"Outwitting History" - preserving Yiddish

Twenty-three years ago when I and my siblings were clearing up our parents' flat in Cape Town, I asked Lillian Dubb whom I'd met 10 years before at a summer Yiddish program in Oxford, what we should do with my mother's collection of Yiddish books. I think Chava Leah (which is how I knew her because we all used our Yiddish names that summer) referred us to the Kaplan Centre at UCT. Someone came to look at the books. They took some they didn't have copies of, I kept a few, including the two volume: "Jerusalem of Lithuania" (about the Jews of Vilna) and my sister took a copy of the Rakishok (Rokiskis) Yiskor-buch, but what of the rest? The person said we pack up the rest and when we have enough to fill a container or half or whatever, we send them to a Book Centre in Amherst, Massachusetts. It seemed a bit sad that no-one would want them in South Africa (quite a few had originally come from the Western Hemisphere already - Argentina no less) but it was comforting to know that we didn't have to throw them away or bury them - something Jews do with worn out prayer books.

And that was pretty much all I knew or bothered to find out until a friend lent

me "Outwitting History", Aaron Lansky's account - both hilarious and moving - about saving a whole culture before it got thrown in the trash by hiring trucks, donning gloves and doing the hard dusty work of saving Yiddish books from attics, basements and garages all over the United States and beyond. Then subsequently setting up in a specially designed building, the  Yiddish Book Centre.

I've forgotten most of the Yiddish I learnt that summer in 1982 but the impact of what it meant to me to study it has stayed with me to this day. It was a form of cultural liberation. I wrote about the experience shortly after, in a booklet that some of us in the London Jewish Women's History Group published

The International Slavery Museum

On an autumn day last October, whilst on a visit to London, I travelled by train to Liverpool - a city which I had never visited in almost 30 years of living in the UK. A bitterly cold wind swept me down towards my waterfront hotel. I had come for an overnight visit in order to spend the next day at the International Slavery Museum which comprises one floor of the warehouse-like building housing the Maritime Museum.

What had led me to make this special trip?

Last year I attended a few day workshops organised by the Human Rights Media Centre (HRMC) in collaboration with the Cape Town Holocaust Centre. To these, the HRMC brought people from the refugee community together with South Africans who had experienced human rights violations during the apartheid years. Shirley Gunn of the HRMC had asked me to come in case people giving testimony needed emotional support.

The event is structured so that the Holocaust, the exhibition and the Centre's educators, provide both the containment and the catalyst for invoking feelings about the other atrocities the participants have experienced. Survivors being enabled to tell their stories in the context of the group listening and acknowledgement, serves to break down barriers between people and communities. This may not be the goal of the 2 organisations involved, but that is my viewpoint of what the workshops achieve.

I think it was the second time I went: we had been taken round the exhibition and were having a debrief about what came up for people. A Cameroonian refugee said: "I feel bad. It's as if we black people are not important. There is no museum for us. Slavery transported millions of Africans and many died - it was our holocaust."

Immigrant Analysts and the Search for an Emotional Home

Papers on the subject of the immigrant analyst seem to have floated into my awareness in recent weeks. There was a chapter by Kirloff about the consequences for psychoanalysis in the UK from the immigrant analysts who arrived there fleeing from the Third Reich. A recent issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues features papers by two very different analysts: Glenys Lobban - a white South African practising in New York and Dori Laub - a Holocaust survivor and trauma specialist, who has practised both in Israel and the USA. Now the International Association of Self-Psychology has sent out notices for their conference to be held in October this year in Jerusalem and lo-and-behold, the title is: "Where Do We Feel At Home?: Self Psychological Perspectives of Belonging and Not Belonging".

It seems the time has come for me to reflect on my own immigrant experience as a therapist, both in the UK and then when I returned to South Africa (which was both a homecoming and an immigration after 32 years away). Glenys Lobban uses the term "double consciousness" coined by W.E.B. Du Bois, to describe her experience of the multiple selves the immigrant has to negotiate in her new country. Among them was the position of both simultaneously being inside her own experience of foreignness and seeing herself and her foreignness through the eyes of someone living in her new host country - “the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”.   The keyword here is "always". Just in order to survive, an immigrant does need at times to perceive  themselves and their culture as others see them. (I would call this an "assimilating self"). But to be always having to do this and for it to be through the negative lens of racism - this is what I think was meant by "double consciousness".

"The Possibility of Love"

My title is a quote from Jeannette Winterson's wonderful memoir "Why be Happy When you Could

be Normal?" She writes about her relationship with her adoptive mother, Mrs Winterson and her ultimately successful attempt to find her biological mother. It is also in my opinion, an extended love letter to her lover Susie Orbach, with whom she started a relationship as she was writing this book. She says in the memoir that in response to Susie's bestseller: "The Impossibility of Sex", (which she read before she met her), she had thought of writing a book called "The Possibility of Love." And this is partly what her book is about.

It made me think about the different ways we can express love and how the digital age gives us even more possibilities. About 30 years ago, Nancy Kline and Christopher Spence wrote "At Least a Hundred Principles of Love". Pity I didn't buy it when I could - probably a collector's item by now. I wonder whether attending the big events in one's family like weddings and important birthdays figured as a principle on their list? I somehow doubt it. But it certainly figures on the lists of some members of my immediate family! So when my brother who lives in London, recently celebrated an important birthday, it put me in a quandary I hadn't foreseen. My family knows me well enough and they excuse me when it comes to weddings (because I don't believe in marriage) or circumcisions (I boycott them!) but I can hardly muster a political objection to the birthday of a beloved brother. I spent a couple of days looking at flights and then my sister came up with a brilliant idea. We could collect memoirs and photos of my brother from family members and friends and compile a photobook as a surprise gift. It would be more lasting and memorable than turning up for a few days to attend a dinner and exchange a few pleasantries with cousins one hardly ever sees.

So I went into the organizing of this surprise with gusto. And my partner - who is a digital wiz - searched out photobooks online.

Why We Need a Language for Ethical Power

Last week the Jewish Community in Cape Town couldn't get enough of Peter Beinart. Though he is a controversial figure in Zionist circles who has spoken out against Israel's occupation of the West Bank, he was invited to speak from morning to night. On January 23rd at the Albow Centre Zionists who had come to heckle  found themselves charmed. Why? Well he is a brilliant speaker and a very erudite Jewish scholar. He also made a point of showing himself as a supporter of the existence of a Jewish state and a proud Jew before he explained his position about the crisis of Zionism. Furthermore, he is one of our own - his parents were Capetonians and when he wryly revealed that his most virulent critics were members of his own family, he pretty much had us in the palm of his hand.

That evening some members of the audience fully expecting to get heated at hearing another self-hating Jew, found themselves inexplicably calmed and soothed by Beinart's rootedness in Jewish religion and culture as well as his sensitivity to the priorities and fears within the Jewish community.

He made one really potently illuminating point: Throughout Jewish history we have seen ourselves as victims and this is part of the problem in Israeli politics today. Our festivals - Purim, Pesach, Hannukah - have as their theme: We were attacked, We survived, Let's eat! It is a language of victimhood. We don't go on to relate the stories of how our ancestors did battle afterwards and slayed multitudes in revenge, for instance. We lack a language to talk about the ethical responsibility of Jewish power. This lack is reflected in Israeli politics too. A country that has the fifth largest army in the world and is a global arms exporter still sees itself as needing to behave with impunity because of its Holocaust history. He made a plea for a broader panoply of images than just those of Holocaust victimhood or of military triumphalism.

Can you think of any? Do you know of any countries (or philosophers) that have a language to talk about the ethical responsibilities of power? Do any of these ever practice what they preach?

Worcester Peace Train

I mentioned Deon Snyman and the Worcester Hope and Reconciliation Process in my last post. At the "Engaging The Other" conference in early December he talked about a whole group of survivors of the Worcester Shoprite bombing planning to visit one of the perpetrators, Stefaans Coetzee, in prison in Pretoria. Well, they didn't waste any time!

Sarah Crawford-Browne writes:

"Deon is on an incredible journey with 40 survivors of the Worcester bomb - 24 Dec 1996. They left this morning (29 Jan 2013) on a Peace Train to go from Worcester to Pretoria to meet one of the perpetrators.  I'm putting up the updates on the Restitution Foundation Facebook page as they travel.    And we invite you to join the Peace Train -- there's an event on the page... or to share a posting so it does go viral and strengthens the hope in our country!  This is a partnership between the Worcester Hope and Reconciliation Process (they called Deon the father of WHRP today!) and Khulumani. 

This newspaper article shares a little of the story...  - as does a video about Ms Olga Macingwane who was the first to make the journey in 2009, following which other survivors requested the opportunity to meet Stefaans. 

Engaging the Other

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

We don't often read or hear Good News in South Africa these days. So the conference I attended at the University of the Free State (UFS) in early December made a welcome dent in the prevailing atmosphere of pessimism. Engaging the Other: Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition - the third of the post-TRC conferences organized by Professor of Psychology, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela since 2006 - brought together stories of transcending violent histories from all over the world. It was at the first of these conferences that many of us were deeply moved by the presentation from the German psychoanalysts of PAKH who are the second-generation offspring of survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust. It was also then that David Gerbi, a Libyan Jew, performed his extraordinary autobiographical play about "Making Peace with Gaddafi".

Jonathan Jansen

Six years later, Pumla has moved to Mangaung (formerly Bloemfontein) as have quite a few Cape Town academics drawn by the charisma and transformational energy of Jonathan Jansen, the Rector, who was appointed when UFS was rocked by a racist scandal in 2008. Three stories from South Africa impressed me.

The University of the Free State
The first undoubtedly was the story of UFS itself and what Jansen has been able to create in 3 years.