This is the final episode of this serialized draft of My Life as an African. Thanks for being in the audience.
Stay tuned for a new substack called Time Decay, a novel set on Wall Street about the discovery of convexity in finance and love.
Having flirted with the idea of going to do a PhD in the USA, or in Cambridge, England, or at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, I now decide on Columbia. Once I know I am going, I give up studying, though I still go to varsity each weekday and take a few ineffectual whacks at Dirac and a book on group theory.
I have literally several scores of friends, from Habonim and from university, and I run around seeing them all. Many tell me they are going to miss me and we make plans to write until I come back. I begin to feel squeezed by expectations of my attachment, by the gravity they are assuming about our relationship. I avoid serious conversations. I feel anxious. I become frozen.
I begin to pack up all the things I will need in the USA in two trunks that I will ship with clothes for a cold climate, books, old physics and maths notes, mementos. I am a sentimental person.
I spend a terrific totally distracted ten days working as a madrich at a winter seminar camp in Clovelly for young Habonim boys and girls of ten to twelve. It’s a great relief to be there and be busy all the time. I turn 21 there a month before I will leave. After the kids have gone to sleep, at 11 pm, the other madrichim give me a party with cakes and beer and bottles of champagne. At midnight, Raphie, whose parents are landsman of my parents from Slonim, successively shakes each bottle and pops the cork and sprays jets of champagne on everyone and all over the floor. It’s a mess. We all get fairly drunk. Some Habonim girls our age from the neighboring seminar for older kids a suburb away come for the party and late at night, after cleaning up the room so that no kids (or their parents) will know what happened the night before, I drive them back to their seminar hotel. One of the girls, with whom I’ve had an attachment earlier, scolds me fiercely in the car as I drive for being so stupid as to get drunk while looking after kids, and for driving drunk. I am woozy and know I am not driving well and try my best to conceal it. It doesn’t take much alcohol to get me tipsy.
The remaining weeks are spent in preparation. I won’t be back for a long time. I go to say goodbye to people I like, to Dr Berelowitz, to friends, to parents of friends, to professors and school teachers. I go to get vaccinations. I get an international driver’s license. On July 31st I have a giant belated 21st birthday party at my sister Ruth’s house. We need dance music, and this is 1966, so a friend and I spend weeks before listening to Top of the Pops on Springbok Radio every Saturday afternoon and recording three-minute songs on a tape to dance to. All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray …
The last few nights before I leave my parents have at-homes where anyone can drop in. Uncles, aunts, cousins, friends come by. We take some last group photos.
I’m the last child at home. My parents will be alone now in the big house. I tell them they should join a club and take up lawn bowls for social life as many people their age do, but I know it’s not their style.
One last photo and the next morning I’m gone.