by Roger Cohen
My mother, fragrant in her floral dresses, always trim, desired a life as simple and colorful as her embroideries: Make Life a Garden, Friends the Flowers. She was tender. She was a perfectionist. Her South African childhood had been sun-filled, like the Cape watermelons, bright green as sugarcane, opening to yield their vermilion flesh; like the yellow Cape peaches, great firm golden orbs that crunched when bitten into.
She was born on Human Street in 1929. Human Street ran through Krugersdorp, a mining town near Johannesburg, where her father, Laurie Adler, was chief medical officer. Because she was born in June, she was called June. The name suited her. She was bright and full of laughter, small, just over five feet, with lovely pale skin perfect as a pearl, dark, thick bouncy curls, and cool hands. She liked to dance and sing. She was highly strung.
In London she could not have the jacaranda and the frangipani, the mimosa and the palms, the distant horizons and the warm breezes of her youth, but in our house on a hill, she tried to re-create some of that ease. Like those yellow peaches, unavailable in the Northern Hemisphere, she was not made to be lifted out of her environment. Her uprooting had been harsh: from privilege to the austerity of 1950s England, a nation spent by the war. That solid London house, with its familiar feel of the garden suburb, furnished some strand of continuity, a sanctuary. Because of this, she would never forgive herself for precipitating its loss.
June was the granddaughter of another Lithuanian immigrant, Isaac Michel, who had made good. Michel, like Morris Cohen, hailed from Šiauliai in northern Lithuania. They both left in 1896. My great-grandfather was one of the tens of thousands of Jews who streamed from the Pale of Settlement to South Africa between 1880 and 1914—a destination second only to the United States for Lithuanian Jews, or Litvaks. Michel had no formal education, could scarcely read or write, but he knew how to add and subtract. He could see business opportunities in gold-rush Johannesburg. Jews for once were on the right side of things: they were white. To be white was to be invested with automatic privilege. A large buffer against persecution existed: the blacks. Having a plentiful underclass of pariahs constituted protection for a people, the Jews, who were used to playing that role in Europe. Whatever qualms the blacks’ troubles might stir—and they did, for they held up a mirror—were weighed against the inversion of roles that afforded Jews newly ushered from the shtetl a fragile sense of security.
Michel worked in retail. He bought land when he could. He traded in stocks. He created South Africa’s first unit trusts, a form of investment fund. In 1927 he was one of three founders of the OK Bazaars, South Africa’s first large department store. With his pomaded hair, tailored pin-striped suits, and gleaming brogues, Michel grew into the role of tycoon, puffing on his C-to-C (Cape-to-Cairo) cigarettes.
The lavish parties at his sprawling Johannesburg home became legendary. Children—my grandmother Florence (“Flossie”) was the first of six—would gather for a Shabbat and be told to “eat up.” In time, grandchildren were similarly admonished. My mother was terrified. The property boasted a full-size billiard table of immaculate baize, a stream with a stone bridge, and a gardener known as Old Dad Tomsett who had been brought over from England and liked to amble around the two-acre garden with a shotgun: an English gardener for a shtetl-born Jew on his African manor! It was in this garden that my parents met in 1948. After Michel died in 1953, it would take forty-three years to wind up his will.
My mother was long gone by the time the estate was settled. In 1950, at the age of twenty-one, on graduation from Witwatersrand University, she had married my father, a young doctor of humbler background, wider experience, and sterner temperament.
My mother, June Adler, upon graduation from Witwatersrand University, June 1950
The girl born on Human Street married the boy born on Honey Street. It was love at first sight.
“I loved you after our first night out,” she would write to him many years later. “I worshipped you and our children at the brink of death and I’ll love you always, always and always.” It was, for her, a great love, great also in constancy, even when the marriage became agonizing, a love that did not die just because it came to coexist with a repressed fury that would explode with the suddenness of an African storm.
June went with my father to England in 1954, the last year of postwar food rationing, because he had won a two-year Nuffield Scholarship to pursue studies in immunology. She had had a miscarriage in 1953. Soon after reaching England, she was pregnant again. She was living with my father in a small apartment in Chalk Farm, putting money in the gas meter for hot water and coal in the stove. No black servant hovered to attend to her every whim. In the eighth month of the pregnancy, driving in Primrose Hill, Sydney and June had an auto accident. It propelled her out the door and onto the road. I was born soon after, a long and painful forceps delivery. June’s mother, seeing my misshapen head, pronounced herself certain I would be a dwarf, a conviction from which she would not be shaken for a long time. By late 1955 we were back in South Africa. A storm-ravaged sea voyage through the Bay of Biscay brought us home. June, the only passenger not seasick, with an infant to nurse, dined alone with the captain.
June and Sydney Cohen, my father, 1948, shortly after they met
So, through the skirted menace and the back-and-forth, I might have been born anywhere or not at all. As chance had it, I was born in London, sailed for South Africa as an infant, returned eighteen months later, grew up in England, and in time, after a long odyssey, became an American whose home is New York. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to tell stories. I was watchful, taking mental notes. Journalism was a natural progression. The stories I sought were the small ones that revealed large ones. I looked for history as reflected in a single psyche, the imprint of the past. I chose the profession of the onlooker always waiting to get inside—a closed room, a situation, a mind, or a soul—in order to uncover some truth. It was beautiful when that happened, a resolution.
I am not a religious Jew—I scarcely practice Judaism; but nor, I discovered, is Jewishness something you choose. Acceptance, or not, of the authority of the rabbis is immaterial. Jewishness is chosen for you—history demonstrates that. It is tenacious even in an English vacuum. An old story tells of the Jew who says to the hunchback, as they pass a synagogue, “I used to be a Jew,” and is told in response: “Yes, and I used to be a hunchback.”
My mother and me, shortly after my birth
At King Edward VII School in Johannesburg, classes started at 8:25 with prayers. The Jewish boys, including my uncle Bert and my father, were made to stand outside in the courtyard until 8:30. The most violently anti-Semitic kid was Robert Haynes. He was always on about the Jews. Bert asked Haynes why he hated the Jews so much. What had the Jews done wrong?
“When you are born,” said Haynes, “you Jew boys have your foreskins cut off. That is why your cock is different. And you keep this skin until your bar mitzvah, when you have a big feast and eat all the foreskins.” That’s what the Jews did wrong, and Haynes took it out on a scrawny Jewish boy called Mousy Simon—beat him up behind the bicycle shed and made him eat his feces.
The old blood libel, Haynes had imbibed it: Jews with horns, Jews with tails, goats and devils defiling Christian women. Stuff the foetor Judaicus, the stink of the Jew vermin, in Simon’s face!
What happened to Mousy Simon could always happen to you.
“Yid” was how I was taunted from time to time in my London high school. The settings change; the barriers, subtle or not, endure.
The pressure of assimilation: I recall sitting with my mother in an Italian restaurant in the upscale London neighborhood of St. John’s Wood circa 1970 and asking her, after she had pointed to a family in the opposite corner and said they were Jewish, why her voice dropped to a whisper when she said the J word. “I’m not whispering,” Mom said, and went on cutting up her spaghetti so it would fit snugly on a fork. That was before the storm returned, before the madness and the loss of the house on th
e hill, where we had been happy insofar as happiness can be built on false foundations.
My mother was whispering in that restaurant, in that subliminal, awkward, half-apologetic way of many Jews in England. To whisper is to conceal, which is a strain.
When a parent dies unhappy, there is something unresolved that keeps nagging. It is irrational to want to save my mother from her torment—and now I cannot anyway. Still, because of her, I have to go back. It took her death for me to realize the strength of her love and how, in the torment, I had loved her back. The void her absence left could be explained only by her refusal to stop believing in love, however compromised by frailty her expression of it was. She left such exhaustion and disarray behind her that after her cremation, nobody paid any attention to the fate of her ashes. They ended in some Dumpster, I suppose.
Doctors, including my father, diagnosed her mental illness as “endogenous”—that is, coming from within. Dr. Silvio Benaim of London’s Royal Free Hospital, in a letter of May 10, 1979, wrote: “June Cohen has suffered from a recurrent affective illness for the last two years. There is a history of a previous similar illness which occurred … in 1957 and which was treated with E.C.T.”—electroconvulsive therapy. He continued: “Mrs. Cohen is a capable and intelligent woman who has an excellent previous personality, works as a Magistrate, is happily married and has a good relationship with her children. There are no external stresses and I regard her illness as endogenous in type. At the height of her depression, Mrs. Cohen feels totally inefficient, disorganized, sluggish, withdrawn and tends to crawl into bed.”
In theory, then, the paralyzing depression, being endogenous, would have happened in any setting, under any circumstances. Happily married or not, enjoying good relations or not with her children (they were often strained), she would have crawled into bed. But of course it happened under specific circumstances. I wonder how Dr. Benaim came to write: There are no external stresses.
June’s first depression overtook her after she was uprooted, bounced back and forth between England and South Africa, set down at last in Mill Hill in the far north of London in 1957, pregnant with my sister, Jenny, in a blustery and gloomy and straitened nation, with a hardworking husband, and obliged to get on with life as best she could as she raised two infants without all the support she had known. It happened as she strained to fit in, to become part of an alien culture, to become English, to drop South Africa and its sunlit ease and its tight-knit Jewish community, to belong again. She wanted to help Sydney, her overriding goal always. And then, with his success in a foreign land assured, the depression returned with a vengeance, and the one anchor she had found, the house on the hill, was lost.
This was not supposed to happen. Immigrants, although that word was never uttered, we were bound to assimilate. The shtetl, pogroms, and penury had been left far behind. They were never mentioned, either. Our gaze was to be forward-looking. June, despite her suffering, made an immense effort to that end. She herself had been raised in a cocoon of new South African wealth so enveloping as to eliminate, almost overnight, the past. I was raised an English boy, as if England were my birthright and its preeminent faith, Christianity, my faith, if I had one at all. So, just as the Lithuanian past was forgotten, the South African past, with its vestiges of Jewish ritual, was to be forgotten in turn.
New opportunity is only one side of the immigrant story, its bright star. The other side, its black sun, is displacement and loss. In each generation on the move, members of my family have been unable to come to terms with the immense struggle involved in burying the past, losing an identity, and embracing a new life—as if the bipolarity from which several suffered were just that, a double existence attempting to bridge the unbridgeable.
The past was as silent as a village at the bottom of a dam. We had lapsed. The question that grew in me was: Into what?
Franz Kafka, in Letter to His Father, wrote: “You really had brought some traces of Judaism with you from the ghetto-like village community. It was not much and it dwindled a little more in the city and during your military service; but still, the impressions and memories of your youth did just about suffice for some sort of Jewish life.… Even in this there was still Judaism enough, but it was too little to be handed on to the child; it all dribbled away while you were passing it on.”
Dribbled away: Our Jewish past had been disappearing since Morris Cohen and Polly Soloveychik and Isaac Michel, Lithuanians all, set foot in South Africa around the turn of the twentieth century. It was a slow process, but it appeared inexorable. Nonetheless, in time I returned to what I was not given, a Jewish identity, because that, simply, is what I felt myself to be, a Jew. Behind that feeling lay an absence, the void behind the calm exterior of our lives. As Hans Meyerhoff has observed, “Previous generations knew much less about the past than we do, but perhaps felt a much greater sense of identity and continuity with it.” I also came to the conviction that the truth of the story of my mother, the girl from Human Street, was not endogenous but exogenous, at least in part. It was not merely a pharmacological issue; it was a psychological issue. It was tied to our odyssey, a Jewish odyssey of the twentieth century, and the tremendous pressure of wandering, adapting, pretending, silencing, and forgetting.
Truth gets displaced. A rheumatologist once told me of a patient who complained that she could not raise her arm above her shoulder. The pain was terrible, she said. Later he discovered that she was suffering because her younger sister had gone off with her lover. There was nothing wrong with her shoulder. But it was there that she had placed the pain.
My uncle Bert in Florence, 1944, “Captain Uccellino”
Before he reached Bellagio at war’s end, Captain Cohen was in Florence reconnoitering a site for a casualty clearing station. He found a disused abattoir that seemed suitable. As he was standing there, a bird landed on his shoulder. It did not leave him for five days. He became known as Captain Uccellino, or Captain Little Bird. Some women thought he was a saint. They asked him to bless them. He had forgotten that useful mnemonic—“Spectacles, testicles, wallet, cigar”—for the ports of call in making the sign of the cross. He sketched a rough approximation.
An American soldier approached him on the banks of the Arno. “Say, Captain,” he said. “You got a bird on your shoulder.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s been there for four days.”
“You don’t say. Mind if I take a picture?”
So there is a photograph of a young South African Jewish officer on the Arno’s banks with a bird on his shoulder in 1944. The watchful nightingale has flown onward. The water behind him is still. There is no wind that day. The sky is clear. From the church spire I can almost hear a bell chiming the half hours and the hours—a bell fading, not ceasing, as in Bellagio, where there is a clock on two faces of the tower, one facing the lake and one facing the town.
More than sixty years have gone by. Change comes slowly if at all to Italy. I eat trout at Silvio’s. I swim in the chilly lake where my uncle almost drowned beneath the snowcapped mountains. I gaze at the old two-faced clock tower, at the cypresses like green obelisks, at the oozing figs, and at the lazy fronds of the palms in this town set at the tipping point of Alpine chill into Mediterranean languor. Yes, the bird on your shoulder: it comes when least expected to affirm life’s miracles, beyond every suffering. Never, my mother liked to say, underestimate the power of hope. Life circles about, its patterns as intricate as the lake water’s, as impossible to predict as what a small Florentine bird might say about unlikely springs to come. It is time to retrace things, beginning here at the point where the wind divides.
CHAPTER 2
Bones in the Forest
The River Švėtė divides the town of Žagarė into two halves. They are called the “old” and the “new,” but in truth there is not much to distinguish them. The sagging timber homes of the shtetl stand on either bank, emptied of the Jews who built them. On the desolate market square is the green house where the Braude family liv
ed. In a yellow house, the Zagorskis ran a shoe store near the bustling barbershop of the Joffes. One or two prosperous families, the owners of the mill or the slaughterhouse, built in brick or stone rather than wood. Their status, so demonstrated, made no difference to their fate. To stay on in Žagarė was to die.
It is still and silent now in winter. Swift currents cut past patches of gray ice. The streets are empty. Snow imparts its hush. The town is a palimpsest, the present inscribed in too faint a hue to efface a past of which nobody speaks.
The past can be seen in sepia prints: the square filled with horses and wagons laden with flax or hides or maize, the stalls with their produce, the livestock corralled in small enclosures, the chandlers and blacksmiths, the tradesmen placing goods on scales passed from father to son, the merchants offering menorahs and silver goblets and kettles and sewing machines and outsize transistor radios. One can almost hear the tick-tock of old clocks, see the work of the tallith weavers. The hammer blows of small artisans and gravestone cutters reverberate in my mind. The murmurings of the teachers and Torah scribes, their sinuous argumentation with a familiar God, course down the narrow streets of a town once known as a center of Jewish learning and Kabbalah.
The last Jew in Žagarė, Isaac Mendelson, died a couple of months before my arrival in November 2011. So ended a presence that had begun in the sixteenth century. In 1897, three years after my grandmother’s birth, there were 5,443 Jews in Žagarė. Mendelson, a community of one, used to stand on the corner of the market square with his dachshund, Chipa. He would recall the times after the war when he was a goalkeeper for the local soccer team. Seldom did he talk about the catastrophe.
