Flight from Europe

During World War Two and the closing of the Suez Canal, Cape Town reverted to its maritime role as “the tavern of the seas,” the last point of Europe—albeit colonial Europe—before sailors entered the East, both mythical and actual. Troopships, battleships and supply vessels filled the great bay of the harbour, and soldiers being ferried from the European theatre of war to the East or Australians and New Zealanders heading for Europe poured off the transports and made free throughout the city. As schoolboys in our early teens, we found this marvellously exciting. The Australians in particular, with their disrespect for authority, conducting the traffic, turning cars upside down and taking girls into the woods above the city where we could spy on them, giving us their cap badges, their uniform buttons—the Australians delighted us. The hint of anarchy was a faint echo of the terrible disorder of war, its transgressive violence tamed to a sort of carnival.

Of course we knew there was a serious, even existential conflict going on, one that might even effect our little clique of Jewish boys. (The news was beginning to leak through.) We almost all had relatives fighting “up north,” as the desert campaign in North Africa was referred to, and we were kept fully informed by the radio. Our parents, looking worried, listened to Winston Churchill’s defiant, energizing speeches; his sonorities emphasized that what was happening in the active war zones was very different from the pleasant ebullience in our streets.

But for the Hoffman family, the protagonists of Lily Poritz Miller’s novel, In a Pale Blue Light, the war in Europe is a close, terrifying threat. The particulars of the Holocaust are at first vague. All they and anyone know is that an obscene terror is being enacted—obscene in the most classical sense of the word: hidden, rumoured but not present, not known in its exact details and overall dimension—but by the end of the novel they learn of the murder of their families. The Hoffman parents arrived in South Africa in 1929, 15 years before the beginning of the story in 1944. They had left their families behind, people who were not distant memories but psychologically present by way of correspondence and profound attachment, and with hopes of reunion. In a way, the Hoffmans have never fully arrived in South Africa, even though Joseph, the father, has established a successful factory and there are four children, and even though they have settled and prospered. They move in a European bubble, a kind of spaceship equipped socially for the new planet at the tip of Africa on which they have touched down. Their friends are people from their old village in Lithuania (aheim, as they say); they speak Yiddish to one another and, as with most immigrants, the food they serve at their gatherings are the traditional dishes of their European Jewish culture.

Alien that they are, they cannot avoid the surrounding reality of South Africa, its habits, the other groups, the rumbling politics of racial discrimination. The Hoffmans have taken on many of the folkways of other South African whites. They have domestic servants all of whom are black or “coloured.” They are kind to them, and—as the novel clearly sets forth—often deeply attached to them. But it is the attachment of master and servant, a paternalistic mercy corrupted by the sinister imbalance of power characteristic of South Africa. Even before the formal policy of legal apartheid— the National Party will not sweep into power until 1948—the social patterns in Cape Town are cruel and discriminatory, although relatively benign when compared with the rest of the country. The “custom of the land” allows the easy criminalization of the beloved, loyal (Uncle Tom?) male servant Maputo and facilitates the treachery of Elsie, the maid.

Settled South Africans (the white natives, that is) are perceived by the Hoffmans through the caricaturing lens of social distance: the English speakers are snobbish, the Afrikaners uniformly reactionary, boorish, anti-Semitic and—with their own songs, folk dances and celebrations of their national mythology—only too sympathetic to the Nazis.

Joseph’s sudden death is the motor for the novel. Sarah, the mother, is totally devoted to her children, harassed by a vulgar friend/enemy from the old country, cheated by a hypocritical “family friend” also from aheim and eventually saved by yet another landsman. While Sarah stoically assumes her burden, her children act like stereotypical offspring of settled white South Africa. Libka, the teenage daughter, is from the beginning sullen, angry, rebellious. She is a principled misfit and suffers the problems of both her family and the social structure of South Africa in a state of constant seething resentment. When she and her even more disaffected friend Anya are together, they speak of their hatred of apartheid and their love of the Communist Manifesto. They share their enthusiasm for Dostoevsky, for Lermontov. They sound like orators at a revolutionary rally, more like Rosa Luxemburg than two sad troubled teenagers. Libka is a compendium of rectitude crossing the most dangerous of social barriers, the sexual: she is romantically attracted to a Cape Malay boy. Beryl, her brother, could be a vain, confused, selfish, foul-mouthed adolescent of any period. The younger children are less developed in the narrative, serving mainly to swell the family burden carried by the redoubtable Sarah.

In the preface Lily Poritz Miller writes, “Though my story is drawn from memory, it is a work of fiction and I have allowed my imagination to transcend reality.” As fiction the story is simple and predictable. As memory? Who can dispute another’s memory, particularly in matters of family relationships, but in the domain of shared memory there are details here that are simply wrong. There are no “cliffs” in Muizenberg, the seaside suburb that was the erstwhile Miami of South African Jews. To this day South Africans do not speak of automobiles but of cars” and South African Jewish festive meals do not include knishes; they are a North American Meichel, or treat.

One wants very much to like a novel such as this with its heart in the right place and its championing of decency, kindness and acceptance. But the dark characters of In a Pale Blue Light are too stereotypical and its better ones too hectoring. The book seems to be merely an outline, a sketch for a grander novel waiting to be written about families like the Hoffmans and the South African Jewish diaspora. The trajectory of the family’s experience—their flight from Europe and settlement in South Africa, their tragic loss of family in the Holocaust, their involuntary involvement in the complexities of South Africa’s terrible politics and their departure for America at the end of the novel—is the subject for a more developed, nuanced fiction.