Radical Engagements Lorna Levy

1 RADICAL ENGAGEMENTS by LORNA LEVY 2 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 5 PART ONE CHAPTER 1 MY ROOTS: THE HIDDEN PAST. ....................................................... 7 CHAPTER 2 DISTANT MEMORIES: CHILDHOOD LANDSCAPE ....................19 CHAPTER 3 GROWING UP…. SCHOOL AND ALL THAT .................................29 CHAPTER 4 LIBERTY TO FIND MYSELF CHAPTER 5 TRADE UNION ORGANISER - MY FIRST JOB .........................45 CHAPTER 6 MARRIAGE ............................................................................................60 CHAPTER 7 1962 – THE END OF MY BEGINNING ..............................................66 CHAPTER 8 LEON LEVY’S ACTIVISM ..................................................................73 PART TWO CHAPTER 9 SET FOR EXILE ....................................................................................88 CHAPTER 10 PARIS - 1963 .........................................................................................100 3 CHAPTER 11 A MONTH IN PRAGUE ......................................................................106 CHAPTER 12 CONFERENCE IN MOSCOW .........................................................115 CHAPTER 13 EXILE ....................................................................................................124 CHAPTER 14 BEING BRITISH! .................................................................................144 CHAPTER…15 BIRMINGHAM - THE BACKSIDE OF CAPITALISM 157 CHAPTER 16 RE-CONNECTED - WITH SOUTH AFRICA AGAIN ...................172 CHAPTER 17 TRIP TO EAST BERLIN ....................................................................179 PART THREE CHAPTER 18 THE ANC IN LONDON ..................................................................187 CHAPTER 19 “VOTES FOR FREEDOM” ............................................................197 CHAPTER 20 ‘THE DIPLOMAT’ ..............................................................................204 CHAPTER 21 DIPLOMACY IN OSLO ..................................................................215 CHAPTER 22 SOUTH AFRICANS VOTE OVERSEAS IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE ............................................................................................223 CHAPTER 23 THE END OF THE FAMILY .........................................................230 CHAPTER 24 BEYOND 1994 ..................................................................................238 PART FOUR CHAPTER 25 LOOKING FOR A NEW BEGINNING ........................................246 4 5 INTRODUCTION There was a time in the mid 1990’s, in London, a lull in activity, a cross roads in my life, when I started to write the story of the past years, a memoir. The journey seemed quite interesting as I put down all the different things I had done, with the assistance of a number of documents, diaries, letters and notebooks, my own archive; I had stored and carried it with me over the years. Perhaps I formed the habit of recording interesting events and titbits because of my lonely childhood and instead of talking, I wrote them down. At the top of our house, in what we called my studio, I sorted through these papers and began to write. I travelled down memory lane and a good deal of it was a painful experience, particularly reading letters of much loved people such as my father, long since deceased. This assortment of papers, including old speeches, enabled me to make some sense of my past, starting with distant events. I decided to focus on the evolutionary path of a suburban white South African girl, myself, who chose an atypical radical alternative when quite young. People often ask me why I changed course and took another direction. Shimoni’s conclusions persuade me that the radicals and liberals among us “were not made but simply born that way.” As a student in Johannesburg, I drifted towards that small group of white people who challenged the harsh political realities of the times, in the late fifties and early sixties, which resulted in exile in England. With little preparation, I lost my early landscape and in my mid twenties needed to find another identity. The swinging sixties were fun and the challenges and pleasures of life in London helped to mask the deep pain of exile. Those first years in England were tough and I consciously decided to become British, to delete that past life in South Africa. Now I realise it was my way of coping and in the next twenty years, life changed course completely. However, in the mid nineteen- eighties I found myself drawn back to South Africa and became increasingly active in the ANC in London, involved in its activities, absorbed by the final struggles against apartheid. Shimoni Gideon (2003) “Community and Conscience, the Jews in Apartheid South Africa” (David Philips) 6 This was the important era in my life, as I completed, in some senses, the circle. The most significant parts of my life have been involved in political activism, radical engagements, from the time I became conscious of such things. The buzz for me has come from politics. Not only have political ideas, analysis and events been in the fore of my thinking, doing and talking, but they too have been the focus for much of my most pleasurable and painful experiences. A story has to end, and this memoir lay unfinished for years and now, living in Cape Town, I have been able to complete it. My chronology is conventional as I begin with details of my ancestors and first memories. By researching my heredity, I uncovered and remembered the past, many strands obscured by time. - and put together a more complete history of myself. Lorna Levy Cape Town, November 2005. 7 PART ONE: CHAPTER 1 MY ROOTS: THE HIDDEN PAST. My story may not have been written but for the desire to find out about my grandfather who was brutally murdered in 1906, on the road to Brakfontein Farm, near Hopetown, scene of the discovery of the first diamond. My father was four at that time and the youngest of five children. Up to the time I was in my thirties, living in London, no one had ever told me about this grandfather. There was a silence around Philip Borkum and I assumed he had just died young when my father was a little boy. I suppose it was something too shameful to mention or commemorate. Then casually, one day my father dropped the fact…perhaps he thought I knew it. I was shocked by the news and about a century after that event, when I, a rather disorientated returned exile in Cape Town set out to uncover this. I knew it to be an important case for me to unearth - a key to my own roots and identity. I did establish that my paternal grandfather, Philip Borkum had been reluctant to leave Riga. His family were prosperous hat merchants but my grandmother Ella persuaded him to join the rest of her family, including her parents, my great grand parents, in Kimberley. It was there, in Fergusson Lane, on 7 August 1902 that my father was born. I played around with parallels as I tried to unearth the details. Was the path of my own life a journey along the road to Brakfontein Farm? Metaphorically speaking, is the road back to my roots my own murder? How would it have affected my life had Philip Borkum lived to rear his five children? There were so many possibilities that I dreamed of as I scoured the South African Library and the Archives until I found the Court Record of the murder. ---------------------- As soon as I was able to consider such things, I believed myself to belong to two very different and in fact, opposite traditions. The Heydenreichs on my paternal grandmother’s side were a definable tribe. They were 8 bold, articulate, successful and exotic. The older generation were educated, spoke German together and came from Riga. While the Jankelowitz side were an altogether less sophisticated group on my mother’s side, there were fewer of them and they were decidedly more foreign and orthodox Jews. And so paradoxically, although my maternal grandmother, Chaie Riva, from Ponevyz in Lithuania, acted as a mother figure to me in my early childhood I still took my family identity from my father’s side. My maternal grandfather, Yehuda Leib Jankelowitz died a year before I was born and my name, Lorna, was after him, however vague that connection now seems. He married twice, his first wife was a granddaughter of the venerated Vilna Gaon, and she died in childbirth. Although my grandmother, many years his junior, was related to his first wife, we have no evidence to prove that she too was related to the Vilna Gaon. On that side of the family, therefore, I cannot claim any special ‘yiches’. The Heydenreichs, on the other hand, imparted their unshakable faith in themselves to all their children and grandchildren and this stood us in good stead. It was self-confidence, a feeling of equality to all others, which my mother scornfully referred to as ‘our blue blood.’ --------------------------------------- ELLA HEYDENREICH (married Philip Borkum, Abraham Glatt) When I was a little girl, she was a towering figure in my life. My father adored his mother and her whole family and many others revered her. My mother felt slighted by her, judged she felt as an inferior choice of wife for my father. This message came through to me too. It helped to skew my perception of my mother. As it was, because of her authority and majesty, I chose to describe myself as the granddaughter of Ella. She was the matriarch of her large family and had a huge influence on all her relatives. As a child, I referred to her as ‘Big Granny’ because she

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