Another Year in Africa

At first Berka had avoided Hershl, but the latter persisted in his visits to Berka’s workshop, ignoring his deliberate rudeness. While Hershl spoke to him Berka hammered away at his last in silence. One day, however, when Hershl was speaking about the situation in Europe Berka broke in bitterly:

“What hope is there for humanity as a whole when on a personal level sons betray fathers and friends deceive friends?”

From then on the stone on Berka’s heart was lifted and contact was re-established between him and Hershl.

“I’m at home with the Boers,” he answered when Hershl taxed him with his withdrawal from the Jewish community. “They’re simple, open-hearted people, narrow but honest. You know where you are with them. If they call me a bloody Jew I give them a bloody nose. They don’t bear a grudge and neither do I. But with our Jews it’s different. They greet me with solemn faces and pretend nothing’s happened. But behind my back they whisper and they judge. They’ve made Raizel’s life a misery.”

The rhythm of life in First Avenue had been broken and Hershl mourned its destruction. He could not bear the aridity which had followed on Berka’s misfortunes. On Friday evenings Hershl sat alone on his veranda, waiting in vain for the play to begin. But the stage remained in darkness as though in sympathy with the tragedies being enacted on a larger scale in Europe.

Hershl felt out of tune with the world, guilty: amid chaos and destruction his own life ran smoothly. But at least it gave him strength to help others, especially Berka. Hershl drew him out of his private hell and talked to him of world affairs. There was plenty to talk about in those dark years of impending tragedy, nineteen thirty-eight and nineteen thirty-nine.

In China there was war, though the Japanese were retreating; in Spain, Franco was making a final thrust to the Mediterranean and the government forces were all but beaten; in Russia the mock trials and the real executions continued; in Palestine there were riots and massacres. And Chamberlain, that umbrella-carrying hypocrite, was running like an errand boy to Hitler with peace offerings. He reminded Hershl of Joel—he did not tell Berka this—with his moustache and his false smile. In the interests of “peace” he was sacrificing people and lands that were not his to dispose of. While Hitler made a triumphal entry into Austria, he wrote notes of protest. After the Anschluss nobody was safe. The Germans massed on the Czechoslovakian border and wherever Hitler went the persecution of Jews followed.

“If Chamberlain hopes to satisfy that voracious monster’s appetite,” Hershl told Berka, “with titbits of Austrians, Slavs, Czechs and Jews I, Hershl Singer, no great politician but not a fool either, can inform him that he is making a big mistake: the monster will swallow him up as well, umbrella and all.”

“And who will listen to Hershl Singer?” Berka asked, taking out the nails from between his lips. “Only Berka Feldman. And mainly because he’s a captive audience behind his last and in danger of swallowing nails if he argues.”

The whole world went deaf and blind while Jewish judges were thrown out of their jobs in Vienna; students forced out of universities by Storm troopers and Jews thrown into jail and deprived of their livelihood. Jewish merchants were made to stand outside their own shops, some of them the greatest and most famous in Vienna, with placards around their necks reading: “Do not buy from Jews.” Shops were daubed with stars of David and Hitler Youth offered protection by installing themselves in the shops and purloining the takings.

And names like Sachsenhausen, Dachau and Buchenwald were appearing in the newspapers. The atmosphere was heavy with foreboding.

Daily the queues outside the foreign consulates in Vienna grew longer and more desperate. The Swiss announced that they could not take in refugees without means of subsistence; other countries followed suit. And Jews could leave Austria and Germany only by impoverishing themselves. There was an average of a hundred suicides a day among Austrian Jews. Hershl understood but abhorred these suicides.

“Let them die fighting, protesting, not by their own hands,” he said to Berka.

“Hershl Singer sits behind his cash desk in Africa and lays down what the Jews in Austria ought or ought not to do,” Berka said. “What would you do if a gang of Greyshirts or Blackshirts burst through your doors one day, beat you up, smashed your shop to bits, then sent you off to a concentration camp in the Free State without letting Faigel know? Would you die fighting and protesting? How would you defend yourself? Pelt them with blintzes?”

One had only to read the daily papers to realise that Berka’s was not such a wild fantasy. The Malanites and the Greyshirts were competing with one another for the honour of being the best and sincerest anti-semites in the country. Hershl himself was prepared to give the prize to Wiechardt of the Greyshirts, but Malan himself was no mean Jew hater. He could get the consolation prize because he had given the Jews some consolation: At an election meeting early in 1938 Malan had said that for their own good the Jews should not press for increased immigration. They knew as well as he that as soon as Jews constituted more than four per cent of a population, the Jewish Question arose. He personally would not discriminate against the existing Jews in South Africa, but if more came in, he would not be able to give this assurance.

The less intrepid Jews in the community began to resent the refugees: their own security was being threatened. Hershl hated their self-interest but he understood their fears. Swastikas were appearing all over Johannesburg, synagogues were being defaced and Nazism was openly supported in certain quarters. The children from the German School, for example, had been given a holiday to celebrate Hitler’s victory in Austria. The Nazi salute had been taken and Heil Hitlers had punctuated the Principal’s speech. He prayed to God to bless the Fuehrer and took a personal pledge of loyalty to him.

Hershl recalled the talks which he had had with Berka and Dovid in the early thirties. Assimilation is the only answer to the Jewish question, Berka insisted. That’s what the German and Austrian Jews are unsuccessfully trying, Hershl argued; a Jewish state is the only solution. You’re both wrong, Dovid said in his dreamy fashion: Socialism is the answer. Only then will there be true brotherhood of men. National, religious and social differences will automatically fall away and men will live in peace.

By 1938 Hershl no longer knew the answer, and he and Berka no longer talked in grand generalities. The pressing reality of every day life had been more than they could cope with.