from Birthmark

2

He was born into light, the most beautiful soft and bright sunlight of the most beautiful place on Earth. At least, that is how it is in my memory, this other self who was me, the presence within me still. When I was born, we lived in Kempton Park, near my grandparents. My mother’s father, Isaac, had come to South Africa when he was thirteen; his father was a rabbi, a pious and learned man, and a scholar whose every gesture encoded gentleness. His name was Rabbi Moses Friedman (affectionately known as Reb Moishel or, in the pronunciation of the day, Reb Meishel), and he had been a founder member of the Beth Din in Johannesburg, then a town still in turbulent transition after its beginnings as a mining encampment. Though bookish, Reb Meishel had certain saintly qualities. Before he died, he begged forgiveness of anyone he might have harmed even unknowingly; when couples came to him to be married, he would always ask the bride, “How old do you say you are?” so as not to embarrass her or cause her to lie. This sort of delicacy of the unspoken became an underlying motif for the family, so that the slightest undulation in tone could have major significance. We were trained readers of those shifts from the start, sometimes a burden as well as a gift.

When Reb Meishel died, there were thousands at his funeral, the papers reported, and a train of cars and carriages more than a mile long. The rabbi delivering the oration mourned the loss of a Talmid Chochom who had “lived in his books and died among them,” studying the holy Torah in the quiet of the night while others slept and a world of wars and strikes went on about him. Meishel’s son Isaac, however, was different. A bit of a dandy at heart, an entrepreneur, he became mayor of Kempton Park, a small town to the northeast of Johannesburg. In an act of biblical repetition, Isaac married Rebecca, the daughter of a man who came to Zuurfontein before its name changed to Kempton Park; he had walked from Cape Town, where his ship had docked, across the expanses of the Karoo and beyond into the interior. He was named Max Kahan, and he began his life in South Africa by selling groceries to the British soldiers from a siding at the railway station in Kempton Park after the Boer War. For all these migrants there were chronological gaps and asynchronies. Parents preceded children, children preceded parents, husbands preceded wives in the vast journey across the oceans until those who remained behind could be brought over to join them.

Isaac, the son of the rabbi, joined Max, the father of Rebecca, and they ran a grocery shop in Kempton Park called Kahan & Friedman, where my father also worked many years later when it had become a hardware store. After Max’s death, his wife, Esther, moved in with her daughter and son-in-law, and so my mother grew up with her widowed grandmother in the house, a woman who hauled herself round on crutches and mourned not only the children she had lost but also the impure country she had come to, the trayfe land, where the proper ways had fallen behind. She herself was so godfearing that all the way on the boat from the Baltic via England to South Africa she had lived on a barrel of salt herring, knowing nothing else could be guaranteed as kosher. One can only imagine what state she was in when she arrived — and perhaps what it was like to be near her. Sometimes it was the other grandmother who came to the house, Reb Meishel’s wife, Rosa — she would sleep with one eye open in the bedroom she shared with my mother. For Esther, now suffering from short-term memory loss, there was nothing like the country she had left behind, but when my mother asked her own mother about that forgotten place, all Rebecca said was why would you want to...