Reclaiming the L-Word: Sappho's Daughters out in Africa

A comfortable fit

1(5,;:/(7096 and partner Marian Nell are both of Ashkenazi descent and have two sons who they have brought up in the Jewish tradition.  (*64-69;()3,-0; 1(5,;:/(7096 I was born in 1949 in East London. My partner, Marian Nell was born in Johannesburg in 1945, the year World War II ended. We are both of Ashkenazi (East European) descent, second generation Jewesses, born in South Africa. Our grandparents were part of one of the many exoduses from Eastern Europe, Lithuania, in the wake of waves of pogroms and anti-Jewish activity. As was often the case at that time, our grandparents ended up in South Africa more by accident than design. Someone in the family put down some tentative roots here and others followed. Marian’s family migrated to the Western Cape and mine to the Eastern Cape. Marian’s mother grew up on a farm in Ceres and her father in Cape Town. Both my maternal grandmother and my grandfather ended up in King Williams Town where they met and married. My paternal grandfather was a chazan (singer in a synagogue) and, as there were not enough rabbis to go round, ended up as the acting rabbi in a series of small towns in the Eastern Cape. He died before my parents married and was, according to my mother, not a religious man at all – he could sing, a talent none of his grandchildren inherited, and earned his living by doing so. Both my father and Marian’s were attorneys and our mothers were housewives. Our fathers were quite conservative and our mothers liberal. I was the third of three children and have an older brother and sister. My sister emigrated to Israel, with her husband and three children, all of whom are now married and have their own children. My brother married a woman who isn’t Jewish and has two children who were not brought up as Jewish. They have a warm and loving relationship. Marian was the third of four children. Her older brother, Paul, was born with Down’s Syndrome and later institutionalised. He died some years ago. He was followed by Josephine, Marian and Matthew. Matthew also married a woman  1(5,;:/(7096 who is not Jewish, but his children have been brought up Jewish and are roughly the same age as ours. Josephine is married to a Jewish man and has two sons, one of whom is married to “a nice Jewish girl” and they have two lovely children. We often share Jewish holidays with all of them. We both grew up in what were then traditional, largely non-practising, orthodox Jewish families – they celebrated the holidays, and, in my case, had Friday night suppers. We were both from “liberal” white homes: our parents voted for the Progressive Party and probably had friends who were to the left of them, but most of their friends were to the right of them, as was most of the Jewish community. My father died when I was fourteen and we moved to Cape Town where my sister was already married with a child. I went to the University of Cape Town (UCT), where I received a BA in English and philosophy and, after a brief stint of work at the then Progressive Party, travelled overseas for two years. During this time I spent a year in Israel, where I was teaching English in schools in the far north when the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973. Marian went to the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), where she edited the student newspaper and also got a BA – in English and history and politics. She volunteered for six months after the Six Day War and worked on a kibbutz. She then went on to do her honours in psychology through the University of South Africa (Unisa) and subsequently an MBA at Wits. I did various Unisa courses while I worked in a children’s bookshop in Cape Town. Marian worked for the Zionist Federation and then for the Union of Jewish Women before, at the behest of the Institute of Race Relations, she set up an initiative called the Human Awareness Programme (HAP) in response to the student uprising of 1976. Neither of us had great relations with our fathers – nor our mothers! Marian was close to her brother, Matthew, and I to mine. We both had some boyfriends – were...