Why they left Lithuania for South Africa. A longer than usual essay.

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From 1795 to 1918, Lithuania was part of the Russian Empire. After that, it became independent until 1940. From the 1880s onwards, many Jewish people, including my father’s parents, left Lithuania to settle in what is now South Africa. This is relatively well-known. But what they left behind them in Europe is not as well recorded. However, while researching my family’s histories, I came across a few accounts of life in the places from which they moved. In this essay, I will share with you what I have found out.

Carl Joubert, who was, if not Jewish by birth[1], certainly sympathetic to Jews. He wrote this in 1905, after having lived for nine years in the Russian Empire:

“Has the world forgotten the massacres in Kieff in 1880, 1881, and 1882 …or in Kischinieff and Gomel in 1903? In Kieff the houses of Jews were fired and pillaged. The children were torn from their mother’s breasts and dashed to pieces before their eyes. Four hundred souls were destroyed in two days. … Then at the massacre at Kischinieff last year the young Jewish girls were outraged before the eyes of their parents. One frantic woman tore herself from her captors and rushed to her daughter’s rescue, but a blow from the butt of a soldier’s rifle scattered her brains. The Pristav and the Politzmaister, with police and soldiery, looked on at the slaughter.[2]”

Apart from the places mentioned by Joubert, which are in Ukraine and Belarus,, there was also much antisemitic activity in Lithuania. This, alone, must have influenced Jewish people to think about leaving Lithuania.

Most Lithuanian Jews (‘Litvaks’) arrived in South Africa from about 1880 onwards. A few Lithuanian Jews may have arrived earlier, but as Saron and Hotz wrote in their book The Jews in South Africa:

“Louis Herrman … asserts that before 1880 there were barely half a dozen Yiddish-speaking Jews to be found in ‘such records as there are of Jewish communal activity’. He adds that before 1870 ‘not one is to be found’. It can safely be accepted however, that there were a number, though they probably escaped notice because the Yiddish-speaking Jew of the time was not likely to take an active part in the affairs of the anglicized congregations. Moreover, strange as it may seem, formal affiliation to congregations was not a part of his tradition. The Lithuanian synagogue did not have a formal system of membership. Again, those who had stopped in England on their way to South Africa often adopted English-sounding names and were, therefore, not recognised as Yiddish-speaking.”

All my father’s ancestors, including his parents, were ‘Litvaks’, born in Lithuania. I have never visited Lithuania or, for that matter, any other parts of the Pale of Settlement. My impression of it, derived from what little I have read, is that it was not a wonderful place to live for Jews or anyone else. Romantic images of it conjured up in films like Yentl and Fiddler on the Roof are probably almost completely fanciful. The few books I have read written by Isaac Bashevis Singer and by Esther Kreitman do not paint an agreeable picture of it. I can well understand why so many people were happy to leave it when they were able. But what was the place like?

The following description from Heshel’s Kingdom by Dan Jacobson, a South African born novelist who revisited his Litvak ancestor’s homeland, gives an idea of the landscape which my father’s ancestors populated:

“Ploughed fields turned into pasture lands, pastures into woods, woods into water, water into tussocky heaths and marshes … There were no mountains; hardly any hills. Dirt roads stretched between one cluster of steep-roofed habitations and the next.”

Mike Braude (1910 – 1985), my father’s first cousin once removed, wrote about his birthplace Girtegolla[3] in Lithuania in his autobiographical work The First 30 Odd Years. Although Girtegolla was not Plunge or Telsiai, places from which my father’s family hailed, Mike’s descriptions give an idea of what these little places with large Jewish populations might have been like.  He wrote:

“A wavering zig-zag line of business establishments loosely connected the two impressive ends of the square. There were the saloon, feedstore, and inn. There were the dry goods emporium, blacksmith’s shop and apothecary. The same side of the square also accommodated the half dozen or so residences of the local aristocracy, such as it was. All the others, the artisans, peddlars, the poor, lived on the few unpaved streets that bracketed the square in such a way to suggest that the surveyor who laid them out had a severe drinking problem. A rough count may have produced some eighty, ninety, such homes, with one or two rooms each, lean-tos and outhouses, with backyards that trailed off eventually to merge into the corn and wheat fields of adjacent farms”

Usually, Braude continued, Girtegolla had:

“… all the animation of a well-managed cemetery. My eyes might follow the slow progress of an occasional peasant cart as it trundled and creaked on its lumbering passage through town, pausing perhaps for a moment or two at the apothecary for spirits of camphor, or at the saloon for the comfort of spirits. My attention might shift to someone on foot who had the effrontery to invade what would have otherwise remained an almost perfect still life. … I might have concentrated on the exact center of the town where, under the cooling shadow of a huge elm tree, the bulk of the town’s canine population was gathered in more or less solemn assembly, no doubt discussing the increasingly grim prospects of the world going to the men.”[4]

Braude continues his description of his hometown by describing how:

“Market days produced an incredible change in the scene. The square underwent a complete transformation. It became a stage with the curtain rising on a gay, colourful pageant, alive with the teeming presence of vendors and customers bargaining over open cases of bright gingham shawls, glistening metal trinkets, sturdy iron cookware. Farm wagons loaded high with redolent baskets of apples, carrots and onions, attracted with magnetic force crowds of peasants, soldiers, and townspeople, all milling around and jostling one another in a confused babble of barter and trade.”

These excerpts help me to visualise village life in Lithuania before WW1. Mike, who was a small child then, remembered it when he wrote his book in the 1970s from the comfort of his home in the USA.

Several extracts from an un-published memoir (dated 1967) by my father’s grand-uncle Elias Chaim Halperin (1889-1977) illustrate an aspect of Jewish life that many Litvaks recall fondly, namely scholarship – studying , discussing, interpreting, and analysing Jewish religious texts. He wrote:

“My Uncle Chaim sat and studied and my aunt made a living.”

Also:

“My grandfather sat and studied all day and my grandmother had a store and ‘made a living’.”

Lest that makes a poor impression, it would only be fair for me to quote the sentence that follows:

“In addition to studying, my grandfather devoted himself to the sick of the shtetl[5].  It is told that one year when there was an outbreak of cholera in the shtetl, my grandfather didn’t go to shul[6] but went to visit the sick to bring them food and medicine.”

Furthermore:

“My father spent his days studying in the yeshivas[7].  They made a living from an inn which was left to them by my mother’s father, my grandfather.  My father spent all year studying at yeshivas outside of Telz but he came home for all of the holidays.”

These extracts reveal what many Jewish men did – devote themselves to religion – in Lithuania while their womenfolk toiled to earn a living.

Halperin’s memoir includes the following:

“My grandparents had four sons.  The oldest was Rafael Hirsh.  He was a carpenter and he had many children.  From what I hear, some of his children were in Baltimore under the name of Hirshon.  The second son was my father, Meyer.  The third was called Chaim and the fourth was my uncle who lives here (in America).

Because of the military service laws of the time, one of the brothers went by the name Hirshon, two other brothers by the name of Halperin (and the third by the name of Harrison).”

The surname changes described above were to mislead the Russian officials into thinking that the younger brothers of Rafael Hirsh were not eligible for service because they were all ‘first born’ (from different families) rather than siblings (from the same family). First born Jewish boys were exempted from military service in the Russian Army, but the younger ones were not – and they had to serve for 25 years[8]. Evidently, this ruse worked.

It should be evident that there were plenty of reasons – persecution, economic, military – for Jews wanting to leave Lithuania. Many like Elias Chaim Halperin and Bill Braude went to the USA, but others – a significantly large number – chose to head for South Africa. By the late 1880s, when Litvaks began arriving in South Africa, diamonds and gold had already been discovered, and back home there were many pogroms. A few Jews arrived to prospect for these treasures but most of them came to enjoy the economic opportunities offered by South Africa’s recently found wealth. As family members settled in South Africa, others followed in their wake. Other Litvak Jews were attracted to the country by articles that they read about it in newspapers[9] such as Hamelitz – a Hebrew daily published in the Russian Empire.

The benefits of migrating to South Africa became well-known to those in the homeland, but reaching the place was far often from being an easy ride. Not only were there the physical hardships of travel and difficulties related to bureaucracy, but there were also the surprises that the migrants encountered as they emerged from a materially backward part of Europe into the modernised world beyond it. Mike Braude wrote:

“… my first encounter with a flushing toilet in a Mazhaik[10] hotel was … serenely reflective. … In the palaces of oriental caliphs the worthy pulls a cord and instantly a troupe of dancing girls emerges from behind damask curtains to regale and entertain their master. In the villas of wealthy Europeans and middle income Americans a cord is pulled and a valet materializes with a silver tray bearing a decanter of brandy, a siphon of soda and a baccarat tumbler … In Mazhaik one pulls a cord and water comes rushing from a pipe into a porcelain basin.”

Rosie Kaplan, whom we met in 2003 at Tulbagh, where my father’s father had a general store until the early 1930s, described to the how her elder sister Goldie discovered the delights of electricity when she spent a night in London on her way from Minsk to South Africa during WW1. She told me[11] that her father:

“…  was Charles Kaplan. He came to South Africa from the Russian city of Minsk. He left his pregnant wife, Sara, behind in Minsk. She followed him to South Africa 6 years later with Rosie’s elder sister Goldie who was born in 1912 in Minsk. They got stuck in Warsaw for a long time during the First World War. At night they would be locked into the ghetto in Warsaw. She had to sell all her gold jewellery to buy a false passport to get them to London. On arrival in London, they were put up in the Poor Jews’ Shelter[12]. Goldie had never seen electric lights and spent all of her first night there playing with the switch!”

Apart from demonstrating the new experiences that Goldie had after leaving Minsk, this illustrates some of the hardships experienced during the journey.

My father’s parents and grandparents were amongst the multitude who made the difficult journey from hostile Lithuania to South Africa. Dad’s maternal grandfather, Joseph Halperin (1870 – 1949) was born in the Lithuanian town of Telsiai (‘Telz’). His wife Dvora was born in Plunge (‘Plungyan’)[13] three years before him. They were married in Plunge on 5 April 1891. Joseph arrived in the Cape Colony in 1897, aged 27. Their future son-in-law, my father’s father Solomon Yamey, arrived in South Africa in 1900 from Lithuania. His story and those of his in-laws provide a good illustration of the lives of Litvak immigrants after they arrived in the Cape. One day, I will relate the story of their lives in South Africa.

Writing about the difficulties and hardships faced by the Litvaks migrating to South Africa and elsewhere reminded me of the waves of migrants trying to enter Europe from places in Africa and Asia. Unlike my father’s ancestors and their fellow Litvaks, who were welcomed in their new homes – at least until the 1930s in South Africa, only a small handful of today’s migrants are made welcome after their usually arduous journeys to Europe.

Notes:

[1] He died in 1906. Albert M. Hyamson wrote in the 23 February 1906 issue of the Jewish Chronicle that Carl Joubert, whose father’s surname was Grose, had no Jewish ancestry. He was most probably a Jewish proselyte, having been converted by a Rabbi in Warsaw. [From: http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/authors.php?auid=56940, accessed 19th April, 2015]

[2] See: The Truth about the Tsar and the Present State of Russia, by C Joubert, publ. by J.B. Lippincott Co, Philadelphia:  1905.

[3] Now known as ‘Girkalnis’.

[4] This description reminded me of what one of my uncles told me about the outer suburb of the Australian city of Perth, where one of his children lives. He told me that the most exciting thing that happened there was when the one car of the day drove past the house.

[5] Village or small town

[6] Schul = synagogue

[7] Jewish educational establishment

[8] https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/244

[9] “By 1884 a correspondent from the little Lithuanian town of Neustadt-Sugind…, writing to the Hebrew newspaper Hamelitz, was able to report that extensive emigration to South Africa was taking place from the towns and villages of Lithuania. He described how 2 000 people had left a dozen nearby towns for England and America, and ‘the majority went to South Africa’ … and that ‘majority had prospered in their affairs and become wealthy and respected merchants’.” The correspondent was Dov Baer Hoffmann from Lithuania. In 1889, he arrived in South Africa, and a year later began the first Yiddish weekly in the country, Der Afrikaner Israelit.

[10] Mažeikiai, a city in northwestern Lithuania.

[11] I recorded this in my travel diary a couple of hours after I met Rosie in Tulbagh in 2003.

[12] “The shelter was founded in 1885 as the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter to deal with the large number of Jewish immigrants arriving in London’s East End from Eastern Europe.” (http://www.jewishmuseum.org.uk/jb-Jews-Temporary-Shelter-deed-box, accessed 31st May, 2015). See also: http://www.jewisheastend.com/shelter.html (I accessed this on 31st May, 2015).

[13] Plunge’s Jewish community was one of the earliest in Lithuania. Its cemetery contains stones dating back to the 16th century. In 1897, 55% of the town’s population were Jewish (See: Lithuanian Jewish Communities by N Schoenburg & S Schoenburg, publ. by Jason Aronson, Northvale, New Jersey: 1996).

Discovering the American author Herman Melville in London

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DISCOVERING HERMAN MELVILLE IN LONDON

Because of some problem with the bus route I wanted to use, I walked from Trafalgar Square to Embankment Underground station. On my way I passed the southern end of Craven Street. There I saw an old building – the end of a terrace – with a commemorative plaque, which I examined.

The circular blue plaque commemorates the house in which the author of “Moby Dick” – Herman Melveille (1819-1891 – lived for a few weeks at the end of 1849. He had come to London:

“… secure a publishing deal for his new novel “White-Jacket”, or, the “World in a Man-of-War” (1850) and to gather material for an account of the American revolutionary Israel Potter (published 1855).” [see: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/herman-melville/ ]

Originally known as ‘Spur Alley’, Craven Street was rebuilt by the Craven family in about 1730. Melville stayed in one of the surviving original buildings.

Apart from Melville, Craven Street included amongst its dwellers: Benjamin Franklin, the poets Mark Akenside & Heinrich Heine, and the haematologist William Hewson.

Franklin’s home is open to the public. I have visited it once. But when I visited it a few years ago, I had not known that Melville had lived in the same street, albeit briefly.

Had the bus route been functioning normally, many years might have passed before, if ever, I saw the sign commemorating Melville.

The German author Gunter Grass and Calcutta (Kolkata)

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The Bengal Biennale was in progress while we were staying in Calcutta in January 2025. One of its venues was at Arts Acre – Museum & International Centre for Creativity (‘Arts Acre’) – artists’ village on the eastern edge of the city of Kolkata, 10.7 miles directly east of Flurys on Park Street. It was founded in 1984 by the artist and cultural activist Shuvaprasanna Bhattacharjee (‘Shuva’,born 1947). This essay was inspired by one of Shuva’s paintings on display at Arts Acre.

The painting that attracted my curiosity is “In search of Oscar”, in which Shuva depicts the German author, illustrator, and artist Gunter Grass (1927-2015) as Oscar – a character in his novel “The Tin Drum”. The painting is supposed to evoke solidarity with the marginalised people in Kolkata.

In July 2026, I visited an exhibition of paintings from the collector Kiran Nadar’s collection of Indian art. There was a painting by KG Subramanyan (1924-2016). Painted in 1990, it is called “Kali and Gunter Grass”. For those who do not know, Kali is a Hindu goddess usually depicted with her tongue sticking out of her mouth. She is often associated with destruction, death, passing of time, and more.

Seeing Subramanyan’s painting reminded me of Shuva’s painting of Grass at Arts Acre. I became curious about these paintings of Gunter Grass. Soon, I discovered, and then purchased a book, “Show Your Tongue”, published in 1988, and written by Gunter Grass. Not only does it contain both prose and poetry, but also a collection of dramatic sketches drawn by the author. The title refers both to Kali and a common facial expression.

The book is in three sections. One is Grass’s diary of his stay in Kolkata between August 1987 and January 1988. Another is a collection of the vivid sketches the author made while in the city. And the third is a long poem that incorporates his observations, reflections, and feelings about the city. In brief, the book expresses Grass’s fascination of, and his despair about, the city and its amazing poverty, as it was in 1987. Concisely, his diary manages successfully to produce a brilliant portrait of Kolkata, its problems and its history. The book is a ‘must’ for anyone with an interest in Kolkata.

Three pages into the diary, the following is written:

“The painter Shuvaprassana shows us the private art school he runs on Calcutta’s north side … I am asked if, at the start of the new year, I will dedicate an artists’ colony (‘art acres’) near Dum Dum Airport. My half-assent is taken as a full one.”

Throughout the diary section, there are references to Shuva., with whom he spent much time. Near the end of the diary, after having returned from a trip to places outside Bengal. Grass wrote:

“Home from our trip, here I am, as promised, at the dedication of ‘arts acre’. Shuva looks happy … He leads us, the first group of visitors, through the exhibition pavilion, where my etchings are hung. On a brass plate embedded in the wall next to the date of dedication, my name is engraved.”

Given this, and his friendship with Shuva, it is not surprising to find that the artist portrayed Grass in one of his paintings.

As for the other painting, “Kali and Gunter Grass”, its creator, KG Subramanyan was Professor of Painting, Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan. This institution founded by Rabindranath Tagore is north of Kolkata. Gunter Grass visited it during his stay in Kolkata in 1987/88, as well as at an earlier date. It is most probable that the author met Subramanyan.

Two paintings depicting Gunter Grass and my love of Kolkata led me to purchasing a copy of “Show Your Tongue”, which has given me great pleasure. On our next visit to the city, I hope to visit Arts Acre again, and this time, I will look for the plaque with Gunter Grass’s name.

Kiev or Kyiv? Garlic or not?

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Food stores in the Marks & Spencer retail chain used to sell Chicken Kiev. Since the outbreak of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, this company have renamed the same stuffed chicken product as ‘Chicken Kyiv”. Which ever name you prefer, what is in the packet is a chicken breast stuffed with butter and garlic. It is delicious.

The first time I ordered Chicken K in India was at Kwality – an old-fashioned restaurant on Calcutta’s Park Street,

The décor in Kwality might have been considered fashionable or even ‘modern’ when it opened in 1952, but it looks as if nothing apart from regular painting has been done to it since then. Stepping into Kwality is like stepping back more than 70 years, but that is not a problem. Both the Indian and Western dishes served by the gentlemanly waiters, who are simultaneously both haughty and obsequious, are tasty and well-prepared.

The first time that I visited the restaurant, I ordered Chicken Kiev. It took about 45 minutes to arrive, but it was superb. Unlike British restaurants where this dish is usually pre-prepared, at Kwality, it is made fresh, from scratch. The copious hot butter that oozed out of the Kiev was without garlic. That is how this dish is often served in other restaurants in India, and is true to the original recipe, which, some say, originated in a hotel in Kiev at the beginning of the 20th century. However, its origins are not at all certain as Tony Jackman wrote (www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-03-03-throwback-thursday-chicken-kiev/):

“… it’s a chicken breast fillet that has been pounded and given a stuffing of cold butter, then crumbed and cooked. That is the tradition as found in hotel restaurants, particularly in the latter decades of the 20th century and in recent decades in supermarket freezers as a ready-meal. What it is not, purists say, is a chicken breast filled with flavoured butter. Chicken Kyiv is seen as a modern variation on Côtelettes de Volaille, or kotleta de-voliay, a stuffed chicken breast dish which a host of sources cite as being of Russian origin with French influences. In the 1840s, Russian royals, as they were wont to do, sent their chefs off to Paris in search of new fare for their bounteous table, who then returned with a dish for chicken “cotelettes”, or cutlets, stuffed in the way we know Chicken Kyiv to be.”

A year or two later, we visited Kwality, specially to have their delicious Kiev again. When I ordered it, the waiter said that I would need to wait an hour and a half for it to be prepared. Realising that this probably meant that it was too much trouble for the kitchen to prepare one portion, I ordered something else.

So, I leave it to you: Kiev or Kyiv? Garlic or not?

An Indian novel set in India

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A FEW MONTHS before January 1994 when I set off for my first visit to India, my soon-to-be wife gave me a copy of the recently published A SUITABLE BOY by Vikram Seth.

I began reading it, and gave up after the first 300 pages.

33 years later, in September 2026, I began reading it again, and I have just finished reading the entire novel.

The book has over 1470 pages. Each one of them is a joy to read – not one of them is dull.

After having visited India more than 50 times and lived with my wife’s Indian family, the contents of the book make a great deal of sense to me. Words, traditions, and ways of life, which made little or no sense to me when I first tackled the novel in 1993, enhanced my second reading of the book. However, if one is not familiar with India and its recent (1950s) history, a reader might get less enjoyment fom the book than I have. That said, the novel provides a panoramic survey of the lives of various strata of Indian society during the first few years after 1947, when the country became independent.

It is amazing that the author has written a novel that remains compelling, exciting, interesting, and amusing over so many pages.

Anyone with even the slightest interest in India will gain much from reading “A Suitable Boy”.

Albanian migrants who financed a school in a village in Albania

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Today, I came across an interesting article ( https://substack.com/home/post/p-202342382 ) about Albanians in New York City published on Substack by Jake who lives in that city. Reading it jogged my memory. I remembered something we came across on our visit to Albania in May/June 2016.  Here is what we found in a tiny village in the south of the country. …

Tuesday, 31 May 2016. Many people had encouraged us to visit Dardhë, which is a village south of Korçë. To reach there, we had to drive via Korçë onto the main road to Ersekë. This thoroughfare was appalling. Its tarmac had been removed in anticipation of repairing the highway. We drove at snail’s paste along it, bumping constantly on the sharp rocks that lay along the roadway and raising clouds of white dust like thick smoke. After a while, we turned off onto a smaller but much better surfaced road that led across the plain to the village of Boboshticë. Soon after passing this place, we began climbing through wild, barren rocky landscape. Gradually the road began climbing ever more steeply and curling around sharp hairpin bends until we crossed the col of a pass, and then we began driving through a well-forested mountainous landscape. The village of Dardhë is perched high on these hills with a view down to a cultivated valley far below.

We parked our hired car close outside a stone building, which bore the date 1936. It had a newish sign saying it is the Pleqesia (presbytery) of Dardhë. It is close to a small steeply sloping park full of trees that provided much shade, which contains a building that houses a museum (the Muzeu Foto-Historik), which was closed. The headstone of the arch of the museum’s main entrance has the date 1924. A plaque on a wall, cracked in one corner, topped with a 5-pointed star, and dating back to the Communist times, read (roughly translated):

“In this building during the national liberation war important international meetings were held concerning the regional character of the province. It was the centre of partisan forces and warehouse for food and propaganda materials.”

Dardhë is mentioned twice in Roderick Bailey’s book about the SOE in Albania, The Wildest Province. It fell into German hands, and out of fear the inhabitants appeared to welcome them. Various members of the SOE recorded having spent time in the village, notably Major JG Hibberdine, who kept a detailed diary of the awful times he and his comrades-in-arms spent in Albania (between late 1943 and mid 1944). Major P Kemp recorded that the villages’ inhabitants were “Catholics”, and that 2 of his fellow ‘Britishers’ attended mass in a church above Dardhë. Given that the church in the centre of Dardhë is Orthodox, Kemp must have been referring to Shen Pjeter, which is in the hills above the village. In fact, on our way to Dardhë, we stopped briefly at a point above the place where there is a roadside shrine dedicated to St Peter and bearing a Roman Catholic, rather than an Orthodox, cross.

The museum building bore another memorial plaque, which recorded the fact that the building had been constructed with input (financial?) from the Dardhë society, named “BLETA”, its members residing in the USA.  I contacted someone who works with BLETA, which still exists and has its headquarters in Worcester (Massachusetts), and was told that the present-day museum was originally a school, constructed in 1924 with help from the organisation. Many inhabitants from Dardhë emigrated to the USA. According to one source, their families formed the nuclei of the first Albanian communities both in the USA and in Romania.   One of these migrants from Dardhë was Josif Pani (1868-1934), who was deeply involved in the important American Albanian patriotic groups, notably Vatra (meaning ‘hearth’), whose members included prominent Albanians such as Faik Konitza and former Prime Minister Fan Noli.

In the park next to the museum there is a monument, a bust of a man wearing a neck scarf (like those worn by Communist ‘young pioneers’) and on his head what looks a like an Indian ‘Nehru cap’. It is dedicated to the memory of partisans fallen in WW2. The base of the monument has an embossed metal plate recording the list of the dead. These people died on various dates between 24th December 1942 and 20th August 1944. More than half of the 17 deceased died on 9 September 1943. All those listed were born in Dardhë and were described as “rene deshmor”, which means ‘martyred’.  On 24 December 1942, Dardhë was attacked by Italian forces. On the 9th of September a year later, a day after the Italians had given up their alliance with the Germans, their forces left Dardhë, sacking the place before doing so. 

We visited the Orthodox church of St George, which is close to the museum. It was being restored. The BLETA organisation is helping with this. There was scaffolding on its bell-tower. Many of its fittings, including a lovely iconostasis and 2 intricate chandeliers made with gold coloured double-headed eagles, are of recent manufacture. An elaborately carved wooden icon stand appeared to be far older.

I wandered around the village, looking at its old stone houses that perch on the steep slopes of the mountainside. Their roofs are tiled with overlapping flat stones that resembled thick slates. There was a stone arch over the gates to a drive that led to a building near where we had parked. The stonework of the side of the arch that face inwards has a 5-pointed star embedded in its headstone. The side of the arch facing the street did not have one. Next, we had drinks in a large hotel above the village, the Dardha. Its overhanging roofs made it look like an alpine chalet. We were almost the only customers in this vast place when we entered it. Although Dardhë is undoubtedly a pretty place and full of interest, it failed to impress me as much as it had those who recommended that we visit it. However, the drive to and from it was well worth doing because of the spectacular scenery that we saw.

The thing that made the village truly remarkable for me was seeing the school, now a museum, whose construction had been financed by migrants from the village, who had made themselves a more prosperous life in the USA.

This is an extract from my book “Rediscovering Albania”, which is available from Amazon. The book contains my comparisons of what I found in Albania in 1984 with what I saw in 2016.

Portrait of an Indian by an artist from Wales

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Nina Hamnett (1890 – 1956) was a Welsh artist and writer, who became known as the ‘Queen of Bohemia’. Between 1906 to 1907 she studied at the Pelham Art School and then at the London School of Art until 1910. In 1914 she went to Paris, to study.

Nina returned to London, where she continued her Bohemian lifestyle that had begun in Paris.

Her artistic style was post-impressionistic and noticeably avant-garde occasionally. She was a fine portraitist as can be seen at a small exhibition dedicated to her paintings at the Tate Britain., which will continue until 23 May 2027.

Amongst the portraits at the Tate, there is one depicting an Indian. Hamnett’s studio notebook recorded the model as “Chanda”.

The Tate’s label suggests the subject was “Apurva Kuma Chanda”. ‘[Kuma’ is most probably ‘Kumar’.] Apurva was known to have been close to Nina’s circle of friends.

I became curious about him.

Apurva was a son of Indra Kumar Chanda of Silchar in northeast India – in Assam. Apurva and his brother Anil Kumar Chanda were very close to the great Bengali cultural figure Rabindranath Tagore, and promoted his work, notably his songs that became known as ‘Rabindra Sangeet’. He lived from 1893 to 1967, and would have been about 15 when Nina painted him in about 1918.

Looking at the picture, which depicts a young man with a drink in his hand, he looks like a very mature 15 year old – or, possibly, the painting is not of Apurva, but someone else.

Apurva or not, the paintings of Nina Hamnett are well worth seeing.

A murder in my family

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In 1949, a year after my father, Basil Yamey married my mother, one of his cousins arrived in South Africa from Europe. Hendrik (aka: ‘Henry’, ‘Hendrik’ and ‘Heinrich’) Jami set foot on South African soil after an arduous trip. Tragically, his life ended suddenly and by foul means in South Africa.

Hendrik was a son of Moses and Dora (née Peisel) Jami. The Peisel family owned a brewery in Budapest. Moses was a brother of Basil Yamey’s father Solomon Yamey. Hendrik was born in Plunge in Lithuania in 1895, soon after his uncle Solomon had migrated from Plunge to South Africa. His brother Kurt (1901-1984) migrated to Rhode Island in the USA, and another two brothers, Isidore (1903-1946) and Max (1905-1990), followed their uncle Solomon to South Africa between the two World Wars. Records in the National Archives of South Africa suggest that Hendrik was planning to go to South Africa to join his brothers there in 1939. However, it took him 10 years to reach the country.

Hendrik, who had been living in Budapest for several years, must have perceived, as did many other Jewish people, that the Nazis in Germany were beginning to make life very uncomfortable for Jews. Even after the Second World War broke out in 1939, Hungary – an ally of Germany – was not occupied by the German troops; this only happened in 1944.

From late 1938 onwards, Hungary invaded territory beyond its eastern and south-eastern borders. This increased the length of its frontier with the Soviet Union.  Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union in June 1941. I assume that it must have been sometime before that date when Hendrik began his journey eastwards towards Shanghai. This city in China was just about the only place where there was no administrative difficulty for Jews to gain entry. According to Sally Ogle Davis writing in an article[i] published by the on-line Jewish Journal in 2002:

“It wasn’t that the Chinese deliberately set out to help the Jews of Europe, it was simply that among the warring colonial factions who ran Shanghai — the French, the British, the Japanese — no one wanted to control the passport department because no one wanted to take ultimate responsibility for the chaotic province. And in chaos lay an escape route for the Jews.”

Many of the Jews who fled to Shanghai travelled by boat via the Suez Canal. Others, including Hendrik, travelled by train across Stalin’s Soviet Union to China. Shanghai, their destination, had an established Jewish community. This was founded by wealthy Baghdadi Jews, including members of the Sassoon and Kadoorie families, in the 1870s.

Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese in 1937[ii]. It was then that the port allowed entry without passport or visa, making it a place that Jewish refugees could gain access freely if they could travel so far from Europe. By the time that Hendrik reached the city, there were already many Jewish refugees there, and conditions were becoming crowded. By 1943 there were at least 18,000 Jews sheltering in Shanghai. It was then that the Japanese forced them all to live in a small ghetto, a three-quarter square mile area of Shanghai’s Hongkou district. Conditions were cramped and difficult to say the least, but the Jews, most of whom might have already perished had they remained in Europe, were safe for the time being.

The Shanghai Ghetto was liberated in September 1945, and by 1949 most of its Jewish inhabitants had moved away from China. Hendrik Jami was amongst these. When he arrived in Cape Town in 1949, he was met by one of his brothers, Max Jami (who was to change his surname to that of his uncle Solomon: i.e. ‘Yamey’). Max took him to his home in Wolsely, which is just under 90 miles north-west of Cape Town and 10 miles south of Tulbagh where Solomon Yamey used to live. Hendrik lived with Max and his family for a few weeks while he acclimatised to his new surroundings and a new way of life.

Eventually, Hendrik moved to the town of Worcester, which is about 26 miles south-east of Wolsely. In time, he bought the Afrikaanse Koffiehuis in the centre of this small town in the High Street near where it is intersected by Porter Street; the establishment still exists. The Koffiehuis was both a café and a general store. Hendrik’s nephew, Max’s son Mervyn, remembers visiting his uncle once a week on Sundays. He recalls that Hendrik was a very friendly man who got along well with everyone. He was very generous, always plying his nephews with gifts of confectionery. Mervyn told me that his uncle’s generosity extended well beyond his family. Once, for example, he donated a huge sum of money, £1000, to the Dutch Reformed Church in Worcester. Mervyn also remembers that Hendrik did not believe or trust in banks, and kept much money in his living quarters which were situated behind the shop and separated from it by an almost enclosed yard. Another source of information, the Cape Argus newspaper, said that Hendrik was often seen around the town with his bulging wallet stuffed full of banknotes.

In early 1956, Hendrik sold his business to a Mr Athanassiou. He continued to work in the shop as its manager, and lived as before in his quarters behind the shop. Shortly before midnight on the warm summer night of the 10th of January 1957, Hendrik Jami, the manager of the Afrikaanse Koffiehuis, was seen taking a leisurely stroll along Porter Street in the small town of Worcester in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. Next morning, Mrs Rena Erasmus, who worked as an assistant at the Koffiehuis, arrived at half-past seven to find that her workplace was still closed. Usually, it was open by then. She knew that Mr Jami always opened the shop promptly at five thirty in the morning. He was always telling her so.

Alarmed, she telephoned the café’s owner, Mr Athanassiou, from a public ‘phone box, and told him about the unusual state of affairs. He told her to look at Mr Jami’s rooms behind the café. What she found there was very unpleasant. Mr Jami was lying fully dressed on the floor of his kitchen. His hands were tied behind his back with a handkerchief, and there were bruises on his throat. A cloud of flies hovered above him, buzzing. He was dead. His murdered body was described in gory detail in the Cape Argus. It made front page news on several consecutive days. After some days, two different rewards were publicly offered for any information that lead to the arrest and conviction of Hendrik’s murderer(s). Both Mr Athanassiou and Hendrik’s brother Max offered rewards of £100 (worth well over £1000 today).

The crime was not resolved immediately. Eventually, the murderer and his accomplice were discovered and arrested. Hendrik’s nephew Nat Yamey told me that they were both sentenced to death in the Circuit Supreme Court in Worcester.  In those days the death penalty was by hanging, and he remembers that his father told him that they were both hanged in Pretoria Central Prison.  

[i] http://www.jewishjournal.com/arts/article/europes_harms_to_chinas_arms_20021004, accessed March 2015.

[ii] A friend of mine, the late Sir Henry Norman Brain (1907–2002), was a British diplomat in Shanghai when it fell to the Japanese. He remembered that the seemingly unending fighting stopped suddenly. Soon after this, he asked a Japanese general what had made the Chinese surrender so suddenly. He was told the Chinese soldiers, who were all mercenaries, had accepted a bribe from the Japanese to do so.

I can only remember but a few mnemonics that I learned at school

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I do not know why I suddenly thought about them when waking this morning, but several mnemonics came to mind. All of them I learned at school. Here are a few:

BODMAS : Brackets Of Division Multiplication Addition Substraction

Referring to the order in which arithmetic operations are carried out.

SOHCAHTOA : Sine=Opposite/Hypotenuse Cosine=Adjacent/Hypotenuse Tangent=Opposite/Adjacent

MR VAN STAMPED : First letters of French verbs that use etre in the perfect tense. Monter, Rester, Venir, Arriver … etc

ADOLPHUS HITLER : The vowels in Adolphus can follow a c cedilla – ç – in French, but those in Hitler cannot.

Although mnemonics are to aid the memory, I cannot recall any others. Can you?