Raphael Shevelev

When my parents were very young, only a few years older than my grandson is now, they fled their Baltic homes from the growing ugliness of European anti-Semitism. Much of the Western world was closed to them, so they found refuge in South Africa. In 1936, in their mid-twenties, they were married in Cape Town’s Great Synagogue. I was born in December 1938, just nine months before Hitler’s troops invaded Poland and thus started the Second World War. Other family members, not having had their foresight, were murdered in the Holocaust. As a child growing up in Cape Town’s beauty and delightful climate, I became aware of a distant war, and from time to time evidence would spill into my young life. Opaque blinds had to be lowered over windows at night, and Cape Town, being a significant port city, harbored allied shipping. We were constantly warned “Don’t talk about ships or shipping.” There were men in military uniform in the streets. The adults listened to radio news each night. I was usually excluded, and there was little talk of war otherwise. I do remember the triumph of VE Day, and some guarded speech about concentration camps, and missing relatives. Not much was said, and my questions went unanswered. After high school, I became an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town, and there some of my curiosity about the war was satisfied. I spent much of my freshman year in the basement of the University’s Jagger Library, reading and reading and reading the daily newspapers of the entire period from September 3rd, 1939 to the German surrender on May 7th, 1945. After graduation, I enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, to do my Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Political Theory and Government. A year later, after a few odd jobs, I applied for, and was granted, my first academic position, as Lecturer in Political Science and Public Administration at the University of South Africa, Pretoria. A few weeks after my appointment, I returned to visit my parents in Cape Town. While I was there, they surprised me by taking me to a fancy showroom and buying me a watch. A luxury Swiss watch encased in real gold. I already had a serviceable steel watch, and asked why they had gone to the expense of purchasing this costly gift for me. It seemed such a departure from their usual modesty and parsimony. When we got home from our shopping, my father drew me aside. “Mother and I came here from a continent where Jews were ejected from universities, both as students and as instructors,” he said. “Now we have a son who has just begun an academic career. The watch is to celebrate this critical, joyous moment in our lives.” By the end of this year, 2016, The Gift will be fifty-five years old. For much of that time I’ve worn inexpensive battery-powered watches. But recently, I removed it from its decades-long hibernation in a bank safe deposit box. It’s on my wrist as I write. It works! Years ago I had thought of passing it along to my grandson, but he is a free American child, born to American-born parents, and has little capacity to understand what the watch represents. Though it weighs only a few ounces, this watch is freighted with a whole range of cataclysmic history and improbable triumph. I think I’ll wear it myself for a while, mostly for the depth and texture of memory. But then I may return it to the vault. _________________________________________________________ © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries

I wore my best blue suit to meet Harry Springett. In a place where even modest dwellings were named, my parents took me to “Fairhaven,” 15 Flower Street, The Gardens, Cape Town. Mr. Springett was the first photographer I’d met. A little shy of my first birthday, Dad and Mom wanted their only child captured on film. Harry Springett obliged by placing me on a small mattress and making a photograph of me. It was black and white, of course, but he had mastered the art of painting in color using transparent oils. As a teenager I tried doing that with a photograph of a girl I admired, and discovered one of the difficulties: the painting was done under the light of a 40-watt incandescent bulb, and in the morning, seeing it in sunlight, it was ghastly. I never gave it to her. Two years later, my parents took me back to “Fairhaven” again, to be photographed just before going to Kramer’s Barbershop for my first real haircut. I don’t remember Mr. Springett’s appearance, but I do remember being hoisted onto a tall box to sit for the next picture. My parents didn’t ever own a camera, though I hasten to add that photography had been around for over a century. Though Mother was an excellent seamstress and could do elegant miracles with a treadle Singer sewing machine, using a camera would have struck her as being an impossibly complicated task. Though Father did eventually learn to drive a car (not well), photography would have been beyond his technological comfort zone. Other than the two Springett photographs, there are almost none of my young life, except for high school class pictures, of which I have only one from a crude copy machine, and my first driver’s license picture. So why am I writing this? In December 1950 I calculated that at the end of the century, if I survived, I would be sixty-two. It seemed impossibly ancient. As it turned out, both my parents died before reaching sixty. As I write, in a few hours I shall be seventy-six. It has been a life of – to put it gently – great texture. I have experienced most unexpected changes in health, relationships, professions. But at this time of my life I have reached a place of growing satisfaction. I adore my wonderful wife and the happy home we’ve made. I love my children and grandchildren. I’m glad to have become an American. Being an only child, the immigrant son of the immigrant parents I left behind, I have somehow been able to acquire remarkable “siblings,” dear brothers and sisters who mean the world to me. December 10 is a fine date on which to celebrate a birthday. It is the day when, in Stockholm and Oslo, Nobel Prizes are awarded. This year it is also the sixty-sixth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in which, incidentally, my father-in-law had a role. A quiet sense of celebration will permeate this coming week. December 17th will mark the fiftieth anniversary of my departure from South Africa. It is also the date on which, in 1974, I became a citizen. I do not believe it is a delusion that the years have taught me a lot, and I’m grateful for all the education, formal and informal. I’ve learned to love, to write, and to produce art. At last, the man and the infant feel at home and at peace with each other. _________________________________________________________ © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries

My wife nudged me awake and said “I have a pain in my belly.” “Not surprising,” I said, “given all the boerewors (farmer’s sausage) we ate at the neighbor’s braaivleis (barbecue) last night. Would you like Alka-Seltzer?” She said “I don’t think that’s the reason. I think the baby is coming!” Well, that certainly changed the day. She kept a small suitcase of personal items under the bed. It came along with us to the Marifont Nursing Home, a Catholic maternity hospital just two blocks away. I wanted to be present, but the sisters blocked the door to the labor room, and I was left to stand outside the front of the hospital awaiting our physician’s arrival. The doctor’s little Austin came tearing onto the parking lot and I think he jumped out before the car was at a complete stop. Running past me, he shouted “She’s four-fifths dilated!” I had no idea whether to be thrilled or concerned. Time went by. It must have been around 11 a.m. on November 11, 1963, when he emerged and said “You’d better start collecting a dowry!” I took that to mean a daughter had arrived. It was not until years later that I developed a fierce opposition to the idea of dowry, and not out of parsimony. The day after Judy’s birth, a very large bouquet of roses, six dozen reds, arrived at the Marifont with a gold-engraved card, “From the Mayor and Mayoress of Pretoria.” The Mayor, Prof. Piet van der Walt, was an academic colleague who occupied the office adjacent to mine. We had an odd, but oddly affecting, relationship. Our politics and social views were about as oppositional as they could be. He was a staunch nationalist, supporter of the apartheid regime. And yet, there was an affectionate mutual respect. He had been born to a really poor family, became a barber, and eventually acquired the education that culminated with his doctorate in criminology. Our friendship really began on the day when there had been a vote of censure on South Africa’s racial policies in the U.N. General Assembly. Piet came into my office, slammed the morning newspaper on my desk and asked me to explain why Israel had voted against South Africa. I said “Piet, I am a South African citizen, and though Jewish, not in any way responsible for Israel’s vote, though I agree with it. If you want to write a protest letter to the Israeli Foreign Minister, feel free to do so. And, by the way, your name is derived from your Dutch ancestry. How would you feel if I asked you to explain the similar vote by the Ambassador of the Netherlands?” The bouquet of roses for Judy’s birth was a conciliation gesture. Judy was thirteen months old when we arrived in the U.S. She grew up to have a powerful humanitarian voice, become a very good student at the University of California, Davis (in my former department) and Columbia University, New York, and perhaps above all, a passionate lover of dogs. In her eighth year, Judy accompanied me on a trip from the West Coast to Europe, South Africa and Israel before we returned home. She was a wonderful companion with a great surprise awaiting me. In Cape Town, where we hosted a formal dinner for family and friends, Judy, in her floor length gown, was asked if she would like to live in South Africa. With the demeanor of a kindly teacher addressing a less-than-gifted student, she fluently and emphatically rejected the idea of living in a society that not only tolerates, but promotes racism. Our hotel was within sight of Robben Island where, at that moment, Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. Later that evening, as we were about to retire, I answered a soft knock at the door. Two of the “Cape Coloured” staff, waiters at our dinner, surreptitiously asked to meet the white child who had so spoken out, and her father. Many years later, Mayor Piet won a U.S. Leadership Exchange Grant, and invited me to lunch with him in San Francisco. He wanted to tell me that his politics had been wrong, and that he could envision a new democratic South Africa. I was so glad to hear that. Judy, a student of Latin America, has lived in Mexico for many years. After years as an administrator of an American college extension in Mexico, she has reverted to her first love, establishing a school for the care and training of dogs (and by necessity their people). She turned fifty-one this week. I’m amazed at the passage of time and the woman she has become: courageous, gracious and optimistic. Healing from a unilateral mastectomy, she still voices her concern for others. A lifelong giver, she is learning that, in her own words, “to accept from others with grace is no small task.” _________________________________________________________ © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries

Davey Neipris of Boston, Mass., gave me a left-profile portrait of George Washington. It’s crafted in metal, fractionally short of an inch in diameter, and cost him no more than 25 cents. That was in the days when you could get a cup of coffee, including a refill, for 5 cents. It was my first contact with American currency. At home, I emptied one of my father’s matchboxes – Lion Matches – lined it with cotton, and placed the coin there for safekeeping in a drawer near my bed. It was one of my childhood treasures. By “treasure” I mean not intrinsic value, but much more importantly, fantasy value. There were other American treasures: an old Parker fountain pen, feeding my fantasy of writing, and a Viewmaster. Mother took me for a walk to Zetler’s Pharmacy. We didn’t hold hands, because I was already seven years old, in my school uniform: shined black shoes, knee socks, short navy pants, blazer, striped tie and an English schoolboy’s cap. She let me choose the one disk she could afford, with its matched diagonally opposed pairs of tiny color film images, which, rotated in the mechanism of the Viewmaster, produced a binocular stereoscopic effect. I chose San Francisco, showing the city, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Golden Gate Bridge, and what was then called the Oakland Bay Bridge. I looked at it thousands of times, wearing out the mechanism, hoping that some day I’d see San Francisco Bay. Now all I have to do is look out the west window of my study as I write, though not with my old Parker, which was lost in the translation from Africa to America. I keep extras of that portrait of George Washington in the car. I’m a patriot. Growing up in Cape Town, South Africa, was to be inundated with American products, music, movies, cars, and the sense of fantastic huge cities, wide-open spaces, multiple cultures, gigantic opportunities. For me, the attraction was compelling. There was nothing quite as boring as a Sunday in South Africa, with its Sunday Observance Act of 1896, where everything closed down to accommodate the blue laws demanded by the Dutch Reformed Church. It was a perfect opportunity to dream of the vibrancy that dominated my imagination of America. Even now, in my fiftieth year in the United States, Sundays always arrive with a feeling of greater freedom. As a young political scientist, I was well educated on the South African political system, which, in many of its more beneficial ways, derived from England: the sovereignty of Parliament, and English constitutional history and law. The less beneficial ways – the perpetration of legal racism, the abrogation of habeas corpus – don’t bear repeating here. Not easily available in local academe, I therefore had to take upon myself the reading of U.S. constitutional history, and began with the Federalist Papers, loaned to me by a friend at the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria. This was augmented by visits to the United States Information Service Library in Johannesburg, and by readings in history and fiction. To admit the truth, I also saw movies that starred Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Lauren Bacall, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Ava Gardner, and someone called Ronald Reagan, who had nice hair, wasn’t very convincing, and I hoped would find another way of making a living. On a warm Pretoria Friday evening, eleven days after my daughter Judy was born, I strolled to a local corner shop to buy milk. A colleague happened upon me, and said “Did you hear? The President was shot.” Thinking it was the South African President, Charles Robberts Swart, a stalwart supporter of apartheid, I shrugged, not really caring. He said, “No, Kennedy!” I remembered to buy the milk, then returned home to hear the short-wave broadcast from the Voice of America. As did so many around the world, in mourning I deeply felt the tug of the New World. Then the opportunity arrived. I could apply for a visa to the U.S. if I could land a university fellowship through the Fulbright-Hayes program, administered by the Institute for International Education and the Embassy. An interview with a committee of four, two South African scholars and two American diplomats, had to be endured. I knew that the two South African interviewers, both Afrikaner nationalists, would give me lower scores, not too low to be suspect. The Americans, wise to this, scored me excessively highly, so on December 17, 1964, accompanied by my first wife and daughter Judy, my American adventure began. That first day, walking down a dressed-for-Christmas Fifth Avenue in New York City, was magical. I was quite sure that I had chosen well, having turned down a British Council Fellowship, thinking that becoming fully British, with its ancient sovereign culture, was going to be harder than becoming fully American. This was borne out, when, some years later, a colleague at the University of California (Davis) remarked, “It’s hard to think of you as a foreigner.” My first Fourth of July was pleasant enough, but the date, not being an essential part of my own history, passed in a blur of beer-and-hot-dog conviviality. Over the years, my appreciation of the significance of that date has deepened, but I remain indifferent to the beer, hot dogs and fireworks, seduced instead by the courage and foresight of that day in 1776. In 1967, our first American daughter was born. Ruth Ann’s arrival gave us an even greater stake in our chosen home. But the struggle to become American was just beginning. There had been no choice but to accept an Exchange Visitor Visa, which required repatriation after a course of study. There was no way in hell that I was going to return to the racist police state that South Africa was still then. The alternatives were to hire the services of an expensive immigration attorney, or to do what a good student of politics might do. The campaign was on, … Read more

On a unique occasion, before I entered elementary school, my mother spoke of her birthplace. She called it “Yelok,” the Yiddish form of Ylakiai. It was then a tiny village, a shtetl, in northwest Lithuania, with a population of less than one thousand. About half of them were Jewish. My mother’s family name was Abramson, her father, Simon. I don’t recall her mother’s name, and mother quietly refused any further inquiry. By the time I was a teenager, I realized that she was taking refuge from intense pain, and I didn’t pursue the subject. I know nothing about my maternal grandparents. My mother, Dora, was orphaned early in her life. I believe there were five children, four girls, one boy. The eldest, a teenager named Esther, struggled to hold the remnants of the family together, and must have had help from the community. Eventually, as I’ve searched whatever traces of my childhood memory are available to piece the story together, the children were farmed out to foster parents. My mother somehow found her way across the nearby Latvian border to the coastal town of Libau (Liepaja), and found a home in the Shevelev family, whose second son Jacob, my mother’s age, later became my father. To my mother, the name “Esther” was sacred, and in recognition of this, it became part of my older daughter’s identity. Of the family of five children, three survived the Holocaust: my mother, her older sister Tzila, and their brother Hershel, known for the rest of his life as “Abe,” his foreshortened surname. The others were murdered, though where and how I cannot say. Uncle Abe was my favorite. He laughed a lot, and seemed to take a greater proportion of pleasure out of life than the other adults in my family. For a relatively recent immigrant to an obscure part of the African continent, he had done quite well for himself. He acquired an automobile dealership, a pleasant home in Windhoek, the capital of South West Africa (now Namibia) and a small sheep farm near Otjiwarongo. Of the few pictures I have of my mother, one has her seated behind the wheel of Uncle Abe’s Buick convertible, with my Aunt Tzila in the passenger seat, ca. 1930. I’m sure Abe must have taken this picture of his sisters. I believe he was interested in photography. He gave my mother the gift of a Voigtländer bellows camera, which, many years later, still unused, became my first. As I sift through my memories of his adventurous life, and of his appearance, I see a man whom I resembled in my forties and fifties. He listened to me, and engaged me much more than the others did. We were not only relatives. He was my first adult friend. Abe was a freer spirit, a Freemason who married “out of the faith,” as I have, and couldn’t have cared less about what the rabbis might have thought of his eating bacon. Nor do I. His visits to Cape Town were happily anticipated, and he stayed with us except when on business. Then, he would find accommodation at the Assembly Hotel in Queen Victoria Street, not far from the House of Assembly, the lower chamber of Parliament. An invitation to dine at the hotel was my favorite treat (menus! choices!) and a real challenge for my kosher-observing parents. A shock greeted us on the first occasion. On a table just beyond the entrance to the dining room was a heavily decorated suckling pig. It was my first sight of a dead quadruped sucking an apple. Dad and mom sidled past, averting their eyes. As I followed behind, Abe whispered “It’s quite delicious.” Uncle Abe became a special hero of mine on the only occasion I visited his home. That took a long overnight train journey north from Cape Town, to the town of Upington, on the banks of the Orange River. He and his African driver Jonathan came to fetch us in a grey Buick sedan. The five of us set out westward across dirt tracks and the desert, where the car bogged down in the sand. Not another soul in sight, as the adults all tried to free the car from the obstinate earth. But the wheels just spun, and we were trapped. I didn’t realize until later that being without food, water, or blankets for the desert night could be problematical. After a brief consultation, Abe set off alone on foot, with a reassuringly firm stride. An anxious time passed before we saw a distant mirage, figures far away. As they got closer, we could make out Abe, an older bearded Herero tribesman, and two donkeys spanned together. I remember running toward them, and being lifted in Abe’s arms. Jonathan tied the donkeys to the front bumper and, with them pulling, all the adults pushing, the car was moved onto firmer ground. Uncle Abe gave the Herero some money, and I witnessed, for the first time, I believe, the lovely African politeness in which all gifts are accepted with both hands cupped, as though one hand were insufficient to bear the weight of the generosity. The journey continued, until we encountered a barbed wire fence, interrupted by a wide metal gate across our track. On the other side, in our path, was a very large bovine. I, the city kid, assumed a bull, but in retrospect it may have been a cow, an enormous creature, staring at us. How would we negotiate our passage? Abe got out of the car, opened the gate, grabbed hold of the horns, and shoved the bull/cow out of the way. It must have been a cow. My uncle, my hero, twice on the same day. More than sixty years later, in the hilltop fortress of Chittaurgarh, Rajasthan, a rather less fearsome Indian cow stood blocking my way. The needed solution was now part of family lore, so I grabbed its painted green horns and pushed. We Abramson-Shevelevs know what to … Read more

We talked with each other for twelve years. To be honest, I did most of the talking, he did most of the listening. I knew he was actively engaged because he would cock his head slightly, just so, and look at me unblinkingly with his warm, beautiful brown eyes. We started at a conversational run, no baby talk. From the beginning it was all about politics, international relations, war, peace and the logistics of nutrition. The latter, I admit, was more to his liking, and I never managed to discover whether he was indeed a Keynesian, as I am. Now, in hindsight, I think he was secretly Friedmanesque, but wanted to keep the peace between us. A true democrat with both upper and lower case D/ds, he socialized with everyone, irrespective of race, creed, breed or nationality. Because of that he mastered many languages, and sometimes I would see him stand on and closely study Le Monde and the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle. A favorite literary pastime was listening raptly to my readings out loud of John McPhee’s essays in The New Yorker. This was no great surprise. He had earned his CD (Companion Dog) and CDX (Companion Dog Excellent) degrees cum laude, and won the Dog World Award for Canine Excellence. They didn’t know the half of it. We liked each other’s company a lot, and did many things together: walks in the woods, running on the beach, cuddling together for warmth on cold days, sometimes falling asleep on the living room rug. We’d stop by at Baskin-Robbins, I for blueberry cheesecake in a cone, he for vanilla in a cup. He refused the plastic spoon. He was quite fashion conscious. When I changed from my city shoes to hiking boots, he would demonstrate immense pleasure. If I also reached for the case that held my shotgun, he would ululate his ecstasy with as great a precision of pitch and brio as the soprano section of the Contra Costa Chorale. Though usually fearless, the onset of thunderstorms had him racing to my bed, scrambling under the covers, trembling until my embraces and caresses calmed him, and we both fell asleep. We even took turns in saving each other from serious threat. Using a silent hand signal, I once stopped him from running toward me across a park road just as a maintenance vehicle was approaching. He even dropped his favorite toy, a pine cone, and just lay there waiting for the “come” signal, an inward sweep of my extended right arm. On a very foggy, lonely night at the San Francisco Marina, I just barely saw a figure approaching us, perhaps someone with ill intent. On my almost inaudible whisper, “speak,” he growled and barked so viciously that the figure disappeared into the mist. Then he turned to me, anxious to receive the customary praise. I don’t remember what our last conversation was about, but I knew the end was near for him. Petting, holding, feeling that warm tongue, were the last gestures. This portrait of Goldlegend’s Midas Touch – Midas – remains on the eastern wall of my study decades after his death. I know that “man’s best friend” is a cliché, but every day I’m reminded of my once very best friend, so grateful for those twelve years. In my teens, I accompanied my parents on three ocean cruises. On the last, aboard the beautiful Lloyd-Triestino liner Africa, I shared my cabin with a taciturn Englishman who occupied many of his hours reading books about dogs. I found that deeply eccentric, until I acquired my own library on dog breeds and canine psychology. For a time I had a lively correspondence with Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz, author of Man Meets Dog. My daughters Judy and Ruth became goldenretrieveraholics years ago, and still seem to be accommodating their addiction. Much more recently, my younger daughter presented me with a very fine granddog, Lily. Lily is exceptionally beautiful, though I think she may be quite fickle. When here, she and I adore each other, and kiss frequently. It finally dawned on me that, when not here, she may well be indulging in similar intimacies with others. She’s very intelligent, and I fancy that, late into the night, when her human siblings have gone to sleep, Lily is studying The Economist’s review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital. We’ll get to discuss it during her next visit. I shall always miss Midas, but Lily’s attentions are very consoling. _________________________________________________________ © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.