Degas' Dust. Carnie Matisonn
success.
He was a wonderful entertainer, though – merely in the wrong time and place.
These were the parents I was born to, Eva and Natie Matisonn, seven months after the end of World War Two, on Boxing Day of 1945, in a ramshackle, badly constructed farmhouse, still some way beyond the rapidly expanding municipal boundaries of the mining boomtown of Johannesburg.
They named me Carnie, which – it was explained to me – comes partially from the Hebrew word kern, which means both a ray of light and a ram’s horn. Eva was fluent in Hebrew, but Natie wanted a reference to his Nordic origins. As Jews do not take the names of their fathers, he adapted the name from Karnielsohn, the name of his uncle. So it was that I was named both for hard-headedness and the lost family member whose story would come to possess me later.
My entry into the world brought little joy to Eva, who was already taking strain from life with the moody Natie. He was always unpredictable and full of contradictions. At times charming, dapper, kind and generous, my father could get so wrapped up in himself that the suffering of those closest to him failed to move him in any way. When I was born, Natie still had dreams of becoming a famous lawyer, no doubt thinking he could redirect his frustrated theatrical talents to the legal stage. If not for the recession of the 1930s and the world’s all-out mobilisation for war in its aftermath, he might even have lived his dream. He was an avid reader of the spellbinding court cases of Clarence Darrow, one of America’s most famous lawyers and libertarians. The 1924 case of Leopold and Loeb – who were convicted for murdering fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks – so interested Natie that he bought all the books he could about the bizarre and tragic sequence of events that culminated in the brilliant and deprived young teenagers avoiding the death sentence and receiving life plus ninety-nine years.
My father was inspired by Darrow’s opposition to the death penalty, agreeing with him that it was something fundamentally in conflict with human progress. But it was not only legal books that gripped him. Natie never hesitated to spend our food money on literature of all kinds.
While our fridge and the pantry cupboards were almost always bare, the latest nonfiction bestseller was guaranteed to appear somehow at Natie’s bedside whenever he was home – before alcohol later became his primary pastime of choice.
His books covered a wide range of subjects. Many had to be purchased on the black market, because of the oppressive apartheid censorship legislation at the time. The list of banned items in our house included ANC symbols, buttons, T-shirts and lighters and, of course, all literature deemed objectionable, including posters and films. As with Prohibition in 1920s America, the banning itself proved to stimulate interest and excitement and a raging desire for any and all forbidden goods. There was a roaring trade on the black market.
The two major organisations banned under apartheid laws were the Communist Party of South Africa and the African National Congress. Natie was a communist at heart, and the books he bought made that clear. There was row upon row of books in the entrance hall, along the passageway, in the dining room, even in the toilet, that would have marked out our little home as a hotbed of sedition.
An apartheid censor would have been appalled to encounter, on brazen display, Das Kapital by Karl Marx, sitting unashamedly alongside that mammoth work of human sexual exploration, The Kinsey Report. I doubt even the mollifying sight of more noble and acceptable works, such as Churchill’s twelve volumes on World War Two, would have placated the authorities.
Natie’s shelves were graced by venerable historical, scientific and political tomes sitting alongside historical books like The Scourge of the Swastika, Hitler: A Study In Tyranny and the famous treatise of sociopolitical hatred by the Führer himself, Mein Kampf.
My father, like many other Jewish intellectuals, had always tried to understand the madness that could take hold of an entire continent, to allow the genocide of our people. I, too, in time devoured every shred of writing I could find on what had allowed Hitler’s Final Solution – or even any of his interim solutions.
We lived in what was then still a periurban area outside Johannesburg, surrounded by cattle and peach farms at the foot of Aasvoëlkop, which would later become known as Northcliff. Back then it was a far cry from the sought-after suburb it is today – with its rare views across the city.
We would eventually become a family of seven in our small, three-bedroomed home. I spent the early part of my childhood sleeping on a makeshift bed in the dining room, where I had to contend with the regular sounds of my mother’s typewriter or sewing machine, clacking or grinding into the early hours. Whatever she turned her hands to, the typewriter, piano or sewing machine, Eva worked like a slave. Her fingers were tireless. And they must have drummed the spirit of a strong work ethic into me too.
From my father I inherited the soul of a dreamer.
Every so often, my mother would mount shopping expeditions to the city, which started with a 6am visit to the Newtown Market.
Many of the buildings in the precinct were an eclectic mix of architectural styles – Victorian, Edwardian, even Art Nouveau. As a child, I remember standing there each weekend, admiring the beauty of the buildings and the hustle and bustle of a busy, growing city.
The massive Newtown Market building, completed in 1913, was the largest of its kind in South Africa. Supported by elegant steel trusses, it attracted thousands of people on Saturday mornings. It was where farmers sent their produce, predominantly by rail, to the Kazerne goods depot, to be sold by auction at the sprawling extension to the central business district. One could either bid for a box of vegetables or negotiate for one or two items. It was also where many of Johannesburg’s leading entrepreneurs acquired their skills, in what everyone called the “University of Newtown”. It was an easy place to start a business, but extremely difficult to remain in business. The noise would grow as competition heated up between traders attempting to outmanoeuvre each other.
During the Second World War, manufacturers in Newtown had produced goods to support the war effort. Its proximity to the railway sidings had made it an ideal location for light industry and manufacturing, and signs of this remained. The inner city was mostly occupied by black and white men, with the former squeezed into uncomfortable and overcrowded compounds run by the mines, the latter in more well-catered-for boarding houses, all of it stretching from Jeppe in the east to Fordsburg in the west.
The continual shortage of accommodation and the endless influx of rural migrants looking for a better life led to various slums mushrooming around the Fordsburg area.
Competition among the Litvak (Lithuanian Jew) wholesale and retail merchants kept the idiosyncratic subculture and jokes about the “University” alive and flourishing. Fictitious certificates were even periodically awarded to brave entrepreneurs and millers.
On the occasions we visited Eva’s uncle in his semi-detached house in Doornfontein, we would alternate between walking and travelling by tram. The sound of electric dynamos, street lighting and double-decker electric trams radiated from the city hall outwards – an image of old Johannesburg that exists only in history books now.
A favourite venue for us was Wachenheimer’s, a butcher’s shop in Doornfontein that operated a restaurant in the style of a nosh bar in a room behind the counter. For little more than a few cents one could enjoy a bowl of chicken soup and a knaidl (matzah ball) as an optional extra for those less financially constrained.
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My first encounter with anti-Semitism was when I was about seven, years before either of my sisters was born. A group of neighbourhood kids ambushed me while I was walking home from school. They called me a Christ killer and shot me eleven times with a pellet gun. I was powerless to retaliate and ran from them as fast as I could.
I asked my father why they thought I had killed Christ. And who, for that matter, was Christ?
He shook his head. “There are few fellow Jews at school with you and many parents who have taught their children to hate Jews. It starts with their potty training and becomes a feature of life. ‘Hate the Jew. Kill the Jew.’ Through the ages, Jews have been hard-working, industrious and conscientious. This has made