Episode 26: The Cult and I: Part 2
I don’t have the character for being part of “movements” and group sing-a-longs and folk dancing —- it all embarrasses me a bit, I feel awkward — yet here I am.
For recent and new subscribers: This is Episode 26 of My Life as an African. Catch up on earlier episodes here.
Continuing from Episode 25 The Cult and I - Part 1:
By the end of high school I am on my way to drifting out of “the movement”. Nevertheless, I still attend meetings of our Shomrim group, teenagers sixteen and up, on Friday nights. We have interesting discussions about books and politics. Once, I give a lecture on the novels of C. P. Snow, author of the series Strangers and Brothers. I like Snow’s approach to the two cultures, the necessity of being familiar with both science and the arts, and I especially like his dispassionate and yet compassionate view of troubled relationships. I don’t have the character for being part of “movements” and group sing-a-longs and folk dancing —- it all embarrasses me a bit, I feel awkward — yet here I am.
Meanwhile it is the early 1960s. After Friday night meetings we go to The Troubador in Hope Street, to drink and listen to folk music. Performers sing spirituals, Dylan songs are coming into vogue, and Hoyt Axton’s Greenback Dollar is a favorite. I think about how to get a new social life. I date a bit. And then, in 1962 at the end of my first year at university, Justin Passwell, a medical student a couple of years older than me that I know (and like a lot) both from the Jewish school I attended and from Habonim, asks me if I would be a Madrich (youth counselor) for eight-to-twelve-year-old Shtilim at the annual Habonim three-week summer camp by the sea at Onrus, seventy miles from Cape Town. I agree. And so, I spend the first half of the summer working and earning money on both weekdays and Saturday mornings at Jaggers (see Episode 23), and entire weekends meeting with other Madrichim to prepare for camp.
From Saturday morning to Sunday night a bunch of us, boys and girls (men and women?), camp out in Hout Bay, cook on a fire, prepare a syllabus for the forthcoming camp, and learn commando-like outdoor activities from an Israeli ex-soldier. He teaches us how to commando-crawl around on beach in the dark, body pressed close to the ground, propelling yourself forward one foot at a time, trying not to be seen. “Don’t sit near your campfire at night, that way the enemy can see you. Sit farther away in the dark, and then you can see them by the firelight when they approach.” We bond together and begin to meet during the week for fun as well as training. I’m friendly with Darylle, an independent girl from Stellenbosch who is just beginning to get involved in the movement.
Finally, the three-week camp starts. We look after young boys and girls from all over the country, cook for them, put on entertainment at night around the campfire, sleep in a tent on the ground with the five or six kids we’re each in charge of, hang out on the beach late at night with the other madrichim, flirting and smoking after all the kids sleep. The latrines are deep holes in the ground periodically topped up with quicklime, covered by wooden planks with several toilet-shaped holes. Flies buzz. I run a science group for kids, telling them about the history of the universe, making hydrogen balloons from granulated zinc and hydrochloric acid that you can easily buy in a pharmacy in those days when pharmacists compound most of their own prescriptions. We launch the balloons aloft with little handwritten messages and watch them float up and away, hoping someone will find the message when the balloons finally burst or leak and drop back to earth.
It’s a wonderful period. I am so perpetually busy there is no time at all to worry about personal problems1. I go to bed in the tent exhausted. Work is all-encompassing and takes me out of myself. The work is social, rather than solitary like studying physics, banging your head against a book. I love it and I love looking after young kids. And so, I’m hooked.
After camp Justin persuades me to become a regular year-round Shtilim Madrich and run a group at the Orphanage in my neighborhood of Oranjezicht. For the next three years I run groups of young kids on Sunday mornings or teenagers on Sunday nights, playing games and teaching them.
A year later I spend my summer on a communal tour of Israel for South African Habonim youth. For six weeks we travel together, listen to lectures on Jewish history, work on a Kibbutz for a week, see the whole country at a time when luxuries are scarce. Coca Cola is unobtainable (the company fears an Arab boycott). Only one restaurant in Tel Aviv, California, sells hamburgers. The yolks of Israeli eggs are so pale that you wonder what they have done to the chickens. While there, like most of us, I buy a Kefiyeh, a traditional Arabic head-dress that has now became a fashionable urban scarf in “the movement”. The irony is unapparent to me. Some of my friends, equipped with condoms by their parents for their first experience, visit prostitutes on Rechov Hayarkon or Ben Yehuda in Tel Aviv and come back to report.
I’m a person who, all my life, takes other people’s expectations far too seriously. I love Israel but the trimmings in “the movement” begin to grate on me. I should laugh at them but I can’t.
We have Wandervogel-ish slogans and principles that originated in the 1930s. A member of Habonim is close to nature and simple in his ways was one of the more memorable ones. Habonim has its own Hebrew pioneer words for everything official and ideological. The movement’s motto is Aleh U’vneh – go up and build – and the appropriate response was Aloh Na’aleh – we will indeed go up. The first line of the movement’s archaic-sounding song is “Habonim, strong builders, we lads have become,” the lads being a nice Scottish-Jewish touch. Somewhere in the song is a couplet that goes “We pause not for laggards but build, brick by brick, A mighty foundation with shovel and pick.” Some of us being at least partly normal lads despite all of the ideology, we invariably sing the last phrase as “shovel and prick”.
Though it is slowly fading away, there is an unwritten prejudice against makeup for girls; it isn’t natural. We try to sanctimoniously look down on normal social life and ambitions. The highest aspiration, we are told, is to upend the traditionally 19th Century Jewish social structure of labor, which, we are taught, was an unfortunately inverted triangle, its top disproportionately heavy with professionals and brainworkers and its bottom too light with the agricultural and manual laborers that should have provided a stable societal base. There should be more workers and fewer luftmenschen. Labor is noble. The best thing you can do is emigrate to Israel, live on a Kibbutz and earn your keep by manual labor in a communal setting. On some Kibbutzim children are brought up communally, sleeping in a children’s unit apart from their parents. Some young men of my generation in South African Habonim choose to become fitters and turners or plumbers rather than go to university. For several years the movement ran a Hachsharah (a preparation camp), a communal Kibbutz-style farm within South Africa where you could live and learn agricultural skills in order to prepare for Kibbutz life. In principle I still think it was all admirable stuff, if ultimately misguided and harking back to an era that had passed.
Since entering university, my social life has revolved largely around Habonim. The years flow by: weekends involve Friday night discussions among contemporaries, Saturday night get-togethers with our own entertainment and skits, Sunday mornings or evenings running a weekly meeting for a group of younger kids. Late at night we drive to The Harlequin or The Doll’s House drive-in restaurants for toasted cheeses, chips and milkshakes. We sit in our car until late at night talking about intellectual stuff, morality and girls. It’s fun.
For me, this cloistered and romantic haven comes to a crisis during my final years at university. Now, around 1964, the 19 and 20-year olds who run the movement start nudging us harder and harder to fulfil its aims. They institute an Aliyah Register, an oath you have to sign in order to continue to be a member of the movement, your signature certifying that you intend to fulfill Chalutzik Aliyah (a pioneering emigration to Israel), or, failing that, at least some kind of bourgeois Aliyah. They argue, scorn and even shame members who won’t sign.
But I know I most likely will not emigrate to Israel. And I won’t give up physics in order to live on a Kibbutz. In truth, I wouldn’t live on a Kibbutz even if I did give up physics.
Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.
I wouldn’t be writing about the movement now if it hadn’t left its marks on me, many of them good. So, somewhere around the age of twenty, though I still work at some camps in the summer, I depart its constraints, a little bitter at the hole in my social life that follows for a while. It doesn’t matter as much as I fear because I leave for New York a year later. What bothered me most was the self-righteous, I-know-what-you-should-do attitude of people who pressured me. Years later, few of them remained in Israel, and an even smaller number remained on Kibbutz. I should have laughed at their contradictions.
One of the big advantages and attractions of movements.