Degas' Dust. Carnie Matisonn
my life, many would tell me its recovery was nothing less than an exercise in futility.
But that only made me more determined to pursue the dream. It was to become my lifelong quest to recover it, along with all the other treasures that had been looted on that pitiful, snowy evening in Oslo.
PART 1
The caravan and the cave
Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation.
Christopher Hitchens
Chapter 1
Neither my siblings nor I knew my grandparents very well. My maternal grandmother, Ester, came from Hull in the UK and was the only one I recall meeting, although only on a few occasions. She was uneducated, but could play almost anything on the piano after hearing it just once. Her genes no doubt played no small part in what later turned out to be my own passion and affinity for music. They were not passed on to me alone – most of my family is musical.
Ester never seemed able to remember the names of her grandchildren. She lived alone in the 1950s in her large house in Pretorius Street in the Jacaranda City, Pretoria. By the time I met her, she was a widow. When we went to visit her, her house had no carpets, nothing much in the way of decoration and only the most essential items of furniture.
My maternal grandfather, Abraham Fasser, was an uneducated tailor who had escaped the pogroms in his native Poland with four of his brothers. His other brothers, all six of them, were murdered in the wave of anti-Semitic purges that followed the expansion of the Russian Empire across Europe in the latter half of the 19th century. The five young surviving brothers initially fled to England, which was where Abraham met Ester.
One brother remained in England. Another moved to Brazil. One made his way to the United States. The two tailors, Solomon and Abraham, with new wife Ester in tow, emigrated to South Africa.
They touched African soil for the first time in 1885.
The brothers found their way to the capital, where they slept in a small shop and plied their trade for fifteen hours a day in the service of Pretoria’s early inhabitants.
The town was only a few decades old at that point, having been purchased by the Voortrekker leader Marthinus Pretorius in 1853, as two farms that became a town in 1855 named after his father, Andries Pretorius. The latter was a man considered a hero of the Great Trek, who had led the defeat of the Zulus in the Battle of Blood River.
By the time my grandfather settled in the capital of the Transvaal Republic, the First Boer War had ended only a few years earlier, in 1881.
Neither man had learnt to read or write, but they managed to earn enough to scrape by, living from month to month. Grandfather Abraham was a tall man with a back as straight as a wall and an equally rigid personality. Ester was cold, polite and indifferent – a walking relic of a stoical time. One made do with what one had in those days and made peace with the fact that there wasn’t much sense in complaining. From what I’ve been told, she was incapable of love and eventually made my grandfather’s life even more of a misery than it had been to start with.
It’s difficult to imagine how he had courted my grandmother. By all accounts, theirs had been a humourless, practical arrangement. She had followed him faithfully to this new country and dutifully bore my grandfather four children – to whom neither parent appeared equipped to dispense much love or affection.
Eva, my mother, was Ester’s second child. Most of the family’s resources were channelled into educating the eldest son, Ellis, who repaid this faith by qualifying as a doctor. He went on to become a paediatrician, musician, artist, hypnotist and scientist. His doctoral thesis on congenital anomalies and rubella led to most of the world’s governments allowing legal abortions to be performed on pregnant women who’d contracted measles.
By contrast, Eva only attended school up to Standard 6 (Grade 8), but educated herself further and became a speech and drama teacher. She learnt to play both the piano and organ. Her playing was always technically competent, but she performed without much feeling. My mother’s renditions of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart and Dvorak were soulless, like someone telling you a story in a language they could read out loud, but not actually understand. She was most comfortable when playing the more technically brilliant but emotionally dry composers: Stravinsky, Wagner, Rimsky-Korsakov.
When my mother’s father took ill, he drew little sympathy from his wife. In the end, Ester could relate only to herself. She spent her days writing letters to herself and then replying. She died certifiably insane.
Long before that happened though, Abraham had thrown himself off the sixth floor of a general hospital.
* * *
My father’s name was Nathan Matisonn, known to his friends simply as Natie. His mother, Kate, was the daughter of an orphaned Lithuanian immigrant to South Africa. She was one of the 300 000 Jews orphaned by genocide at the hands of Russia’s Red Army. Natie’s father, a Norwegian immigrant named Jacob, was known in South Africa as Jack. Grandmother Kate liked to speak to Natie in Yiddish, but grandfather Jack preferred Afrikaans, which he’d learnt after arriving in South Africa, aged just 21. Born in Østfold, Norway, to a Norwegian father and Russian mother, he’d been forced to leave for South Africa after his uncle banished him for arriving late for dinner at the commencement of the Sabbath as the sun set one Friday night. That was all it took in those days to be forever dismissed.
South Africa and the odd assortment of migrants it played host to seemed to suit Jack. He was politically active and something of an entrepreneur. He resented the English for what he considered their unique brand of racism. He believed there was no place in modern society for class distinction. Those were the days when Afrikaners were the world’s true anarchists, a time when no one calling himself an Afrikaner would dare to think himself above another Afrikaner – though of course they had no such compunctions about the native black communities or the English.
Jack tried his hand at anything he felt might serve this new community of stubborn, frontier folk and earn him an honest living. When he arrived, with no knowledge of either English or Afrikaans, he initially worked as a smous (peddler) moving between the farms.
He decided to become an Afrikaner. There are many similarities between Afrikaans and Norwegian, so learning the language and the shift to becoming one of the volk was probably not as big a jump for him as the English route may have proven.
As his courage and connections improved, so too did the value of his inventory. Jack began to trade in farm implements and tractors, attended political rallies and established himself as an outspoken member of the farming community in and around Koster, about 160km west of Pretoria. Koster was eventually proclaimed a town in 1913. Good fortune and loyal friends afforded Jack an opportunity to acquire a piece of land in the area, where he tilled the field and provided for his family.
So it was that my father was born on this maize farm and spent his early productive years working for his parents – until the day a black cloud of locusts descended and, within thirty minutes, thousands of acres of crops nearly ready for harvest were erased by hundreds of thousands of greedy mandibles in a relentless living storm.
My grandparents faced financial ruin. The banks, inevitably, foreclosed on the farm.
It also meant Natie never attended university, though, given half a chance, my father would have excelled. He had matriculated with distinctions in mathematics, English and Latin, but after the disaster on the farm, he still considered himself lucky to find a menial job as a blockman in a butcher shop.
Natie initially did make a bit of a name for himself in Yiddish theatre. But making a name for yourself in Yiddish theatre back then was a bit like making a name for yourself as a fixer of typewriters in the early 1990s. Yiddish was a dying language in South Africa and, when its last few syllables were finally put to pasture as an everyday language in the Jewish community, he tried to find work as an