A JOURNEY TO SOUTH AFRICA
Fein, Leonard
A JOURNEY TO SOUTH AFRICA LEONARD FEIN "One of these days, I will really have to confront the issue." These were the words of R, a successful man, a decent and thoughtful man, one of the many I...
...There is a sense of surprise in the report (although it is the occasion for a strong anti-discrimination editorial in the same edition of the paper...
...Each time, that expression has followed safely behind more forceful expressions from other quarters...
...After all, A (the male servant) is really quite primitive...
...There is no melting pot nor any doctrine of the melting pot to lure the South African Jew...
...The contrast is dramatic, and the consequence is striking...
...We talked, my Capetown friend and I, about Israel, to which South African Jewry is so utterly attached...
...he turns away and mumbles, "But I have no answer...
...Nowhere have I encountered such narrowness of vision amongst people otherwise so sophisticated...
...The point, instead, is that the American Jewish community lives in a nation that has always had an ambivalent view of particularistic sub-communities, that has preferred to perceive and to judge the individual on his merits, independent of his ethnic (or other group) background...
...Now, however, there are reports that the Begin government may move towards Black Africa...
...It is one thing to feel residual guilt that you benefit from a continuing injustice...
...it is a crude double standard, the product of Third World politics rather than of an enlightened consensus of nations...
...Perhaps it is because they are afraid to look...
...One hundred and twenty thousand Jews, perhaps just a hundred and ten thousand...
...I know, however, that the issue, say, of Soviet Jewry, or the issue of Cambodian hunger and starvation, or of Sakharov's banishment, or any of another half dozen issues which are normal parts of the conversation of informed people in other places are no part of South African conversation—not, at least, among the Jews with whom I visited...
...it is quite another to offer your sons to defend that injustice...
...Nor do I think it entirely coincidental that a community so insular and so insulated has failed to produce a significant literature, has failed to make a distinctive contribution to the Jewish culture or the Jewish scholarship of our time...
...The relationship between South Africa and Israel is a matter of profound importance to these Jews, who stilt see themselves as sojourners, their journey to the Land interrupted for a time, for a generation or two...
...Fear, and the dulling of moral sensibility that is an inevitable consequence of life in this place, in a place where the debate over what is right takes place within such narrow boundaries...
...Scarcely a Jewish family in South Africa does not have a close relative in Israel, and there are very many families whose fondest hope is that their children will make aliyah, will ascend to Israel...
...but they do no evil, sometimes they do a modest piece of good...
...Is that not also a cost...
...Yes, one gets used to it, but no, it never leaves the room...
...It is not the wall that the nations of the world, in their anger, have erected...
...In it, far larger obscenities are graphically detailed...
...I told him that I thought I had erred in coming, that by my visit I was encouraging my hosts to think South Africa a normal place, a place foreigners come to visit and not a place where madness reigns...
...A three hundred dollar increase in the per ounce price of gold means seven billion extra dollars of annual revenue to South Africa...
...On the contrary: They perceive that connection as a key element in their own security...
...Costs: There is a high wall around South Africa...
...One does not wish a bloodbath upon South Africa...
...Consider, for example...
...Who is liberal in South Africa...
...I turn to him, expectantly...
...Prime Minister Botha, much to the surprise of his followers, and the chagrin of some, has challenged white South Africa to sacrifice its selfishness, to accept both the pragmatic and the religious imperatives for reform...
...There is universal (so to speak) military training in South Africa...
...How can one shout "j'accuse" to such as these...
...My friend is the loser because he is caught...
...I did not meet the assimilated Jews, the marginal elements of the community...
...It is known that the fate of South African Jewry weighed heavily in Israel's decision, but the decision was nonetheless about to be taken...
...I have even generated a socio-geographic hypothesis: Perhaps people who live on the shores of great oceans, who look outward to the waters and to the world, are more prone to a liberality of the spirit than those who are landlocked...
...it was heated and candid...
...Why bog down in this morass, why claim it as our own, why persist in a place where circumstances both invite and require Jews to be, first and always, white...
...My traveling companion on the flight that morning was to be my host for the rest of the day, and he had arranged for his driver to meet us at the airport...
...What more do we ask of ourselves...
...The words might as easily have been emblazoned on the banner of South African Jewry...
...Nor is there the gap, so familiar here, between those whose Jewish commitment is expressed philanthropically and those whose commitment is expressed culturally...
...But a book called Soweto Speaks is easily available...
...What more can be asked of them...
...In Montreal, one is either French or English, and language, schooling, religion all follow therefrom...
...I had delivered the keynote address at the opening of the Congress, and perhaps it was thought I might offer some fresh insight on what is, in fact, a perennial debate...
...I do not remember the text or the sense of the resolution that was finally adopted...
...I recall vividly my last visit, in 1972...
...Not until there is a lull in the conversation, and I turn for a moment's private interchange to the man on my right: But how, I ask, do you live with the hostels...
...In the meantime, there is a sale to get to, a play, a holiday to take...
...One of these days, I will really have to confront the issues...
...Assimilation is a possibility, but it takes effort...
...Nor do I think any of my friends in South Africa would have been surprised, or even hurt...
...Both communities are currently in transition...
...Maybe we will be lucky...
...We know, still, what is right...
...More familiar, surely, than the lavish Yiddishkeit of the community, which is matched on our continent only by the Jewish community of Montreal...
...But most of all, what the Jews of South Africa practice is a politics of caution...
...There, the public school system has no proud history as the site for societal integration— on the contrary—and fully one-third of South Africa's Jewish children attend day schools...
...I think it is...
...There is doubt as to the extent of the change the system as it is now structured can accommodate...
...But the reference to "the Southern parts of Africa" is a clear reminder that the government still intends a white South Africa, linked in some yet-to-be-determined fashion with the ten black homelands-become-states...
...According to that doctrine, all black South Africans are assigned one of ten "homelands," according to their tribal background...
...Voting "Prog" is good for the conscience...
...It is hard to speak of costs in Capetown, a city that combines spectacular beauty and an atmosphere of seductive softness...
...If Soweto were to be made genuinely habitable (electrification is yet to come, and the need for more and better housing is urgent, and the schools are still hopelessly inadequate, and the hospital is overcrowded, and crime is a terrible problem, the poor scavenging on the poor), would it not attract still new hundreds of thousands of "illegals...
...In the closing days of the Rabin government—not very long ago—there was a lively prospect that Israel, for raisons d'etat, would choose to downgrade, perhaps sever, its diplo- ] matic ties to South Africa...
...The Jews of South Africa are, with respect to the large issues that confront their nation, a passive people...
...My wife would know better," he says, "but I am quite sure that there is never any political discussion...
...it is quite another to offer your sons to defend that injustice...
...I met the accountants and the attorneys, the physicians and the manufacturers, the rabbis and the teachers who care the most, who are in Jewish terms the most sophisticated as well as the most committed...
...such a waste...
...For years, organized Jewry in South Africa has debated whether the Jewish community, as a community, ought to speak out decisively against the evils of apartheid...
...A familiar chapter in the chronicle of Jewish energy and enterprise, of Jewish mobility...
...Nothing I had read or heard of apartheid had adequately prepared me for its grotesque and ubiquitous reality...
...The Nationalist assures me that the party will support the Prime Minister in his proposed reforms...
...But judgment is expected, it is invited...
...Talking about these things, I suggest, idly, that perhaps it is my friend's task—he is, after all, a leader in his community—to help wind down the affairs of the community, to focus all his effort on aliyah, on immigration to Israel...
...I never heard it referred to in any other way...
...And I remember, most vividly, that when the Executive Committee of the Board asked me to sign a statement indicating that my remark had been quoted out of context—"just in case"—I signed...
...But a stranger, too, has reason to be cautious...
...And I worried, and worry, that I was too kind, that my good manners might be misunderstood as an endorsement...
...It is not enough to recall the degree to which the Soweto riots of 1976 remain a watershed event for all South Africans...
...Good people, bright and talented and willing people...
...My problem is not that I do not wish to give offense...
...In America, we boast that our allocations to Jewish education have grown to 23 percent of all local allocations...
...And I know that either way, my friend is a loser...
...Is China less oppressive...
...They are questions with which a considerable number—not all—of South Africa's Jews learn to live, questions they put to themselves when Steve Biko was killed— murdered—questions their children put to them before going off to the army, questions expected, in some version, of a visitor...
...These were the words of R, a successful man, a decent and thoughtful man, one of the many I met during my brief (eight day) visit to South Africa in mid-February, one of those I now count as friends...
...That, of course, is a point that is often made by those who cannot afford to look at the South African reality directly—and no one who lives there, and has a soul, can afford to look directly...
...the Progressives (both Jews) are a bit less confident of the future, but the future they propose is not, in substance, very different from the one the others describe...
...it is obviously very sensitive...
...Oh yes, there are easy and not-so-easy rationalizations...
...We must expand our day schools, train more teachers, heighten Jewish identity...
...In the South African context, a liberal is one who believes that the urban blacks—the millions of blacks who have been brought to white areas to work the mines or to work the houses or to work the many thousands of jobs a booming economy generates—must somehow be given the right to self-expression where they are, and not merely as expatriate citizens of "homelands" they have never seen and do not wish to see...
...Yes, it seems to me that we here in America mean well, and that is not nearly so clear in South Africa...
...I wonder how seriously it will be taken, not by the authorities, who will make their own kind of reckoning, but by my friends...
...Is that a measure of things, of costs...
...each has his own bright analysis, his own detailed scenario for change...
...Some days later, the Congress of the Jewish Board of Deputies, the central organization of South African Jewry, debated its position on what is euphemistically called "Public Relations...
...But first, my friend had to find the dispatcher to inquire whether blacks are allowed on the airport bus...
...It is not enough to say that half the news in the daily papers is invariably connected to The Problem...
...Here in the States, our communal fund raising effort (for local rather than overseas needs) focuses most heavily on the welfare of individual Jews...
...I have felt it, felt and seen the differences since 1972, when I first visited this land...
...Is Saudi Arabia...
...A liberal in South Africa is opposed, radically opposed, to gratuitous discrimination, and is in favor of a more equitable program for separate development...
...This is the doctrine of separate development, now called "multinationalism," and it is within the parameters of that doctrine that the government has begun to move towards greater fairness, has proposed a more generous setting of the homeland boundaries, has revised or indicated its readiness to revise a dozen of the most noxious discriminatory laws...
...If this is a society racked by doubt and torn by guilt, or if this is a government scarred-by crudeness and insensitivity, you would not know it from the table talk...
...The brows of white South Africans are not furrowed by the large questions of South African history and destiny...
...In shul on Sabbath eve, one finds the doyens of the community, and at communal functions the Birkat Hamazon (grace after meals) is recited with easy skill...
...Among the Jews of South Africa, those rewards are considerable...
...We live our lives, said Keynes, in the short run...
...I lunched with "them" one day, with five members of Parliament, representing all the major parties...
...Most of all, the official doctrine which holds that South Africa will never be a unitary state with universal franchise remains firmly in place...
...I ask whether the scenarios we have been discussing are more than scenarios, more than sterile intellectual exercises, whether they actually describe a plausible reality...
...Costs...
...An elegant table, conversation most thoughtful...
...Will it surprise my friends...
...In 1972, it was forbidden for^ black police officer to arrest a white criminal, or, for that matter, for any black person to be in a position of authority over any white person...
...The debate was closed to the press...
...We still depend heavily on our protective coloration...
...more established voices counseled caution...
...They say about the Afrikaners—a majority of South Africa's whites are Afrikaners, and they control the nation's political life—that they are a bluntly honest people...
...Given the context of my visit—I had come to help launch the United Communal Fund campaign—my sense of South African Jewry is necessarily biased...
...For us, the rise in the price of gold is an annoying reminder of, the dollar's weakness...
...Even among liberal white South Africans, there is little support for fundamental change...
...on the allocation of land and wealth to the homelands...
...I had asked my host, one restful afternoon at his home, whether he ever talks about The Problem with his two servants...
...The Jews are I apprehensive...
...a "Nat" government is good for everything else, for security, for the economy, for order...
...Against the distant risks and the abstract price, there are the day's rewards...
...No, he says, but we need something to hang on to...
...There it is the families who are most active in the community's philanthropic endeavor who are most likely to send their children to day school...
...But they are not my questions alone...
...Three percent of the white population—and 21 percent of the physicians, 11 percent of the accountants, 12 percent of the teachers...
...The risks they run by living where they live are distant risks, and the price they pay is an abstract price...
...And what I said was that we are enjoined to observe two commandments, to choose life and to pursue justice, and that the dilemma—tragedy, perhaps—of South African Jewry is that it is not possible simultaneously to observe both...
...For what it might be worth, I added, I had once in a different context observed (during the New York City school strike of 1968) that Jews are not white...
...It is still a surprise that black resentment runs deep...
...No such report could have been published, would have been published, was published, until very recently...
...A Jew in South Africa...
...Not long after my departure, a government commission appointed to study the Soweto riots of 1976 lays the blame—in part—on racial injustice...
...Is it now virtually certain that expectations, now whetted (particularly by the recent election results in Zimbabwe), will expand a dozen times faster than the government's capacity to move towards decency...
...Many of the conversations in which I took part—about Israel, about fund raising—might as easily have taken place in Chicago or San Francisco...
...the children have not done well in school this week, and the car is acting up...
...We are Jews, and have our own agenda, our own needs and our own commitments...
...they are, in no small measure, its working motto...
...I sought counsel and comfort then from the Jewish community's leading champion of social change, a man widely perceived as the steady voice of the communal conscience...
...And if he is not, there is sorrow...
...they are made by those who have a foot on the ladder, and want to climb higher, faster—and cannot...
...The one-man, one-vote notion which is so axiomatic in Western democracies seems to them misplaced in the context of a nation where four million whites govern and some eighteen million blacks are kept impotent...
...Then" is still a long way away, longer still because of the current economic boom in South Africa...
...We all do, in our various ways...
...That is not easy...
...By mush, and by contradictions...
...You cannot imagine," he said, "what a relief it is to have an American lecture us about his community rather than about our own...
...There, the caution of the community is about other things...
...Not that we are black...
...What I asked of one South African Jew, in Capetown, is that he consider more carefully the costs of his life in that place...
...there is a modest but steady outflow, to Israel, to the States, elsewhere, but there is also a steady inflow from Israel, in that maddening game of musical countries the Jews persist in playing...
...Who are these others, they ask, who cast stones at us...
...The self-willed isolation is stunting...
...It is a wall of South Africa's making, and it exists in spite of all the subscriptions to Time magazine and the trips abroad and the visits from foreigners...
...We are still heirs to that collective shyness which led so many of us, a generation back, to insure that our Hebrew School texts were turned to hide the writing as we went to and from school on public transportation...
...He is a liberal...
...Here, amidst these lovely people...
...In many ways, they resemble their counterparts in this country—successful, energetic, devoted, wonderfully caring people...
...If it were not blacks in Soweto and whites in Johannesburg, if it were merely the poor in the one and the affluent in the other, as it is in so many, so very many other places, would the world curse South Africa as it does, or would it shrug and see there merely another Cairo, another Calcutta, another South Bronx...
...They are the passive beneficiaries of a rotten system, and its passive opponents...
...It is sufficient to note that it is one thing to feel residual guilt that you benefit from a continuing injustice...
...Is Soweto really worse than the shanty towns that surround almost all the major cities of Africa and Asia, that seem to be the necessary consequence of urbanization...
...in it, opposition to the regime—short of advocacy of revolution—is eloquently expressed...
...Playboy is forbidden here...
...Yet he does, of course...
...Such change as is endorsed deals with what is called "petty" apartheid, the system of essentially gratuitous discrimination (separate drinking fountains, separate toilets, separate most things), and with the definition of grand apartheid, the doctrine of separate development which is at the heart of the government's policy...
...There were, however, two pervasive differences...
...If he is, there is danger...
...When the Prime Minister proposes to the members of his party that "God is not only the God of the White people of South Africa but the God of all the peoples living in the Southern parts of Africa," those who in the past have watched in sorrow as Christianity has been employed to justify apartheid have cause to rejoice...
...today, the steam rooms and showers...
...The South African community is part of a nation where the group rather than the individual is the key building block of society...
...They do not have the need, as we here do, to apologize for the connection between the two nations...
...The similarity is instructive, for both communities share not only a closeness to their European origins but also a highly structured, relatively impermeable and fundamentally competitive ethnic environment...
...This time, eight years older, inured from shock, perhaps, by my last visit, I was less sure of my judgment—and less choked by my surroundings...
...I remember only that there was, after all, a reporter in the room, and that the next day's paper carried a front page article headed "Jews Not White, Says American Professor...
...It is a marvelously beautiful and deeply anguished place, and its legacy of meanness is a confusing and debilitating sorrow that touches the entire nation and all its peoples...
...The book is presented to me as a memento of my visit to the King David Day School in Johannesburg...
...But in both, the importance of ethnicity in the general community has reduced the pressure to assimilate, a pressure that has been so major a factor in American Jewish life...
...The government, in South Africa, is "they...
...And what happens then...
...They are used to it by now...
...And another quiet question, this to the man on my left, shows how thin is the veneer of confidence...
...I do not wish to labor the point...
...Perhaps the Vietnam agony may serve: Imagine the American experience in Vietnam not as an episode, but as a continuing and intractable event...
...That is not enough...
...I have not come here to judge at all, but judgment is inescapable, it is expected...
...Your sons are defending orderly change, they are defending stability, they are opposing mindless terrorism which does not distinguish among its victims...
...They do not have the need, as we do here, to bear in mind that Israel's trade with South Africa is but a fraction of its trade with Black Africa...
...Like people everywhere, their attention is claimed by the daily bookkeeping of life and not the grand accounting...
...The pass laws and the Immorality Act and the bannings and the censorship continue...
...In this sports-minded country, integration has begun in athletic endeavor...
...Revolutions are never made by starving people...
...All in all, the talk is positive, pragmatic, urbane...
...Tens of thousands of blacks who work in the large urban centers must return each night to dormitory quarters in barren hostels, far distant from their wives and their children...
...Yet manifestly, segregation is the rule...
...Yes, there is change in South Africa these days...
...To a stranger, the answer to these questions is different from the answer with which South African whites, the Jews among them, live...
...If Johannesburg is Chicago, then Capetown is San Francisco...
...Costs, looking down from Table Mountain...
...And there is the other part, the part which produces all the excuses, none of which is foolish, none of which is evil, none of which is not true, all of which are wrong...
...It is so tempting simply to voice indignation, and let it go at that...
...Would I be different...
...I sought to demur, but was pressed to speak...
...But it is hard, withal, to develop the requisite patriotic fervor...
...the best of our young, and a good number of our not-so-young, have left...
...Like Israel, South Africa is a place where all conversation—at least when a guest from abroad participates—comes back, again and again, to "The Problem...
...Things are changing in South Africa...
...These days, there is almost no one who is ready to settle for that legacy, to accept it as a prescription for the future...
...No, he answered, there is really very little conversation between us at all...
...Are we still so famished a people that we must call every resting place where we stop our home...
...On the day I was to leave, I arrived early in the morning in Johannesburg, where a full day's schedule awaited...
...That is the bloodbath theory of South African politics...
...Imagine being born and living and dying with Vietnam, and bequeathing it to one's children...
...one does not slide into it, it is a path of moderate resistance...
...The plan is that these homelands will one day be independent...
...on the nature of the eventual relationship between white South Africa and the ten prospective black states...
...Not so in South Africa...
...These are not easy questions to raise with people whose children attend South Africa's universities, who own shops and factories, who have built homes with their own sweat investment, who have learned the owners' language and manners...
...A recurrent theme of my conversations has to do with the change, with whether it is cosmetic or substantial...
...In the South African context, a liberal is one who rejects as unfair the current allocation of just 13 percent of South Africa's land mass to the black homelands, the reservation of the balance for the whites...
...And in due course, I was asked to express my opinion on the matter...
...At the end of Peretz's Bontsche Schweig, it is the prosecutor who has the last laugh—as we are all too wont to forget...
...They hear evil, they see evil...
...His face crumbles, his voice breaks: I cannot, he says, I cannot...
...Each small step towards decency represents a major achievement, and there are always so many convincing reasons for caution, so many qualifications to the clarion calls, so many valid arguments for incrementalism...
...He cannot be satisfied that he treats his servants well...
...In South Africa, the fund raising effort is both based on and directed towards the welfare of the community itself, and especially of its day schools...
...For all the fabled generosity of South African Jewry, and for all its single-minded devotion to Jewish education, could so isolated and so parochial a community carry its fair share of global Jewish responsibility...
...Costs, standing in front of a synagogue that may be the most graceful I have ever seen, and is surely the most delightfully situated, in the central public garden of Capetown, its twin spires rising out of the lush foliage, and in the background, the Mountain...
...There is doubt whether it can happen fast enough to satisfy the expanding demands of the disenfranchised...
...No one shies away from such talk...
...The numbers are not large, and not all who go, not by any means, go to Israel...
...Over and over again, a Yiddish or a Hebrew phrase would serve to remind me of how much more organically South African Jews have remained connected to Jewish culture...
...One is surrounded here by mush, not by evil...
...I try to think of some analogy which will explain how near the surface The Problem always lurks...
...The current rate of intermarriage is estimated at about 10 percent (compared to 35-40 percent here), and Jewish studies programs at the universities are expanding...
...The desperate hope of the spokesmen of pacific change in South Africa is that the economy will keep booming along sufficiently to permit the shock of social change to be absorbed by the cushion of economic growth...
...Too soft: I do not know...
...After one of my talks, the chairman expressed his gratitude that I had concentrated on the American Jewish scene...
...tomorrow, for sure, much more...
...Are we still so famished a people that we must call every resting place where we stop our home...
...Either A is resentful, behind his servile facade, or he is not...
...The Jews, I was told a dozen different times, vote for the Progressive Party, and feel fortunate that it is the Nationalist Party that governs...
...hundreds of thousands more live, many of them illegally, in cramped quarters in the institutionalized slums known as townships...
...To a stranger, the systematic disruption of black family life that is a direct and intended consequence of current law in South Africa, the vestigal emasculation which is the necessary consequence of petty apartheid, these and much, much more, seem qualitatively different from other dismal and unjust places...
...That is no longer the case...
...On the day I left, the afternoon paper in Johannesburg reported on its first page that three out of four Soweto residents felt sympathy towards terrorists who had recently raided a bank in Pretoria...
...For the South Africans, that price rise provides the wherewithal to fund social change...
...There is a part of him that knows that his task is to insure that his servants resent, oppose, resist, refuse...
...The man of tired indignity in Durban, the one who interrupts our pro-Nationalist companion in the midst of his elaborate defense of the status quo ("for otherwise, Communism will destroy the West") and says, "I disagree, I disagree strongly, you are wrong...
...In Capetown, talk about costs centered on specifically Jewish costs...
...The wage differential between black and white, even when they perform the same jobs, prevents most blacks from eating in the newly desegregated restaurants or from stopping at the few hotels from which their color does not bar them...
...There j are days, he says, when we feel we j are fighting a rear-guard action, j keeping the skin of our lives**' together while the flesh moves out...
...We talk about our aged, about our families in distress, about the poor and the sick...
...I doubt he ever thinks about politics, or really knows anything about politics...
...Today, there are blacks staying in my hotel, and the papers announce limited desegregation of restaurants...
...Only two percent of South Africa's Jews speak Afrikaans at home...
...And now, therefore, the question that haunts political conversation in South Africa is whether the new reforms, actual and prospective, can possibly keep pace with the exploding expectations of South Africa's blacks...
...One does not wish to judge, it is too easy to judge, the line dividing judgment from sanctimony is very thin...
...I wondered out loud about the peculiarities of the South African Jewish situation: Could a community of 110-120 thousand sustain itself...
...Yesterday, the playing fields...
...Once peddlers in the hinterlands, now professionals, managers, entrepreneurs...
...But I know that A has a wife back in the homelands, whom he can travel to see but once a year...
...They do not hide behind reassuring rhetoric...
...And the large areas of daily brutal-ization remain virtually untouched...
...And I know how easily we grasp at rationalizing illusions when the truth is unbearably harsh...
...Most of our talk was, of course, about The Problem...
...While we awaited the driver's arrival—the flight was a few minutes early—my friend decided that it would be most efficient were we to take the car and proceed directly to our first appointment, leaving the driver to return to my friend's office by public bus...
...We here feel ever more at home in this welcoming nation, and are increasingly willing to assert our Jewish commitments visibly and volubly...
...And maybe, just maybe, his voice trailing off, we will be lucky...
...There is doubt as to how seriously change is intended by the governors...
...Will they permit themselves to acknowledge the resentment, can they afford to...
...Whether sipping cocktails in an entirely comfortable home in a Johannesburg suburb, eating in a Capetown restaurant perched at the end of the last landmass of the Southern Hemisphere, enjoying a summer's sun poolside on the 32nd floor of the Maharani Hotel in Durban, talk inevitably turns to the future, and, as casually as here at home we might discuss the state of the economy or the collapse of detente, the topic there is the prospect of a bloodbath...
...Change— creaky, awkward, uncertain, inadequate—has begun to happen...
...Reform," however, must be understood within the boundaries of the South African debate...
...After two days in the country, I felt choked...
...I do not know why it is...
...a very different emphasis results...
...the result is a marked emphasis on individual welfare...
...I asked, and no one I asked knew of such a rabbi or of such a congregation...
...All 18-year-old white males must serve for two years, and the service these days is likely to involve a stint on the "front lines," the borders from which terrorists, guerrillas, liberationists, call them what you will, seek to bring revolution to South Africa...
...Hence the advent of the Begin government, which has felt far less constraint regarding the Israel-South Africa connection, was a relief to many South African Jews...
...Jewish college students insisted that the community adopt a more forthright denunciation of apartheid than it had in the past...
...But change there is...
...Some six or seven hundred people were killed in the course of those riots, fueled, says the report's author, by "great hatred" among blacks...
...Fear no doubt plays a major part in the reluctance of the community to speak more boldly...
...He agrees, with an important amendment: In order to wind down, he says, we must first wind up...
...The numbers are somewhat vague...
...in South Africa, the education budget claims over 60 percent of the communal dollar, j The point here is not that Jewish j education in South Africa is so very : much better than it is in America...
...Each time the debate is freshly resolved, the community has inched forward towards a more explicit expression of its sentiment...
...In South Africa, one is either Afrikan or English— and again, the rest follows...
...Above all, why...
...I do not knW whether it is a students' committee or the headmaster that has chosen this way to say to me, "Do not judge us harshly...
...Yet I doubt, for all that, whether most American Jewish i parents would feel completely easy about their day school children, dressed in school uniforms with Hebrew insignias, moving comfortably after school hours through downtown streets or suburban malls...
...But people are neither housed nor sustained by good intentions, and I cannot say, not for sure, that the migrant farmworkers of my nation do better than the blacks of South Africa...
...It is not a refined moral standard by which we are judged, they say...
...In both communities, the Jews are superficially English...
...Some already are...
...They are not happy j with the fact of Israel's isolation in the world community, but they take some satisfaction from the peculiar circumstances which have cast South Africa and Israel together...
...But there is still the very powerful knowledge that our success will be measured not by what we leave to our children, but by j whether our children leave...
...Our language was an international language of Jewish activists...
...I thought to abort my visit, to leave the next day...
...He admonished me, argued that it was vital that South Africans be enabled to see themselves through others' eyes, that I should speak openly and not play the good guest, that I should criticize freely...
...Thus a black born in Soweto, the principal black township near Johannesburg, might, by virtue of his tribal background, be assigned to a distant place he has never seen...
...he is entirely illiterate, and still quite attached to tribal customs...
...My problem is that I cannot be sure, had my parents headed South instead of West, were I living in that troubled and reviled and beloved country, and not in the United States of America, that I would be so very different...
...These days, debate centers around the fate of those blacks who have lived all or much of their lives in the white centers...
...And now, just these last few months, their rhetoric has begun to change...
...We understand our nigras, it's only you damned trouble-makers from the North who are messing things up...
...It may be that there is a South African rabbi who has spoken to his congregants about Cambodia, or a congregation that has sought ways to help...
...Is Chili, is Argentina, is even, yes, say it, the United States of America...
...And over and over again, whatever its point of departure, conversation would return to The Problem—that is, to the peculiar circumstances which define the South African context...
Vol. 5 • April 1980 • No. 4
