This weekend an important early history of Jewish Johannesburg, originally written in Yiddish and translated by academic Veronica Belling, will be launched to a public that has not had access to its information for many decades.
Originally published in 1956, The Jews of Johannesburg (Yidn in Johannesburg) was a radical revisionist history of the community from the discovery of gold in 1852 until Union in 1910. In her introduction Belling has called the book, ”An anti-establishment alternative history”. Others have called it a Marxist, Yiddishist polemic.
Speaking about the author, Leibl Feldman, who died in Toronto in 1975, Belling says: ”Feldman was focused on trade unionism and radicalism, and it was white trade unionism in those days. But there is a chapter on the attitude of Jews to Africans where he said the Jews did not have a Christian missionary approach. They didn’t think that they had come to civilise the Africans. Generally the Jewish ethos is free from that. They just saw another mensch [people] when they arrived here.”
Feldman devotes chapters to the recreational life of the early immigrants, describing the Friends of Russian Freedom club who met in the Richmond Hotel on Commissioner Street. Here they staged Yiddish plays and commemorated workers’ festivals below portraits of Karl Marx and with red flags. At times they went en masse to Zionist meetings to heckle and when the Zionists sang their anthems they opposed them with renderings of La Marsellaise.
Belling became involved in the translation when she was researching a master’s thesis on South African Yiddish theatre, about which Feldman wrote a chapter. The translator has also contributed to the programme of the upcoming Yiddish Film Festival, which will be the first of its kind in South Africa since 1941.
Belling says that Yiddish films were shown widely in the South African city centres — in Johannesburg at the City Hall, the Alhambra and at the Standard Theatre. Yiddish stars of the stage and screen often toured South Africa, notably Molly Picon, who came here twice — in 1937 and 1947 — and Maurice Schwartz, who toured the Union.
The new Yiddish Film Festival, which kicks off in Cape Town this weekend, has programmed seven movies starring early screen legends. Picon appears in Mamele (Poland, 1938) about Jewish life in the tenements of Lodz where, as a dutiful daughter, she keeps her family intact. Her first movie, East and West (Vienna, 1923), about an enlightened American girl who visits her religious family in Poland, is also programmed.
The films were restored by the National Centre for Jewish Film at Brandeis University. The centre’s executive director, Sharon Pucker Rivo, says: ”What we are rescuing is a chapter of world cinema. It is not merely Yiddish cinema and not American cinema. It represents many places, actors and directors.” Rivo says the films were made in Warsaw, Odessa, Vienna and in New York, but never in Hollywood.
”It speaks of the immigrant experience,” she says. ”They are interesting women’s films because the women in these families depicted try to tie the family together — and they are often the ones seeking modernity.”
The Yiddish Film Festival takes place in Cape Town from August 14 to 21 at the Labia Cinema and in Johannesburg from August 21 at Nu Metro, Hyde Park Corner. To buy a copy of Jews in Johannesburg email [email protected]