My brother Gideon was almost three when I was born, and was thrilled at my arrival. So much so that he stood on our balcony, announcing to anyone on the sidewalk below: “ I have a sister! I have a sister!” But he was a bright kid, and it didn’t take him long to realize what had hit him. Within a few days, he pulled my father aside, man to man, and proposed that they get rid of me by throwing me off that very same balcony. But Dad resisted the pressure, and things got still worse for Gideon on the sister front before they got better as I, a blue-eyed baby, went on to grow a head of blonde curls, a rarity in the land of the Jews. When our mother took us for walks, strangers would stop her on the street to marvel at her beautiful baby. Mom, sensitive to her swarthy firstborn’s jealousy, would always say something like, “And look what a lovely big boy I have too!” But coming from her, that didn’t help much; Gideon still felt second best.
So he proceeded to take his revenge by trying to convince me that being blonde was a major disadvantage, not an asset. For his first attempt, he explained to me that since I was the only blonde person in the family, I was clearly adopted. A changeling. When that failed, he tried to persuade me that blonde hair was really ugly. At this he was more successful; one day, when I was four or five, I got hold of my father’s Brylcreem, a greasy substance that men used to oil their hair with in the fifties. I smeared an entire jar on my head, and announced happily to my horrified parents: “Look! I’m not blonde anymore!” Nevertheless, despite Gideon’s best efforts, I did eventually come to learn, if not accept, how blondes are viewed in our culture. When I was in high school, a nosey English teacher required us to write an essay describing ourselves. I began mine with “Blonde hair, blue eyes, surely the portrait of an angel you would think,” and went on to dismantle these heavenly expectations.
Gideon also had other ingenious ways of getting me to cooperate in my own torture. One day, our mother came into my room and found him slapping me with a ruler on my legs, which were by then covered with red welts. “Gideonni, what are you doing?” she cried in horror. “No mommy, it’s good for me,” I explained. It makes me strong!”
Although I was born in Israel, I spent much of my early childhood in South Africa. When I was just over a year old, my mother took us children to visit to her parents in South Africa. My father, who was still an officer in the Israeli army, stationed in the General Headquarters, had to stay behind for a while. He had known for about a month at that point that that the war now know as the Sinai Campaign was about to break out, but this was secret information; he couldn’t even tell anyone about it, not even my mother. On the day she arrived in South Africa, she was stunned by newspaper headlines crying out that war had erupted in the Middle East.
My father was released from the army a couple of months later. The war was over by then, but he didn’t head for South Africa yet. He had been studying for a law degree all that time, and had to complete his articling. It was five months before he finally joined us, a long time for a toddler to be separated from her father. When he arrived, I took one look at him, and announced: "That's not my daddy, that's Gideon's daddy. My daddy will come back soon." The plan was for us to all stay for one month longer, and then return together to Israel. But just before our planned departure, my grandfather died suddenly of a heart attack. My earliest memory is a vivid image of me dancing on the sunny lawn with my teen-aged aunt on the day of my grandfather’s death. I had just turned two, and have no memories of my grandfather. I must have liked him, though, because a few days after his funeral I said to my grandmother “Enough dying. It’s time for Saba to come home now.”
My grandfather had run large businesses, an ostrich farm and a feather factory. The farm was huge, over two thousand acres; when my mother first visited it, she was shown, as she stood at the entrance, a mountain range in the far distance. “That’s how far our farm goes,” she was told. Ostriches were the main business, and there were over a thousand of them. But there were also about a hundred cows (some even pedigree! my mom says), there were sheep and hens, and they grew wheat, corn, and vegetables in the fields. About 12 colored farmhands lived on the farm and did all the work. The feather factory was also large, and employed about twenty colored workers who performed tasks such as sorting ostrich feathers by quality and dying them. The best feathers were sold to manufacturers of fancy hats, the less perfect ones were used to manufacture brooms and dusters at the factory. My grandmother had no idea how to manage these businesses, so my parents decided to stay on for a few months to allow my father to put things in order. And then they decided to stay on for a few more months, and a few more; we ended up living there, in my grandmother’s house, for almost five years.
Apartheid was still the law of the land, and South Africans classified as Black or Colored lived in abject poverty and had few legal rights. The White minority, on the other hand, lived in extraordinary comfort. A White family did not have to be wealthy to employ several colored servants. It was the norm, and my family was no exception. My grandparents had two maids, who lived in a room behind the back porch, a gardener, who lived in a shack in the yard, and a driver who lived elsewhere. When my mother arrived with us for an extended visit, a nanny, Elsie, was hired as well. Elsie was only thirteen when she started working for us, and my mother was at first reluctant to take on such a young girl. But Elsie turned out to be great with us kids, and our whole family soon grew to love her. But then Elsie found a boyfriend. Her parents considered the young man objectionable, and worried that Elsie would bring shame on their family, so they decided to marry her off to an older man, a widow with a child. They insisted that the widow was a decent man and that he would be good to Elsie, giving her a better life than she would have if left to her own devices. And so they gave him permission to bring Elsie back to the township where he lived and marry her. When he arrived at our home with a friend to get her, Elsie, still barely a teenager, in love with another man, and desperate to avoid her intended fate, clutched desperately onto the legs of our dining-room table, screaming. It didn't help. The men dragged her off, and that was that. My mother wept for days afterwards, but there was nothing she could do.
At first, thinking we would spend only a short while in South Africa, my mother
tried to protect my brother who, at five, was old enough to ask questions, from
the realities of apartheid. One time, she bought a new set of china, and the
store owner, without asking, added some enamel cups for the help. Gideon wanted
to know why they got different cups. Mom explained that the enamel cups were
especially good: They were big and attractive, and you didn’t have to
worry about them breaking, so the cooks could use them safely in the bustling
kitchen and the gardener could take them outside. Gideon looked her in the eye
and asked: “If they are so wonderful, how come I didn’t get one?”
The realities of apartheid could not be escaped.
One of our maids, Betty, had worked for my grandmother for years, and had become
“part of the family.” After we returned to Israel, my father would
look her up on each of his annual visits to Oudtshoorn, they would exchange
family news, and he would give her some money to tide her over until his next
visit. Betty’s son, Michael, was about Gideon’s age, and they often
played together. Once Michael even saved Gideon’s life. There was a large
orchard at the back of our house, and a stream ran through its bottom. We were
not allowed to play there, but Gideon and Michael ventured out there one day
anyway, and Gideon fell into the stream. He would have drowned if Michael had
not pulled him out.
Years later, when we were all adults, my mother, sitting in her home in Israel, got a phone call out of the blue. A male voice with a heavy South African accent announced: “Miss Esther, It’s Michael!” Michael had become a sophisticated, cosmopolitan young man who had traveled the world with the South African merchant marines. His ship had docked in Israel for the night, and he was hoping to see us. Needless to say, my mother invited him immediately to spend the night at our home. Gideon and I were living elsewhere at the time, but my parents and Michael spent hours talking, finally on equal terms, my mother thought. But despite his worldliness, part of Michael’s experiences growing up as the little colored son of our maid had clearly stayed with him. The next morning, as my mother was frying some eggs for him, he slapped his thigh in amazement. “I can’t believe I slept in Master Gideon’s bed last night!” he exclaimed, “and Miss Esther is cooking me breakfast!!!”
As a pre-schooler, I liked to hang out in our Oudtshoorn kitchen, sipping coffee and trying to follow the servants’ conversations. The servants were so amused by my coffee consumption that they composed a little poem about me, in Afrikaans. It’s last line proclaimed, supposedly in my voice, that “My real name is Coffee Can.” I still love coffee, and my husband learned early in our relationship that there was no point in trying to have an intelligent conversation with me before I had had my first morning cup.
I don’t have many memories from Oudtshoorn—I was too young—but I vividly recall a trip to our ostrich farm. The ostriches’ feathers were being plucked that day; ostriches shed their feathers naturally each year, but if they were allowed to do so by themselves they would trample and destroy them. So farmers try to pluck them just before they are due to be shed spontaneously. But ostriches are big, dangerous birds with sharp claws that could rip you open, even kill you with a well-placed kick. So how do you pluck their feathers? It turns out that all you have to do is cover their heads, and they become docile, harmless, and easy to manage. So, the African farmhands were chasing the ostriches around the field, trying to drive them, one at a time, into a wooden cage-like structure that was open only on one side. Once they had managed to force an ostriches into this structure, one of the farmhands would get in front of the wildly stomping bird and place a sock on its head. The ostrich would calm down immediately, and the farmhands would pluck its feathers. I remember seeing a drop of blood on an ostrich’s back where a feather had just been plucked, and wondering whether it was true that the procedure didn’t hurt the ostrich, as my parents had assured me. My compassion for the plucked birds not withstanding, I loved eating their meat, especially in the form of dried strips, a little like beef jerky, called billtong. Ostrich meat is not kosher, and I wasn’t allowed to eat it, so someone must have smuggled it to me; I don’t remember whom.
My father went on business trips often. Once, before leaving for a trip to Cape Town, I asked him to bring me back a bicycle. I still re member my disappointment when he arrived carrying a tricycle instead. But I soon grew to love that red tricycle, and would ride it all around town. At the age of three, I was already fiercely independent, and insisted on going places by myself. So, off I would zoom on my tricycle, with my nanny following discretely behind, far enough that I didn't know she was there. Once, I went into a store frequented by my grandmother, chose myself a toy iron, and nonchalantly charged it to Granny’s account. Another time, I rode to the library and checked out a book. Much to my embarrassment, the book turned out to be in Afrikaan. Gideon had a field day with that one… Still, I continued to pretend that I could read; in restaurants, I insisted on perusing the menu carefully before placing my order. I think my mother always had mixed feelings about my relentless need to be independent, which has stayed with me. Years later, on my wedding day, as Paul and I walked hand in hand down the aisle to be married, my mother muttered, with a mixture of admiration and annoyance, "It's just like Ziva to give herself away!"
By the time I was four I could read for real (I think my aunt taught me), and I have been a voracious reader ever since. It was not unusual to see me running out of the bathroom, pants rolled down and bottom exposed, looking for a book to read while doing my business (nowadays I plan in advance…). A while after I started reading, my parents noticed that I always held the book I was reading off to the right of my face. My nanny had noticed this much sooner, but thought it wasn't her place to say anything about it. By the time the problem was diagnosed--a lazy left eye--it was too late to correct it, though the doctors did try. I wore glasses with a patch over my right eye for years, and would do special eye exercises at the eye doctor's office. I had to fix my head to a piece of equipment that showed each eye a different image. I would see something like a bird with one eye and a cage with the other, and my job was to try to get the bird into the case. If I could, that would mean that my eyes were working together. But I never could, and still can't. As a result, I don't have three-dimensional vision, and will never be able to be a Ping-Pong champion like my mother was or become a pilot. Oh well.
I was a tomboy from the start. I had practically no interest in dolls and other “girl stuff,” and preferred to rough it up with boys instead. Before my mother fully realized the implications, she used to sew me beautiful dresses. For the most part, I refused to wear them (though she did manage to take some pictures of me donned in these admittedly lovely dresses). My favorite clothes until I became a teenager were Gideon’s rugged, scruffy hand-me-downs. I remember explaining to one of my soccer buddies that even though I had the body of a girl, I had the soul of a boy. And, back in Israel a little later, on one Purim holiday of masks and costumes, I decided to dress up as a South-African school boy. I put on Gideon’s old Oudtshoorn school uniform—a green cap lined with yellow stripes, a green blazer over a white dress shirt, scratchy gray woolen shorts, and knee-high gray socks—and I strolled proudly around the neighborhood. I was quite upset when people recognized me—I had hoped and believed that I had manage to masquerade as a boy, at least for one day. I had grown a long blond ponytail by the time I was five but naturally, I wanted to cut my hair short so that I could look more like a boy. My mother, who did not share my enthusiasm for a haircut and must have wanted to put it off for as long as possible, perhaps hoping I would change my mind, told me that I would have to wait until Granny, who had returned to Israel by then, saw me in all my glory. For we were about to go back home.
My parents couldn’t take life in Oudtshoorn any longer. My father, a sparkling, witty, wide-ranging conversationalist when in the company of his intellectual peers, has never known how to converse with men who were not quite in his league. He had few men to talk to in Oudtshoorn. My mother, no less intelligent, has always enjoyed talking to people from all wakes of life. Send her in a limo to the airport, and she will tell you the driver’s entire life story the next day. But she, too, felt confined by her small, often petty community. (When I read Amy Tan’s first novel, I was struck by how similar the Chinatown mothers she described were to the Jewish ladies of Oudtshoorn described in my mother’s stories). Most important, my parents wanted to bring us kids up as Israelis and Jews; they realized that if they didn’t move fast it might became too late. We were both in school already, and neither of us spoke Hebrew. Gideon had even become reluctant to mark Jewish holidays in public—not wanting to stand out, he refused take matzoh for his school lunch on Passover. It was time to return to Israel. And so we did, in Feb. 1961.
This page updated March 3, 2004.