My grandfather’s presence did not light up a room. He was rather stiff, entirely awkward in the presence of strangers, and usually showed little interest in the lives of those he had already met. He had never mastered the art of conversation and the habits of social etiquette.

Thinking back, I suspect he knew that others did not take to him, and he reacted brusquely, his defences up; a man anticipating social alienation and acting to produce it.

…

My grandmother Erna was a lot warmer, adoring in fact. He grimaced, she beamed. A woman eager to please, sometimes overly so, she radiated joy in the presence of her only son, the daughter-in-law she loved as a daughter, and four grandchildren.

…

We children pitied Erna. Her horizons were so limited, living with a man who felt alarm at the prospect of a big wide world out there. I suspect we were also a bit ashamed of him, the grandfather who we knew lived a life of lack.

…

Ordinary stories

Writer Njabulo Ndebele exhorts us South Africans to look beyond the flaming spectacles of our history – the political conflagrations, often violent, ignited by the brutality of apartheid – and to delve into the minutiae of ordinary lives. The small subplots of the everyday unfold in the crevices of the bigger drama, and in there many lives are possible. Modest and motley, these are the quieter stories of most of us – no less engaging or complex for being ordinary.

The same could be said about how South Africa’s Jewish history has been remembered and told. Typically, it’s spectacles of suffering and its redemption that loom large and dominate attention, in dramas of resilience and accomplishment against often formidable odds. Less visible are the marginals and the misfits, the little people who in the big scheme of things have no history, at least nothing of any apparent significance. All the more so if these lives tell stories of mediocrity or failure: the envious, diminished, shameful ordinary, rather than the stoically robust, incrementally triumphant, or tenaciously cheerful ordinary.

It’s mainly [my grandfather] Maurice’s life, entirely on the margins, that I’m intent on retrieving. This has puzzled others in my family: why him? they have asked, incredulously; he was so embittered, so much at odds with the world. It’s exactly these qualities that have drawn me to Maurice’s story: as the marks of a man who did not make what he had hoped of himself and who never recovered from the ignominy of that, acutely aware of the Jewish preoccupation with achievement. A man surely not unlike many other Jewish immigrants who have, for that reason, faded into historical insignificance.

The task is made difficult, however, by Maurice’s ephemeral trace: the lack of letters, diaries or other family memorabilia, and a minimal archival imprint. I have to make do with fragments. Where there is bulk, it may be stuffed with silence; where there is form, it sometimes has more shadow than light.                   

My sense of how he became the man he was takes shape intermittently then, and partly in counterpoint, contrasted and connected to others: his parents and grandparents, the few I can trace in his extended family, as well as many unrelated, unknown others who embarked on similar journeys from the East, into alien territory. Maurice’s parents, and then Maurice himself, come into view partly through the options they discounted, the choices that eluded them, the people they could not have become.          

Confronted by a citadel of power and privilege, the Eastern European Jews who arrived in South Africa from the late nine- teenth century took different routes in. Some stayed low and struggled to breathe in the strange colonial air. Others flourished, either playing proudly by the rules, or taking a more experimental approach, pushing boundaries and taking risks, as their prospects rose and fell. Some were so offended by the system they encountered that they devoted themselves to the fighting against it. These were variegated lives, never a homogenous mass. Maurice was just one among the ordinary, insignificant many, moving in and out of focus.

The myth of Jewish exceptionalism

All the Jews heading to South Africa did not slip into the country unnoticed. The impact of their immigration would be prominent, and decisive at times. In the national population at large, Jews were never more than a small minority (peaking at just short of five per cent of the White population), but one that was disproportionately conspicuous.

Initially, Jews made their presence felt most strongly at the economic frontier. Several became leading pioneers, among the country’s richest and most entrepreneurial. In the early days of industrialisation, with gold-mining in the driving seat, Jews were in the financial vanguard, pouring money in and taking even more out. Lionel Phillips, Otto Beit, Barney Barnato and Sammy Marks were among the mining magnates who helped set the course for the country’s industrial development, vexed as it was. Others made their mark as commercial innovators, perhaps none as formatively as Isidore Schlesinger, who set up early insurance and entertainment businesses – including the first radio and film studios – that dominated these sectors for decades. Gustav Ackerman and Morris Mauerberger were among those who would set up the first giant retail food enterprises, with many others following suit.

Jews also stood out in the professions, particularly medicine and law. By the late 1920s, ‘nearly forty percent of graduands and diplomates at the University of Witwatersrand were Jewish ... At the University of Cape Town, Jews often made up more than twenty percent of the graduating classes in arts, law and medicine.’8 At the time, Jews comprised a little over four per cent of the country’s White population at large. The trend towards professionalisation accelerated, so that by 1960 around twenty per cent of the economically active Jewish population were professionals. Around twenty-three per cent of doctors in general practice were Jewish; the proportion of specialists was higher, at around thirty-three per cent.10

For those of us looking back on that history, the disproportion of these accomplishments has made it discomforting to write the Jews into the wider story of South Africa from the late nineteenth century. It risks reanimating the familiar antisemitic tropes that circulated in the Western world in those times and that have never entirely disappeared. I’m thinking, for example, of the supposed Jewish conspiracy to seize control and steer the course of history in line with selfish Jewish interests. And then there’s one or other version of the alleged obsession with making money above all else, on the part of all Jews, be they lowly or more elevated, professional or not.

One response for the writer is to turn away, disconcerted and unsettled. Some evidence of that strategy lies, perhaps, in the relatively scant scholarly history of Jewish immigration to these parts. What there is has been written almost entirely by Jewish authors, and largely as an ethnic story written for and by insiders. And even then, there are chunks of that history that haven’t been opened up.

Another response has been a redemptive writing-back to antisemitic prejudices, affirming Jewish achievements to the fullest. Typically this is a triumphalist narrative of Jewish advance in this country: a series of rags-to-riches stories, over- coming adversity, attaining extraordinary successes – as if a characteristically Jewish thing. A myth of Jewish exceptionalism became a strongly held belief, a motivating tenet of communal identity.

This myth may have been comforting, but it is also inaccurate and misleading. Alongside the internally reassuring – if externally uncomfortable – feature of sometimes extraordinary Jewish attainment, the majority of the Jewish population remained middling to mediocre, neither more nor less successful than others who had put down roots here.

It must be possible to hold both facets of the immigration narrative in the frame. If anything, the ordinary mass makes the triumphant minority all the more striking, but not then as a characteristically or uniquely Jewish phenomenon. Some Jews did exceedingly well; most did not. The mix requires an explanation that extends beyond the fact of Jewishness.

'Darker Shade of Pale: Shtetl to Colony' is published by Jacana Media