Toil and Trouble
Or:
How the World Has Mistreated Me
(Thus Far)
by David Dvorkin
A Redhead on the Dark Continent
The five Dvorkins emigrated to South Africa in 1947 on, as I remember, the Union Castle ship Stirling Castle.
(Yes, kids, in those days, people made such long trips on large ships, and except for the vomiting passengers during the first few days, it was a lot more fun than sitting cramped in an airliner being held up tens of thousands of feet above the ground by the power of baling wire, chewing gum, and magic spells.)
We arrived in Cape Town, and I wish very much that I could remember what that looked like. I think I remember the sight of Table Mountain, but I'm not sure if that's a real memory or something I've reconstructed from seeing the mountain from the city years later or from pictures of the beautiful bay. I assume the sky was blue and the sunlight was sparkling on the water. I assume most of the passengers were desperate to get onto something that wasn't moving constantly underfoot. I assume there were no girls in white summer dresses greeting us with bouquets of freshly picked flowers. At three and a half, I wouldn't have been interested in the girls, but I probably would have found the flowers eye catching.
Among the many things I don't remember and foolishly haven't asked older family members about is what our circumstances were when we arrived. I think we stayed with relatives of my mother's in Cape Town for a while. I don't know if my father had arranged a rabbinical position for himself in advance or if he started looking for one after we got there. I think such positions must have been fairly plentiful, though. A lot of people were emigrating to South Africa in those days, I think including a lot of Jews, so there must have been a large number of small congregations scattered all over the place in need of rabbis.*
We ended up in Uitenhage, a smalll town in the Cape Province. Such is the wonderfulness of the Wonderful World Wide Web - henceforth, the W4 - that this little dorp has its own Web site: Garden Town of the Eastern Cape(!). Sounds pretty nice, actually. I wish I remembered it.
It's impossible - for me, anyway - to transliterate Afrikaans pronunciation accurately, but you'll come fairly close to the correct pronunciation of the town's name if you say [purse lips] Eigthen [normal lips] haa kh [gutteral sound, clearing your throat of very sticky phlegm] uh. We learned from the other English South Africans to pronounce it Yootenhaig. The local Afrikaners probably cringed and cursed every time they heard that. But they did, after all, lose the Boer War.
We didn't stay in Uitenhage, the Garden Town, for very long. (We never stayed anywhere for very long.) We moved to Ficksburg, in the Orange Free State. (For a nice summary of these names and the related history, do the Wiki.)
Oh, my god, Ficksburg has a Web site! Is there any town in the world that doesn't? It sounds like a nice place. Is there any town in the world whose Web site doesn't make it sound like a nice place?
The only thing I remember about Ficksburg is that it was across the river from Basutoland (now Lesotho), an independent kingdom, so named because the majority of its citizens were Basutos, or members of the Basuto tribe, and that many Basutos worked in Ficksburg and were distinguishable by the colorful woolen blankets they wore in even the hottest weather. To an English immigrant, the idea of wearing wool to keep cool under the African summer sun was impossible to accept.
My parents hated Ficksburg even more than they hated all the other places we lived. It was tiny, dusty, hot, dreary, dingy, dead, dormant - in short, everything the town's Web site says it isn't. We left after six months.
And went back to the Cape Province, to Wellington. Which doesn't even have its own Web site! People, get with it! If Ficksburg can have its own official Web site, what the hell's the matter with you? Let me know when you get it up.
I have faint memories of Wellington as a pleasant place. Given its location, I think I'd enjoy visiting it nowadays.
It was one of the main places where the Hugenots settled back in, um, 16 or 17 something or thereabouts. Only the French names remained to show that ancestry. My best friend was a boy named Pierre Cilie. (I'm not sure about the spelling of the surname.) We pronounced it Peer Suhlee.
Soon enough, my parents grew dissatisfied with Wellington, as well. To be fair, they were also concerned about the future direction of the country. The less pleasant wing of Afrikanerdom had won the national election of 1948 and had set about creating the system generally known as Apartheid. (Elements of it had existed before, but scattershop and with considerable variation from one place to another.) Along with that went Boer ethnic triumphalism. Maybe they could undo the surrender to the British in 1902! Die Volk would be victorious, after all.
I have a curiosly vivid memory that may date from that 1948 election, or rather from the campaign preceding it. I was standing on the sidewalk, holding my mother's hand. She was dressed in a warm coat, and so was I. There were crowds of people around. We were all watching a long, open limousine driving slowly by. A kindly looking man with a grey beard, wearing a dapper khaki uniform, was in the back seat (sitting, according to my memory), waving at the crowd. My mother told me that was General Smuts, who was a good man whom we liked, and I should wave at him. I did so enthusiastically, jumping up and down and shouting hello, or something like that. He turned and looked at me and laughed and waved back. The other grownups were laughing, too. Assuming this is a real memory (gee, I hope it is!), that was the closest contact I've ever knowingly had with a famous historical figure.
One of my few memories of Wellington dates from 1952, the year we left. I was in my friend Peter** Preuss's house, and we were listening to the radio broadcast of the funeral of King George VI. There was dolorous music and the somber voice of the announcer: "And nooow, the coffin is being loooowered into the groooound . . . " Peter said, "It's really sad, isn't it?" I agreed.
And so we moved on. This time, we went to the United States. (Hint: we didn't stay.)
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This autobiography is guaranteed to be free of certifiable facts. It's strictly limited to vague memories and fanciful reconstructions.
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An odd kid. If he didn't like the way a book or comic ended, he would tear it up in fury and fling the pieces wildly around the room.
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