 1945. Feldman (1897-1968) was born in Lithuania but emigrated with his parents to South Africa in 1910 at the age of thirteen. He published in a wide variety of South African literary journals in both Yiddish and English. He became a prominent member of the South African Labour Party and served as Labour’s representative on the Transvaal Provincial Council for eleven years from 1943 to 1954. He translated some of the work of I.L. Peretz into English. His own major work was his volume of short stories, Shvarts un vays, first published in Warsaw in 1935, and republished in 1957 by the Central Yiddish Cultural Organisation (CYCO) in New York, with a dust cover designed by Irma Stern. With an entire section of new ‘race tales’ (as Feldman called them) added, this was the only volume of South African Yiddish stories ever to achieve a second edition. The basic theme of all Feldman’s work is the crucial problem of race relations in South Africa.
21. Levinsky, N. (1901-1957), Der regn hot farshpetikt, a volume of short stories published posthumously in Bloemfontein in 1959. After his university studies in Kovno in Lithuania, Levinsky emigrated to South Africa in 1921. Having settled in Bloemfontein, he and his brother, together with Woolf Levick, became the co-founders of the Bloemfontein Yiddish Cultural Circle. Levinsky’s writings, the first of which, ‘Der kund’, dates from 1938, first appeared in such early SA Yiddish journals as Faroys and Dorem-afrike, and were collected in book form after his death. The title story of this collection is included in Antologie, pp.124-33, and was published in English translation for the first time in this issue of Jewish Affairs.
22. In his story ‘Tiki’, Feldman evokes a society in which South Africa’s diverse population groups, sharing nothing but suffering in common, are brought together: ‘There were blacks of different tribal origins, and there were also Indians, “coloureds”, and some “poor whites”.’ See his anthology Shvarts un vays, p.77
23. For example, several stories stress the necessity, imposed by the white administration, for people to change the indigenous names. This cultural imperialism is investigated further later in my paper
24. See Wolpe, D., ‘A yidisher dertseyler vegn shvartsn mentshn un zany lebn’, Yontev-bleter, Jhb, May 1960.
25. This characteristic, largely absent from the Yiddish literature of Eastern Europe, is in line with the Zionist ideological dream of returning to the ancestral Land of Israel and to the tilling of the earth, work forbidden to Jews through many centuries.
26. Feldman, R., ‘Ya, baas’, Antologie, p.136.
27. Feldman, ‘Karbid-ash’, Shvarts un vays, p62. The father of a daughter in this tale demands that a young man give twenty-five oxen as a dowry immediately and on the spot.
28. Feldman, Karbid-ash.
29. Feldman, ‘Tiki’, Shvarts un vays, p76. In response to the uprising of white workers in Johannesburg in 1913, the police shoot at the crowd, in the process killing black people who happen to get in the way. Without doubt, this is what happened to Tickey’s father, classified ‘disappeared’ just at that turbulent time. Masika the night watchman, due to return to Zululand, is killed as he marches in a demonstration in support of a miners’ wage increase: see Feldman, ‘Masika der nakhtvekhter’, in Shvarts un vays, p34.
30. Feldman, ‘Dos gekestlte rekl,’ Shvarts un vays, pp.17-23.
31. This is also the theme developed by David Zhager in his poem, ‘Johannesburg’, Antologie, pp.122-24.
32. Feldman, Karbid-ash, p28.
33. Feldman, ‘Masika der nakhtvekhter’, pp27-28.
34. Leibowitz, S. (1912-1976), ‘Mkize’, Antologie, pp141-46. Leibowitz immigrated to South Africa in 1929, and began writing stories in Yiddish soon after, publishing locally in journals like Faroys from 1931 onwards. His considerable output was never assembled in book form, and must be sought in ephemeral South Africa publications.
35. Sacks, C. (1891-1981), ‘Der boss un johannes’, Antologie, pp. 163-74. Translated into English as ‘Sweets from Sixpence’. See Editor’s Note.
36. Zygielboim, F., Di uhamas a novel published in Tel Aviv in 1971. An extract from this novel, which constitutes the latest text, is found in Antologie, pp.187-92.
37. Feldman, ‘Der vayser kafer’, Shvarts un vays, pp.79-96.
38. This is how Heine spoke of conversion, which permitted Jews to enter those professions that would otherwise have been closed to them during the 19th Century.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]