Episode 17: La Vie En Rose, Part 1
These are my visions of sophistication -- memories of the Long Fifties that ran from 1950 through 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated. It was only after that that The Sixties began, and they were short
My Life as an African: A BiograFICTIONAL Memoir
Juliette Greco! Edith Piaf! Eartha Kitt! Amalia singing Fado at the Olympia!
Ten years old in 1955, I am technically too young for this kind of entertainment, yet I am opened up to it by my sister Shulamit.
I don’t remember much about her before she left for Europe after her three years at the University of Cape Town. Twelve years older than me, she says she was too busy with her own adolescence to pay me much attention. One rare early recollection is going at age four with my mother to pick her up at university, waiting outside our car on University Drive for her to emerge from the crowds of students. I walk up to a student and ask “Have you seen Shulamit?” and then I realize that in this crowd, that name does not define her. Another memory from around the same age is going to visit her friend Becky Lan in Pinelands and watching them prepare to bake cakes, and being allowed to dip my finger in the delicious raw sugary batter and lick it.
England and the continent is where young people go postwar. She leaves for England when I am about seven and we see her off at the Cape Town docks on a Union Castle liner to Southampton. People send flowers and bowls of fruit to her cabin — that’s how you saw people off in those days on those ships. In London, where she has some friends doing similar things, she finds a job as a social worker for a year or two. Then she goes to work in Tel Aviv where we have relatives. She works with tuberculosis patients and often fears that she is catching TB herself.
From England she sends me a grand magician set with wand and cape and tricks you can do, and two pairs of real leather boxing gloves. In our still small Jewish school that tries to ape the extracurricular activities of the tougher gentile schools, some boys actually take boxing as a sport, instructed by Mr Purchase who has one genuine cauliflower ear from being punched too much. There is a one-night-a-year boxing evening attended by parents and children in which boys of similar weight fight three rounds with each other. My tough nine-year-old classmate Charles Rosenthal cries while he batters his opponent and is battered in return, punching while tears stream down his face. How do parents allow their children to do this? Luckily I wear glasses and cannot box at school. But with Shulamit’s boxing gloves I do spar sometimes for a few minutes with Carl Snitcher, one of the older boys in my neighborhood, a boy who really does know how to box. (His father, Harry Snitcher QC — Queen’s Counsel for those of you who don’t know this stuff —, was on the central committee of the Communist Party of South Africa until 1948.) We “fight” in his backyard and he quickly penetrates my defenses and chips one of my teeth with a blow to the jaw and then we stop. I have a lifelong tendency to think I can be good at anything, and he has taught me a lesson. Slowly, but certainly, the recollection of the lesson wears off.
When Shulamit returns to Cape Town a few years later she brings with her the accoutrements of post-war burgeoning European and Israeli life: Eartha Kitt records, Amalia singing fado at the Olympia, avocado dip which I later discover is called guacamole, hummus, tahina, espresso, steak which she broils bloody in the toaster oven (I hate the żyła, as my parents call it, Yiddish-Polish for the sinewy part of the meat).
Cape Town begins to get pizzerias, gelato, Italian food, and Italian movies that Shulamit and her friends go to. She is a social worker at Child Life in Queen Victoria Street not far from the center of town. There is a cool restaurant in St George’s Street, near her office, in which she meets her friends after work. It’s called the Negrita, such a sophisticated name, and sometimes she takes me along. Years later when I go to Nice and see the Hotel Le Negresco on the Promenade des Anglais, with its pink dome allegedly inspired by the breast of the architect’s mistress, I think of the Negrita. At the Negrita they smoke and talk and drink espressos and eat toasted sandwiches after work. That’s the life I aspire to.
My friends envy me my access to the world of my older sisters. I listen to Eartha Kitt on vinyl singing The Heel and Hey Jacques and I Want To Be Evil and Mambo de Paree and The Day That The Circus Left Town, and to Amalia singing Maria Elena. Shulamit belongs to (the intellectual) Film Society that shows uncommercial foreign movies on a Sunday night in a cinema that would otherwise be closed, and eventually I start going too. These are my visions of sophistication, and they become the visions of my friends too. They are recollections of the Long Fifties that ran from 1950 through 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated. It was only after that that The Sixties began, and they were short.
To Be Continued