Bookblog #44: PS to Jewish Studies



Colin Tatz, Peter Arnold, Gillian Heller, Worlds Apart: The re-migration of South African Jews (Rosenberg Publishing 2007)

My period of intensive study of things Jewish-historical has come to an end. Not that I think I know enough (would I ever think that about anything?), or that I've lost interest, but the immediate motive for the study was to gird my mental loins for some work on the weekend, and now that the work is done I can resume my higgledy-piggledy, not to say harum-scarum, approach to reading. Since my earlier post on Jewish reading I've revisited a number of books: the memoirs and poetry of Jacob G Rosenberg, whose name must now sadly be added to the list of great octo-plus-genarian writers to have died recently, St Inga's Reading the Holocaust and her essay 'Rebuilding Treblinka' in Agamemnon's Kiss (thanks for the reminder, Will), Will Eisner's and Art Spiegelman's comics, and a number of other bits and pieces. World's Apart is the only whole book on the topic I've read since My Father's Country.

A book of history/sociology on the Lithuanian and Latvian Jews -- Litvaks -- who migrated to South Africa around a hundred years ago and then more recently from South Africa to Australia or New Zealand might seem ultra specialised, and I probably wouldn't have read it had it not been lent to me by a friend whose family had followed that trajectory. The book turned out to be fascinating. Its story begins in the shtetls of eastern Europe, familiar to me from Isaac Bashevis Singer's stories and the tales of Chelm, the village of idiots, and reaches Sydney's leafy northern suburbs, by way of the fearful luxury of being White in pre-Apartheid and Apartheid South Africa. The authors, themselves members of the group they are studying, set out to identify the reasons for the exodus from South Africa, in particular the reason why so many people left in the late 80s, when there was no obvious threat to Jews, rather than some 30 years earlier when the elected government had explicit anti-Jewish policies. Unique among large scale migrations, this one was unhurried, uncoerced and un-desperate. (They were a kind of Boat People, Colin Tatz told a Sydney journalist, because a week or so after arrival they will have bought a boat; and when the journalist published the remark, among the letters of protest was one saying that the writer had only been able to afford a dinghy.) What the research found is not at all surprising, but the journey the book takes us on, looking at the situation of tight knit Jewish communities in Lithuania back then, in South Africa more recently and now in Australia and New Zealand, is elegantly executed. What might have been a dry statistical study is leavened with humour (as in the Boat People story), but also with sharpness of judgement (the hideous morality of being White, even marginally as the Jews were, under Apartheid is vividly evoked; New Zealand, that most tolerant of nations, is indicted for pervasive anti-semitism; and Australia doesn't exactly get off scot-free). Among the Litvak émigrés, the answer to the often asked question, 'When did you come here?' is a significant key to the reason for moving: earlier, it's likely to have been because collusion with Apartheid became intolerable; later because of dread of a bloodbath accompanying the change of regime; most recently because of perceived upsurge of crime, though the authors argue persuasively that the last reason may refer to deeper motivations to do with unease about living with a Black government.

So yes, it's a fairly specialist read, but one that holds sweetness as well as light for anyone with a connection to the subject.

Posted: Tue - November 25, 2008 at 08:47 AM           |

©