(Reviewer: Marcia Leveson, Vol. 72, No. 1, Pesach 2017)
Jules Browde was unique, an irreplaceable asset to our society. Besides his formidable reputation as a lawyer – particularly as a fierce defender of human rights – he had an enormous vitality, empathy and curiosity about life. He related to everyone he met, living life to the full. He was also a great raconteur. However, if you expected this biography, written by his grandson, Daniel, to be simply a transcript of those anecdotes with which Jules regaled his listeners –hair-raising and hilarious stories of his exploits in the army and in appearances in court – you will find something different. A much more complex and fuller picture emerges. For those who wish to remember Jules in all his vividness, or want to get to know him better – the essence of the man, his spirit, his background, family, early life, army experience, legal work and interactions with his wife, Selma, his children and grandchildren – this remarkable work, enhanced with many photographs, brings him intensely to life in a way that the anecdotes alone could never do.
The first chapter is intriguing and atmospheric. In the dark, the young Daniel meets an enigmatic figure whose questions prompt him to confront the task that he has set himself – to write a memoir of what he calls the ‘relatively public life’ of is grandfather. Immediately a double level opens up – we see ‘the young storyteller’ grappling to explain and celebrate is grandfather, while at the same time observing and recording himself and acknowledging the challenge he had undertaken. This sets the scene for the the book unfolds – it is an unusual and arresting process.
At first the enterprise took the form of recording and transcribing Jules’s own anecdotes – and some Daniel wrote up from memory after interviewing his grandfather (affectionately called ‘Bronco’). But as he goes along, he also sets down the loving interactions they had, as well as his impressions formed through memories of family gatherings and individual conversations – placing Jules in his habitual surroundings and capturing Jules’s turn of phrase and his thoughts and emotions as he remembers and discusses his past.
It is a complex narrative with many strands. Besides the anecdotes there are the stories Jules tells of his life, his father, mother and siblings. Daniel has researched the lives of the ancestors, and records Jules’s interactions with his family, riends and his many colleagues. Because the project took so long, over a span of ten years, he had the time to preserve any snippets of conversation and observation in telling detail and with a novelistic eye. This gives it the ‘felt life’ texture hat could not have happened in any other way.
We have, for example, Jules’s habitual greeting to Daniel – ‘Hello laddie’; his place at the kitchen table with the skeleton of a crossword, half filled in’; his favorite chair in the corner of the lounge where he often sat and read and where much of the recording was done; immediate evocations of Jules’s study, of family outings, family games of chess, visits to Jules’s early haunts in Page Street, Yeoville (‘I used to play soccer in this garden almost ninety years ago,’ my grandfather said, with a smile that rippled across his lips and disappeared); and to the cemeteries where his parents and siblings lie.Cumulatively we see Jules from many angles over and above what he himself presents. And so, for me, the book has a richness and a depth which is quite masterly.
I am touched by the following passage: One morning I asked him why he thought his career had taken this particular direction….
‘That’s a good question,’ he said, and took a moment to ponder it. For the first time he told he would come back to me.A week later he handed me two pieces of foolscap paper, with his handwriting on both sides of each… he had listed three people whom he called ‘ethical inspiration’: 1) His father, who taught him by his own example ‘to treat people fairly and decently, irrespective of the colour of their skin’; 2) Colin Gluckman, later Colin Gillon, one of the early leaders of the Habonim youth movement in South Africa, who had introduced him at a very early age to Jewish thought and ethics; and 3) Selma, my grandmother…
‘Caring for others… has occupied most of her days, indeed even the hours when some might have expected her to be asleep. It is her example of service to others that was directly responsible for most of the worthwhile activities in which I became involved during the course of my career as an advocate’.
Another passage is equally revealing:
In the last few law sessions his stories took on new shapes. He told me the story of how he and some of his colleagues had formed the Bar’s first non-racial group of advocates, and how the members of this group had chosen to stay in Pritchard Street when all the other major legal groups moved north to Sandton. He told me how in 1998 Nelson Mandela, then the country’s president, asked him to lead a commission of inquiry into the administration of South African rugby. He recounted the story of the scaled down Truth and Reconciliation Commission he chaired at the Wits Medical School the following year.
And we have the intertwined stories that both Jules and Selma told from their different perspectives of how they met fell in love and married. Truly a loving, supportive and achieving couple.
Jules’s long life was very much connected to Johannesburg, and in recording it Daniel has also provided a record spanning the history of the place where he was so prominent a figure. Of a visit to the house and suburb where Jules grew up, he writes:
I thought about how I was being shown around these streets by someone who knew them before they were even tarred. It was a heavy pride I felt then, a melancholic pride. Some lives are lived in many places, most are lived in just one. His had been lived here, in this mining town. This was where he was born, grew up, went to school. His parents are both buried here. It is where he earned his keep and raised his family. It was some relief to think that whatever I wrote or didn’t write, history was already stamped into the stubborn material of the city.
To produce such an engaging and nuanced work was no simple task and Daniel had to prepare himself long and hard. He acknowledges all the support he had along the way including that from his family and his girlfriend, later his wife, Thenji. He has achieved an approach and a style that is easy and intimate – the perfect vehicle for what is in fact a very personal portrait of Jules, both in his public and his private persona. For me, Daniel’s choice to record the writing process in such detail was the right one. The laying bare of the record of his own coming to maturity both as man and writer provides a further dimension which intertwines with the portrait of Jules and enriches it. That is in itself an intricate and painstaking feat.
Jules Browde died at 97, a few weeks before the book went to print. I can only applaud what Daniel has accomplished and I predict that this memoir will be recognised as a splendid tribute and a major biographical feat.
The Relatively Public Life of Jules Browde by Daniel Browde, Jonathan Ball Publishers: Johannesburg & Cape Town, 2016
Dr Marcia Leveson, a long-serving member of the editorial board of Jewish Affairs, is a former Professor in the English Department at the University of the Witwatersrand. She has written extensively in the area of South African fiction and edited a number of anthologies of fiction and poetry.
