of history who may have been Jewish, and we’d say Victor was playing ‘Who’s a Jew?’ again.
Sometimes the claims were dubious. ‘Julius is a very Jewish name,’ Victor said of Caesar and my aunt Bernice just glared at him. Whoopi Goldberg wasn’t out of the running completely, either. ‘She’s in Hollywood,’ said Victor. ‘Look at Sammy Davis, Jr. I’m just saying it’s possible.’
While Victor was a one-man Anti-Defamation League in town, scouring it for anti-Semitism, it did not preclude him from using other forms of bigotry himself. But in our town, that was more or less expected of everyone, even Jews.
It’s true that some South African families sacrificed their nice Jewish boys and girls to Causes, perhaps more than their fair share, and Victor would be able to list every last Jewish bomber, unionist, mastermind and Red. But for the most part, our small-town Jews had opinions on race very much like the other white English speakers. If broad experience begets broad views, perhaps urban Jews had them, but our small town begot small minds, Jew and Gentile alike.
While no supporter of Afrikaner national ideology, I believe Victor voted National Party (which would have counted as liberal in some quarters in our town anyway). He also sprinkled living-room talk with the K-word and bemoaned the laziness of Transvaal blacks (Natal blacks were much better, he said).
Yet no representative of any so-called type retains his sharp edges under greater magnification. Victor’s brand of racism worked on a macro level. But on the micro level, when he actually dealt face to face with black people, his affable self emerged. He couldn’t help himself. I believe he truly liked his black clients (of whom, it must be said, there were increasing numbers).
How Elliot maintained his loving relationship with a man who had exactly the kind of attitude Elliot railed against, I’ve never been able to fathom. Perhaps it had something to do with a bond formed in the aftermath of our father’s death; perhaps Victor was Elliot’s Leo Fein.
Not long after the flag and menorah protest, the high school came by the intelligence that my brother was involved. Ma took a phone call from the headmaster, Mr Cullinan, saying that they’d found a can of blue spray-paint in Elliot’s school bag. Cullinan was a man with an already hostile predisposition towards my brother and he asked my mother whether, as a single parent, she’d prefer the school to punish Elliot.
‘Don’t you touch him,’ she said down the phone. ‘Just send him home right away.’
Worried that Elliot would be expelled from school, she called Victor. My uncle was ready to defend Elliot against anyone, and even more so in the case of Cullinan since he’d already built up a store of antagonism towards him. He’d overheard the headmaster call Abe Kotzen a Jewboy at the country club some time back and, although Victor had contempt for Abe Kotzen for the way Abe bullied his own son, he believed the remark was inexcusable. When Abe thanked my uncle for defending him, Victor had told him, ‘Abe, you may not be a Jewboy, but you’re still a fucking cunt.’
I don’t know if Victor considered himself a Zionist, but I think if anyone else had painted the swastika, it would have been different. Because it was Elliot, Victor saw only a favourite nephew who needed protecting from a bully. And since he liked to lord it over his little sister, a tendency that only worsened with time, he liked to relay to us at Sunday-night family dinners the details of his confrontation with Cullinan.
Victor told us how he’d called up the headmaster and told him what a coward he was. Then he’d taken him through such twists and squirms until Cullinan actually began to believe that expelling my brother would amount to an inexcusable anti-Semitic act.
‘But Julian Gross himself called me up to ask me to keep an eye on the boy,’ said Cullinan, the way Victor told it.
‘And who is Julian Gross? He doesn’t represent every Jew in town, let me tell you, sir. Don’t you know about the Holocaust, Cullinan? About the fascists? There’s a lesson there, my boy. You want to tell a Jew where to live, where to work, to walk through the streets with a star on his arm?’
‘What? Of course not.’
‘Why did six million of us die? Do I need to remind you? So if a Jew wants to paint on the wall of a synagogue, what’s it to you? Not that he did it, mind you. Not at all, but even if he did – would you victimise a young boy for being Jewish? Do you think the other Jews in town are going to like that? Picking on Jews is not advisable, my friend. Not any more. Not since forty-five.’
Uncle Victor’s picture was far from accurate, though, because most Jews in town wanted nothing more than for the perpetrator to be victimised. It was all supposed to be confidential but we saw the Kisch brothers drive past our house several times that week.
‘We never talk about this to anyone,’ said Ma after calling a family meeting with me and Elliot, something I thought only happened in American sitcoms. Victor assured us that Cullinan would avoid Julian Gross’s phone calls, and Elliot told the headmaster the spray-paint can was for an art project. It was never openly revealed outside the family that Elliot had been responsible.
The flag-and-menorah combo was something Ma wanted to keep a family secret. Neither Elliot nor I liked seeing her scared, fretting on the line to Victor every day. It took all she had to keep a grip on the family, and she threatened Elliot: ‘If you ever do anything like that again, or if you ever talk about it at all, to anyone, I’ll send you to boarding school and you can spray-paint swastikas on the headmaster’s arse for all I care.
‘Ben,’ she said, turning to me, ‘if anyone asks at school, or shul – I don’t care if it’s a kid or a grown-up, or a policeman or a teacher – you say you don’t know what they’re talking about.’
Will tried to get involved, pushing for a full apology from Elliot, and payment for the damage by working, under his watch, at Great North Diesel and Auto Electric. So Ma had to fend Will off, too, and instruct him never to speak a word of Elliot’s transgressions to anyone outside the family – in fact, to shut up about it altogether right this minute.
Uncle Victor was the only one in the family who still wanted to talk about the swastika, and each time I could sense Elliot straining to trap the urge to correct him with ‘modified Israeli flag’. No one talked about the slogan or the menorah. No one got it.
Carol still took me to cheder with Shoshana and her pity for me had only grown deeper. She’d study me as I walked out of the shul grounds to her car, as if the lessons were a dose of strong medicine and she was watching for their effect. The Dorfmans still fetched me for shul and I still slept over at their place from time to time, but Joss always gave excuses when I invited him to mine. Everyone still shook my hand in shul and wished me Gut Shabbes, but I felt more than ever that I was allowed access only through largesse.
With the Rabbi, however, I didn’t notice even the slightest change in attitude towards me. He still joked with me during cheder and explained patiently the things other kids already knew, like how to wear the tallis and how to recite brochas for the wine and bread. But even Disney Yarmulke started giving me a hard time. ‘My dad says you’re not going to have a bar mitzvah,’ he told me after cheder one day. ‘They won’t allow it.’
I began to think it would be better if I didn’t have my bar mitzvah after all. I was just going to mess it up anyway. My Hebrew was unsteady and I was nervous in front of large groups as it was. And now the whole community hated us.
More humiliating than performing in front of an audience – what if no one came? Or they came and were hostile, they threw things at me, booed and hissed? I didn’t get into an argument with Disney Yarmulke because I thought it quite possible he was telling the truth.
Then something happened to divert the darts meant for my family. Another swastika turned up in another part of town. It wasn’t as neat as the stencilled ones outside the shul, but it was fresh to the eyes of the vigilant. This one was on a wall near a reservoir. At school the rumour spread that black candles and painted pentagrams were also discovered in the reservoir grounds one night during a police patrol.
It was unmistakably the work of Satanists, which,