Apartheid was flourishing in my growing-up years. Jews were widely thought of as being opponents of this system of racial injustice, their liberal values being deeply rooted in a history of persecution in eastern Europe. But there was also unspoken support for the government, not wanting the status quo to be disrupted or the  economic and social superiority over the black populace to be undermined. And some felt that the government’s focus on the blacks kept its attention away from the Jews, who might otherwise be targets.

Many South Africans, Jews, and non-Jews, who could not accept living in a racially split society, with its black underclass, left the country. Some were forced to leave, to escape arrest because of their political sympathies or activities against the system; some had no choice about remaining, being imprisoned or under house arrest as victims of the government’s relentless persecution. Many of the names of whites in the forefront of the struggle for freedom were Jewish.

Many of my South African countrymen came to Canada. Not all were politically motivated to leave; economic concerns played a large role, too. One woman, a recent immigrant in those days, said she was pleased to be without servants: “They eat you out of house and home. They put butter on both sides of the bread.” These sentiments may not have been specifically Jewish, but I was shocked to hear them spoken unabashedly by a Jewish mouth.

My father’s brothers and sisters were Lithuanian immigrants. When they spoke amongst themselves, they spoke Yiddish. I know some Yiddish words like chutzpah, but most others that I knew have faded from memory. But a word I do know, I heard  often amongst Jews and still do –  schwartze, meaning “black person,” usually said in a derogatory way.

I cringe when I hear it come out of a Jewish mouth. And now when on a trip back to South Africa, I visit an old friend or family member, someone with whom I grew up and with whom I have an almost identical background, and I hear the black maid being shouted at, my level of discomfort is great, and I find it difficult to accept that, in spite of shared childhood experiences, we still have such divergent attitudes towards right and wrong.

*  *  *  *

My mother thought of herself as a liberal, a relative term in apartheid South Africa. It did not mean she was at the forefront of the fight against the apartheid regime, standing in silent vigil along the roadside as a member of the Black Sash, an organization of white women demonstrating against the increasing enforcement of oppressive racial segregation. My mother treated our servants better than most, fed and housed them comfortably – all again, relative.

We had several servants – Nanny, the cook/housemaid, Simon, the houseboy, Emily the wash-girl, and Daniel, the driver. Nanny had started off as just that – nanny to my sister Pauline, but as they shared a name, to avoid confusion, she was called Nanny. Nanny was promoted to housemaid when my sister and I were too old to need one. Sarah and James, our original house servants, were then retired to Top Location, one of the nearby non-white townships.

Every day Nanny brought early morning coffee up to our rooms, a South African tradition. Cooking was part of her job description. She wasn’t a great cook, but then we ate pretty routine meals, and it was my mother, like many South African housewives, who did the fancy stuff like baking – chocolate cake, cheesecake, biscuits, and the traditional Jewish dishes at High Holiday times. Simon did the rough work, sweeping, polishing, and cleaning the windows. Emily came to wash on Mondays, and to iron on Tuesdays, with her baby strapped to her back in a blanket.

Nanny had two daughters, Tsotsie (little rascal) and Girlie, who lived with her. It was illegal in those days for them to be there, but my parents left it alone. Tsotsie’s wedding was held on a summer’s day in our backyard. My mother said it would be OK for the black guests to come inside to use our downstairs washroom.

*  *  *  *

Shirley, the black maid, who had worked for my sister since my nephew was born and who had looked after him through 13 years, summoned her son Stephen to the event. All dressed up, he looked like a city boy, even though in those days he was not allowed by law to live there with his mother. The two of them sat in the synagogue, two sole black figures in the white congregation, proudly listening to my nephew read his portion of the service.

In the early evening, Dan’s friends started arriving. This was their time to celebrate. The grown-ups continued to drink outside in a desultory fashion, the communion of the evening scotch. At one time I went indoors for some more ice. I looked into the room where the youngsters were dancing, nice middle-class kids having a good time. Also watching them was the black boy Stephen, still all smartly dressed in the clothes specially bought for today, a boy the same age as the rest, but not so much as even noticed by them as he stood in the shadows, a boy as bright as the rest, but it would never even have occurred to them to include him.

Did he feel left out? Would he even dare to think in those days that he could be one of them? I stood helplessly in the doorway watching him watch the others. 

Ismé Bennie grew up in South Africa and immigrated to Canada, where she won numerous honours and awards for her contributions to Canadian television. She now writes full time. This is excerpted from her book White Schooldays: Coming of age in Apartheid South Africa (Createspace).