Who Do You Think You Are?: Identity in a Fractured Society

By M. J. Rosenberg

This is at once a personal memoir and the story of what it is like to grow up and live alienated from the values of the society into which one was born. In the deeply fissured modern world, many now find themselves similarly in places where rival ideologies and interests are tearing their worlds apart. This is an account of how awareness of such a world reveals itself. In South Africa apartheid succeeded in enshrining its own particular values in law. But the roots of what had brought its monstrosity into being have never been confined to South Africa. They remain plain to see in the world today: intolerance, bigotry, fanaticism – xenophobia, racism, nationalism. 
In this memoir, Hitler’s installation as German Chancellor and the rise of Nazism leads directly to the author’s early sense of not belonging: a growth in awareness of the reasons for the feeling and acute sensibility to the rifts and fractures lying beneath the surface of a comfortable domestic life. It clarifies how personal beliefs may become diametrically opposed to those of the society to which one belongs by birth. So the question of identity quickly arises: ‘Where do I fit in? Who am I?’ It was this that many Whites asked themselves in apartheid South Africa, but it is also one that increasingly must be asked by many today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jan 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398438798

M. J. Rosenberg

M. J. Rosenberg was born in Johannesburg in 1933. He was educated in Johannesburg, Saxonwold Primary School, Parktown Boys High School, Witwatersrand University, BA English and Philosophy 1953, BSc Mathematics, Mathematical Statistics, Psychology, 1956. He married Greta Hilewitz in 1958 and emigrated to England 1959. They divorced in 1966 but she continued to be his closest friend. Married Dawn Jacobson. He got his PhD in Cybernetics from Brunel University in 1972. Rosenberg published The Cybernetics of Art – Reason and the Rainbow 1978. He now lives seven months of the year in Kensington, London and the remaining five months in Constantia in Cape Town.

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About the Author

M. J. Rosenberg was born in Johannesburg in 1933. He was educated in Johannesburg, Saxonwold Primary School and then Parktown Boys High School. He went to Witwatersrand University from where he completed his BA English and Philosophy in 1953, BSc Mathematics, Mathematical Statistics and Psychology in 1956. He married Greta Hilewitz in 1958 and emigrated to England in 1959. They divorced in 1966 but she continued to be his closest friend. He then married Dawn Jacobson. He got his PhD in Cybernetics from Brunel University in 1972. Rosenberg published The Cybernetics of Art – Reason and the Rainbow in 1978. He now lives seven months of the year in Kensington, London and the remaining five months in Constantia in Cape Town.

Dedication

For Dawn and in memory of Greta.

Copyright-Information ©

M. J. Rosenberg 2022

The right of M. J. Rosenberg to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398438781 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398438798 (ePub e-book)

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Early Childhood

It is at ten to one in the morning, the fourteenth of March 1933 in my parents’ bedroom in their house in Johannesburg that I am delivered by the family doctor, as had been my sister, Margaret, seven-and-a-half years before me; eight-and-a-quarter pounds, disagreeably yellow with infantile jaundice and with a cracked lower lip. Ten days before Franklin D. Roosevelt has been inaugurated as United States president, the Great Depression is in its fourth year. And it is six weeks since Hitler has been installed as German Chancellor. Steadily taking shape in childish awareness grows the fear of his and Nazism’s menace—culminating in War when I was six years old.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century my grandparents had emigrated from Europe to Cape Town in the British colony of the Cape of Good Hope—the Union of South Africa came into being only in 1910. My mother’s father was from Metz in Alsace-Lorraine, her mother from Vienna, my father’s father from Berlin and his mother from Hamburg; westernised, educated, middle-class, and largely secular. These characters could hardly have differed more greatly from those of the Ostjuden who had followed, some as much as two decades later. From the West City-dwellers, from the East inhabitants of its Schtetls. From the West beneficiaries of the secular education of their country’s city’s schools and gymnasiums, the others awaiting the local village school or the orthodoxies of the Yeshiva. Mixing easily, in as much as mixing occurred, with those people of their new country with similar middle-class backgrounds led many of the children of these earlier arrivals—of whom a great number had, like my parents, been born in southern Africa around the turn of the century—to make fun of the accents and imperfect English and disdain the often uncouth manners of the others; though, for the most part, the two groups, clannish, mingled little. Of course these children’s parents also spoke with accents, German or Austrian rather than Yiddish, and defined themselves as they were defined by social class.

Born, brought up and educated in Germany or Austria, having absorbed the mores and manners of their native world in the normal way, and now having come to inhabit this new, far-away, alien land, so unlike what they had known in Europe, naturally altered little the way they thought of themselves: Germans or Austrians. It was only much later—all too late for those who had remained in Europe—that this belief of being German or Austrian had turned out to have been an illusion all along. Not only were they not Germans or Austrians, but they had never been Germans or Austrians. They were something quite other from Germans or Austrians. Jews.

Why did people like my grandparents leave Germany, and why did they choose to come to Cape Town—at the time a city of a hundred and seventy thousand people? My father’s father had been sent as a young man by the firm for which he was working in Berlin. Others coming to southern Africa perhaps hoped for opportunity of betterment offered by a young country. Heading for an unknown foreign country in the eighteen-eighties and nineties was not to be lightly undertaken; the journey likely to be arduous and not easily reversed. What, I wondered, had happened to my great uncles and aunts, both the ones that left home and those that had stayed behind? One knows next to nothing. Of the many like my grandparents, reasonably prosperous, educated, not persecuted, not victims, what brought them to South Africa? Diamonds discovered in 1870 and gold in 1886 had opened beckoning opportunities, though my people had chosen to go, not to the diamonds in Kimberley nor the gold in Johannesburg, but to Cape Town. And if opportunity had been the draw for some, it had not been strong enough to persuade them all; many, my grandparents, and others like them, had left brothers and sisters behind. And what had drawn the women? Daughters of reasonably prosperous families would have been marriageable enough without emigrating, though South Africa’s surplus males may have seemed to offer a wider choice. But it was not South Africa’s surplus males that they married, but other Germans, people who, like them, had emigrated from Germany and who they had met not in Germany but in Southern Africa. Those who stayed behind, those who had survived to the 1930s and 40s, their children, they would have perished, with all the horrors the word conceals.

But now, getting on for two years after my birth, it must be about six-thirty in the morning, and my nanny is getting me out of bed. We go down to the kitchen in our dressing gowns; early-morning tea is a ritual Miss Driscoll has brought with her from England. ‘I like a nice cup of tea in the morning’, a song on a record she has given me to play on the wind-up gramophone in the nursery. It must be early, because, as I remember, the servants are not yet in the kitchen and it must be winter, because it is not yet properly light outside, and I am in my winter dressing gown. I drink my tea from a glass bottle—plastic undevised. After tea we go back upstairs. I am put into gaiters and a wide-brimmed grey, felt hat with a round crown. We set out for a walk around the streets of the suburb, I in my pushchair.

My nanny has come out to South Africa sometime after the First World War—my birth not fifteen years since that had ended and six before the second was to begin—perhaps to find work not available in England, perhaps in the hope of finding a husband and having children of her own (winning the ‘Irish Sweep’, a lottery based on a horse race, her never-absent hope). On our walk we stop along the way to join other English and Scottish nannies, also out walking their charges. Some, unable to afford the twenty-five-pound passage, brought out by some family to look after its children, a form of indentured labour. Margaret, my sister, had also had an English nanny, who had been brought out—not by my family—in this way. When she returned to England, my mother had kept in touch with her, and when she and I visited the country together in 1950, we visited her in Aylesbury, where she lived, now married and with a son, John, named, apparently, after me. On the way home from our walk, I am walking and singing loudly. These details I remember quite clearly.

My memory goes back to sometime before my second birthday, dated from visits to my grandmother, my father’s mother, an old lady dying of cancer— which I, naturally, did not know. She is seated in a leather armchair with a rug over her knees. She has a kindly face and smiles easily, although, from their photographs, her generation seem little given to smiling, of course studio photography at the time was no laughing matter. A photograph of my father, inscribed on the back, Erich 4 Jan 1903 (aged two years and four months) shows a serious infant, immaculately white-suited for the occasion, bearing the photographic ordeal with a look of stoical concentration. Visits to my grandmother bore me. A collection of carved wooden elephants could be arranged according to size; one has broken tusks and always looks as though it doesn’t belong with the others. But that is all there is for me to do, and I have arranged the elephants every visit. My grandmother died two or three weeks after my second birthday, which is how I can date my earliest memories.

Although born in a suburb called Yeoville, my family had moved three months after my birth to a larger house at fifty-four Cotswold Drive in the new, further-from-‘town’, more fashionable Saxonwold. In my memory, dating from two or three years after our move, many plots in the suburb still stand empty, streets lined with plane and jacaranda saplings. ‘Spec houses’, as was said, appear on vacant ground, ours among them. Running east west, the street’s house fronts face either north or south, ours north, equivalent of the northern hemisphere’s south, its rooms and garden’s layout still furnish the model for houses in novels and dreams. I could draw an accurate ground plan today. Downstairs an entrance hall, gives to a staircase at its end, a veranda on the right and a passage left from which branches the living room, the dining room, breakfast room, and, at the far end, the kitchen, pantry, and scullery. Windows flank a fireplace in the living room in which coal fires burn in winter, though in the dining room, an electric fire in the grate glows when lit with artificial coals. The breakfast room faces south and is correspondingly cold and rather dark; dark, teak table and chairs and sideboard add to the gloom. Upstairs my parents’ bedroom stands above the living room, my sisters above the breakfast room, like it cold, the room I share with my nanny above the dining room, the nursery above the kitchen and the single bathroom above the pantry. Apart from the living room fire and the seldom-used radiator in the dining room, the only other form of heating in the house is an electric radiator in my parents’ bedroom. Shaped like a television dish, it makes little impression Johannesburg’s five thousand seven hundred feet elevation’s winter cold.

Servants’ rooms and lavatory and shower open into the backyard. Rudimentary, as in most houses, the rooms are often barely big enough to accommodate an iron bedstead with a coir mattress, and possibly a tiny table or upturned packing case, and a chair. Clothes hang behind the door on a string suspended between two walls or are kept in a box under the bed. Regulations demand that the room’s window be above eye-level to prevent the occupant seeing out. Rooms have cement floors, often lack ceilings, and are always without heating. In the Highveld’s winter nights temperatures frequently fall below freezing. It was common for servants to die from carbon monoxide poisoning through taking coal braziers into their rooms. I don’t recall ever entering the servants’ rooms in our house in Cotswold Drive. Foreign places to be avoided, their strangeness, the alien smells, unguents of some kind that emanated from them provided a sense that they were outside my territory, places to which, as I realised at once, I had no right of entry. This made them the world of what Edward Said later called ‘the other’. The sense of separation, of apartness—apartheid being the Afrikaans translation—establishing itself in my consciousness as an unquestioned attribute of my world—fifteen years before the word had been articulated as a political policy. But of course the history of apartheid had begun long before the advent of the nationalist government. The Colour Bar Act of 1926 had been preceded by acts effectively barring ‘natives’ from advancement through apprenticeships and their exclusion from skilled work in general by which they might have bettered their status. Apartheid as a policy was itself not new. It did little more than set out to entrench in absolute terms, cement into place to prevent any possible change to what the status quo was already.

Three servants apart from my nanny: Irene the cook, Darus, the houseboy, and Peter the garden boy. Irene Mbebe had come to work for my family when I was a little over a year old, so in my memory she was already part of my world. (She remained until her death from a stroke in 1966.) She was short, her figure ordinary from the waist up, but with a huge, steatopygic bottom that extended like a ledge behind. On it I would stand without holding on. A natural cook, her ability instinctual. Shiloh, her home village near Queenstown in the Eastern Cape knew nothing of the extraordinary sophistication of what she produced. Very attached to her, as a three-year-old, I spent a lot of time talking to her in the kitchen. Later, when she fed me on my return from school, or, after my father’s death, if my mother were out and I was eating dinner alone, she would sit with me, and we would chat.

Johannesburg, city streets and smart shops was, in its way, still a mining town. Mine dumps, truncated pyramids of brilliant yellows and creams, ran the sixty-mile length of the gold reef, the south wind depositing layers of yellow dust on streets and cars in the town. Frequent earth tremors, strong enough occasionally to dislodge a picture from a wall, a reminder of blasting and rock falls deep beneath the city’s southern surroundings, small ads in the evening paper, well into the nineteen forties, reporting loss of a ‘blasting certificate’. Still as late as the fifties, black men, new from the country, Basutoland, as it was then, Lesotho, migrants to work on the mines, herded blindly through the streets, expressions bewildered and fearful of the new terrors of a loud and threatening, hitherto unknown city environment, ‘Basuto blankets’ wrapping their shoulders, confronting terror as they descended the mine shafts at a hundred feet a second.

But, at two, if you are lucky, the world does not threaten. It is fixed as you find it, permanent, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, not to be considered, without portents hinting at future alteration. Generally, especially for children, but for people more widely, customs, practices and standards of the time and place are the accepted norms; there are no others. Of course norms are not uniform, and some may chafe a little against them, but few who are fortunate enough to be generally comfortable with their lot look for radical change. Radical change calls for the invention of something new, the invention of new social norms, which so easily turn out to be a minefield of unacceptability.

In South Africa my parents would have been regarded as ‘liberal’. This meant that the servants’ rooms would have been provided with ceilings and some sort of carpet and such furniture as could be fitted into the tiny space; wages would have been a little higher than most, they would have been spoken to politely, and would, as far as possible, have been protected against the constantly threatening abuse of the police and against the many laws that bound them. Had it been offered, they would have voted for the abolition of the ‘pass laws’, freer movement of people and probably some sort of qualified franchise—though perhaps without any clear understanding of what the implications might be. Such liberal attitudes went along with being less bound generally by convention’s narrower mores, a rejection of bigotry, prudishness, or narrow-mindedness.

My world I accepted in the unquestioning way of a two-year-old. In fact, as I came quickly to see, my world was in fact two worlds. There was my world, the world of the Whites, the Europeans as they were known, and the world of the ‘Natives’, as the Blacks were called— ‘Europeans Only’, more explicitly, Slegs Vir Blankes, only for whites, emblazoned park and bus stop benches as I came to see when I had learned to read. Sandwiched between these extremes, as I later came to discover, were the ‘Coloureds’. They lived mainly in the Cape, people of mixed race or the descendants of slaves brought from Batavia by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century to do the work for which the local people lacked the skills. And there were also the ‘Asiatics’, descendants of indentured labourers brought from the sub-continent to work the sugar cane plantations in Natal, and therefore at that time still chiefly inhabiting that province where the cane grew. These groups enjoyed a status thought to be fittingly higher than the Natives and lower than the Europeans. Chinese coolies had also been brought (subsequently returned to China)—their long pigtails something my mother recalled from her childhood—to work on the gold mines. The small Chinese population was treated as Asiatic, while Japanese, of whom there can’t have been more than a handful, were honorary Europeans.

The Coloureds were in a way the most unfortunate group; their language was Afrikaans and most belonged to one of the Afrikaans Dutch Reformed Churches. Yet they enjoyed none of the Afrikaners’ privileges, not like the ‘Cape Malays’ as they were known, the comfort of the ancient religion of Islam, nor the sturdy anchor of being part of the indigenous population. A writer, Sarah Gertrude Milne, was the author of a book about them aptly entitled God’s Stepchildren. Did they feel properly South African at all they might have wondered, though certainly they belonged nowhere else? Perhaps surprisingly, this was unlike my parents who, though they belonged to a first generation to be born in Africa, harboured no equivocations about nationality: they were, unlike the previous generation that had come from and hankered after Europe, South Africans. For my parents, South Africa was their home, without attachments elsewhere.

Family

My own family made no religious observance of any kind. Neither my father nor his brothers nor his father had been given bar mitzvahs. My mother’s father had been in her word, ‘a Protestant’—which is to say, not a Catholic. Not that my mother had anything against Catholics, having adored the Catholic convent and its nuns where she had been at school. Most German Jews would, I believe, have celebrated only the most important Jewish festivals, my family none—though at Christmas we would have a tree decorated with glass baubles and tinsel and there would be Christmas presents. Only my father might have had any idea when or what even the more important Jewish festivals were. My mother, I think, never really thought of herself as Jewish at all and, indeed, it was only when I reached adulthood that I came fully to recognise that I, myself, was in fact a Jew. Not that the Ostjuden, for all their lack of western sophistication, were any less European than their German cousins. The very exoticism of the world from which they emerged made them, in a curious way, more rather than less European than the more western, German Jews.

One of the ten survivors of twelve children, my mother’s mother, Gisela, had come with two sisters, Ida and Wilma, and a brother, Dezhö in the 1890s from Vienna, their name Lazar. (The photograph is of one of the brothers for some reason dressed up in traditional Tyrolean costume. The white stockings were later to become a signature of Nazism.) Wilma, the eldest, a widow, had been born in Budapest and could speak Magyar. The family had lived in Hungary for many generations, though cannot have moved to Budapest until after 1850 when the prohibition on Jews living there was first lifted. A rather grand old woman, Wilma drifted in a miasma of mittel-European melancholy, and lamentation over her son’s death as a very young man from meningitis. Living in her later years at Johannesburg’s Langham Hotel, less flashy of the town’s two smart hotels— discreet, and smaller than the much bigger and showier Carlton. In its Edwardian heyday the hotel was evidently a noted rendezvous for the upper strata of the town’s ladies of easy virtue, mistresses of new-rich mining magnates. Respectability, along with ambassadors and royals came later. India’s first Agent General lived there and so did successive Chinese Consuls. During the War several royalties in exile had spent time there – Prince Paul and Princess Olga of Yugoslavia, and the Shah of Persia. In 1945 the former Aga Khan and his Begum stayed there, and, in her Edwardian prime, the famed Lily Langtry. Tyrone Power, Hollywood film idol of the post-war years, in 1947 attracted a siege of squealing teeny boppers.

Wilma, sailing into the dining room in the evenings, the band would break into a Strauss waltz. Eventually, she died in the hotel. A young man in the room next door reported that, at about one in the morning, he had heard her calling. Entering her room, which in those days ,obviously, she had not thought necessary to lock, she had said, ‘Please hold my hand, I think I’m going to die.’ He did as she asked, and she died before he could summon help, so allowing her to go peacefully.

Ida, my grandmother’s other, younger, sister in South Africa, was also a widow, her married name Sondheim. Her husband was a great uncle of Stephen Sondheim, the composer of several successful musicals that ran on London’s West End in the sixties. Deaf, as the batteries of her hearing aid ran down, ‘Spik a little louder’ would punctuate conversation. Two children, Walter, and Stella. Walter, a flyer in the Royal Flying Corp, RFC, the RAF’s forerunner, during the First World War, killed when his aircraft with its bomb load, such as it may have been, had crashed on take-off. Youngest of the family’s surviving ten children, Dezhö had been the family wit. As children, forbidden to speak at table until they were sixteen, my grandmother recalled Dezhö’s always managing to make one or other laugh, the miscreant sent from the room. Certainly my grandmother, like my mother, could laugh, dabbing at abundant tears that flowed from her very blue eyes.

In Cape Town, Dezhö started a factory making women’s shoes. Walter, his son, following his father in being amusing, would speak in soft, nasal tones, saying outrageous things, never laughing himself. Sent to America by his father to learn the shoe trade shortly before the war, when war broke out, he had joined the South African Navy through the South African Embassy in Washington and returned to South Africa in bell-bottoms and claiming to have had an affair with Rita Heyworth at the height of her fame for her rôle in the film Gilda. Knowing Wally, it could well have been true. Certainly, when he later took over his father’s shoe business, he re-named the women’s shoes it made Gilda.

Of the others who had remained in Vienna I know next to nothing. An amiably mad brother called Yulcsá was reputed once to have pulled a friend off the platform of a passing tram using the crook of his umbrella round his neck. The rest of the family, however, seems to have been passably sane, save for my grandmother’s grandmother who was said once to have thrown a flatiron at someone, thinking she was a spirit.

Of those who did not come to South Africa, a brother of my mother’s father had, I believe, ended up in San Diego, California. Of the rest, I know of none who might have emigrated to