cheder, whether feigned illness, holidays, or more pressing schoolwork, yet the Rabbi never once used guilt to force my mother’s hand, nor did he threaten, as he might have, to stop teaching us.
He’d said nothing in objection to my brothers’ desertion of the minyans straight after their bar mitzvahs. He knew, then, what to expect from me, the third Aronbach, but I don’t remember him ever trying to convince me of the religion beyond the bounds of the lessons.
It’s not customary for Jews to make confession, but I do so now. While my family was steadfastly atheist, I was a believer. At least, I tried to be. It’s no fun growing up in a household of sensible thoughts, reasonableness and reason. Every kid wants to rebel and, in the land of the secular, it’s the believers who are the radicals. So, I kept this rebellious little dagger in my heart for my family.
This does not, however, suggest that I felt any sort of allegiance to my fellow cheder-goers. I disdained them, for the way they kept themselves apart from the bulk of kids in school, but mostly for the way they treated the Rabbi.
The Rabbi was in his early thirties and what we would have called spastic if our parents had let us. For the Rabbi, just turning a page meant a battle between opposing forces in his arms. With even the simplest of movements, his muscles strained and contorted his limbs. And I hated the other children more and more ferociously with every snigger they let slip at his scrawling handwriting up on the chalkboard.
I was desperate for the Rabbi to speak about the black man who’d been in shul on Friday night but he was talking kashrut and what good Jews avoid. Meanwhile, I was wondering where the black man had come from, and why.
Had it been a political act? A statement of some kind? Or was it possible he was from a lost tribe of Israel? A convert? How do you explain Sammy Davis, Jr?
The Rabbi was talking about owls, that they’re not kosher. I watched a boy in a Disney yarmulke draw the word ‘FUCK’ in deliberate wavy lines in his notebook.
‘Why did that black man come to shul on Friday night?’ asked Potato Latke.
I was immediately annoyed that she’d had the courage to ask the question.
‘Well, Shoshana,’ said the Rabbi, ‘I think it was some kind of a misunderstanding, that’s all.’
‘Is he Jewish?’ she asked.
Disney Yarmulke honked a laugh.
‘He thinks he’s Jewish,’ said the Rabbi. ‘Who knows? Maybe he is, but I think it’s unlikely.’
‘How do you know he’s not Jewish?’ she asked.
‘Well, he doesn’t read Hebrew, or speak it. He knows some of the laws and customs, I think, but that’s not enough.’
‘Ben doesn’t speak Hebrew,’ said Shoshana. Of course she was right, but there was no need to point it out, I felt.
‘He’s learning, though, and we know where Ben comes from. But I think the man who came on Friday night is confused about things. There’s some explanation for it. For instance, maybe at one time he worked for a Jewish family and now he misses those things, Jewish things, that remind him of them.’
‘What if he wanted to be Jewish?’ I asked. ‘Couldn’t you help him?’
‘If he wanted to convert, you mean,’ said the Rabbi. ‘It can be done. But, you know, Jews don’t go out and convert. It’s not our way of doing things. You have to really commit to it. We don’t make it easy.’
I thought that was good. I liked it, as if it were a character trait one feels affection for, a sort of humility, even if I didn’t particularly care for the automatic inclusion of being one of The Chosen, and I wondered how it was I’d been chosen but not the black man in shul.
After two thousand years of suffering, we Jews found ourselves on the other side of the fence in South Africa. While we were still shut out of certain clubs and inner circles, called names and made fun of from time to time, we had none of the hardships a brown skin would have got us.
I know Ma saw parallels between the long histories of tribulations of blacks and Jews, though Elliot was the only one among us to express an opinion that Jews had a responsibility to relieve the suffering of black people. Our own people’s suffering sharpened our faculties for sensing injustice, but these seemed to be body-bound, insensate to suffering beyond them.
Perhaps it was just a relief to know that, if there were horrors happening, at least this time they weren’t happening to us. After all, Gail Dorfman’s father had jumped from a train to escape the death camps and lost his parents, two sisters and a brother in Poland; Julian Gross had fought off Nazi sympathisers of the Ossewa Brandwag who had attacked his parents’ shop with crowbars and beaten Julian with chains, right here in our town in the 1940s. Whatever family of ours had been left behind in Lithuania had been led into a forest and shot.
Though we weren’t a family of the struggle, Ma was one of the few people I saw intervening, albeit in modest ways, in the everyday humiliations she’d see black people suffer in shops or waiting rooms, or counter racist remarks in what passed for polite conversation. Perhaps she had the safety of being a woman and a widow.
I knew from Ma that being a Jew was complicated: there wasn’t just one type. There were the communist plotters, and there were the secret admirers of Afrikaners – both nations recognising in one another the respective laagers they’d drawn, Volk and Zion. In town, we seldom heard any other resistance to apartheid from Gentiles or Jews, and whatever liberal noises were being made by the Jewish Board of Deputies in Joburg never trickled down to my ears in any Shabbes service.
Yes, being a Jew was complicated, difficult at times, but ultimately safer than being black. Maybe some Jewish Wallenberg or Schindler could have officiated over the conversion of black people to Judaism to save them from apartheid; it’s unlikely the Department of Bantu Administration would have taken them off their books.
And some black people didn’t need converting at all, though it didn’t exempt them from apartheid. The Lemba people, a hundred kilometres to the north of town, look like their black Venda neighbours and speak the same language, but slaughter their animals the kosher way, refrain from eating pork, won’t intermarry, and worship one god. They pass on to their children a history that says they originated in Yemen, and left the land with the ancient and holy Ark of the Covenant.
Their priestly clan has DNA of the Cohen strand: it seems they’re Jews, the same as me.
* * *
What could I do with the badge now besides take it out and look upon it in secret? I mulled over this question in the car on the way back from cheder. I couldn’t wear it without Shadrack knowing about it, or Ma asking about it, or Elliot freaking out about it. For all I knew, Ma may even have given it to Shadrack.
Even if it was my father’s name on the badge, Shadrack had known him better, certainly longer, and deserved it more: he was no thief.
After Carol dropped me off at home, I came to Shadrack’s room with my fist clenched. I could hear soft rapping and scraping inside, and knocked after a hesitation. I opened the door and found him tapping a nail into the heel of a yellowish women’s boot with the slender hammer.
I put the badge down behind the radio and made a pretence of looking for my orange plastic football; he made a pretence of suggesting it might be in the back garden.
‘Okay, I’ll look there,’ I said and turned for the door.
‘You can steal from me, Ben,’ he said.
‘I didn’t,’ I said, facing the door.
‘Yes-thanks.’ It was his ultra-affirmative, I suppose, his catch-all catchphrase. We didn’t know where he got it, or exactly what he meant by it. It was his and only his, and somehow it always seemed to fit.
He still hadn’t looked up from the yellow boot. ‘Better you steal from me. I don’t care. But nobody else.’
‘Yes,