Category: Social Commentary

After a stay in a hospital near my home in Berkeley, California, I received a questionnaire from the Administrator. I responded that I had been delighted with the courtesies and professionalism of the nurses, technicians and physicians, but I resented the antisemitism. On my second morning there, my breakfast tray contained a curious item: wrapped in cellophane was a round, cold, soggy bread-like substance, ashamed of its own pallor. The menu labeled it as a bagel. I told the administrator that anyone calling that deeply offensive object a bagel must be a rabid antisemite.
The episode got me thinking of the bagels in my life. The early ones spoiled me rotten; they were a gastronomic high point of my 1950s youth in Cape Town, South Africa. What I remember best were the summer weekend expeditions to Muizenberg beach, and the interruption, either on the way there, the way back, or both, to buy bagels from Mrs. Marcus. Mr. and Mrs. Marcus lived in a very modest house on the east side of Buitenkant Street, just a block or so north of Mill Street, in Cape Town. I think he was a cobbler. In order to augment the family income, Mrs. Marcus began to bake bagels for sale in the community. They were so delicious that she soon had to install a second, larger commercial oven. That’s when she became famous. 
Her bagels were exquisite, crispy golden brown on the outside, soft and addictively chewy on the inside. I remember a time when we stopped on the way home from the beach, and my mother went into the Marcus home for six bagels. We lived only about a mile away, and by the time my parents and I got home all we had left was a crumpled brown bag and a few crumbs. That was the ultimate test: they needed no butter, or cream cheese or lox. Mrs. Marcus’s bagels were not coated with onion flakes, or sesame seeds, sun-dried tomatoes, or, heaven forfend, blueberries. Now, if challenged to choose an accompanying drink, it would have to be the finest Ceylon tea, the most expensive Kona coffee, or a bottled product representing the ultimate of the Bordeaux region. At the time, I think I liked Coca Cola.
Mrs. Marcus’s trade soon brought her to the notice of the authorities, who insisted that she obtain a baker’s business license and arrange her premises in a more commercial way. That would have incurred an expense that she could barely afford, and led to a ploy the memory of which still charms me. On one occasion, when I entered her house to make a purchase, she had company. Two young gentlemen were present, distinguished from her other customers by their crew-cut hairstyles and what looked very much like police-issue boots. Before I could ask for bagels, she introduced them by name, and though here my memory fails, they were probably called something like Mr. van Zyl and Mr. van der Merwe. To the introduction she added softly, in Yiddish, “blanke kneplach” (“shiny buttons”), a metaphor for police uniforms. She then handed me a bag of bagels, kissed my cheek and hoped I’d enjoy the gift. No money had changed hands, and therefore no evidence of commercial transaction. This scene was acted out repeatedly with others over some months, and finally the authorities gave up and withdrew the bagel police for other, more questionable, law enforcement work. A day or two later after each event, her customers brought Mrs. Marcus the money.
There’s much to remember about my youth in South Africa. The beauty, the warmth of family and communal life, the early education that eventually led me to universities and careers elsewhere, and the crushing injustice, the immense crime against humanity, of apartheid.
I have since eaten bagels in Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver, London, Paris, Krakow, Tel Aviv and even near my daughter’s home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where the hotel menu described them as un tipo de pan Ingles, a kind of English bread!
For the last twenty-five years, after careers in academia, then business, I am now, most enjoyably, an autodidact student, and occasional instructor, in art, an exhibited and published artist. I’ve come to realize that the experience that began with visits to the National Art Gallery in Cape Town, exposure to the work of artists at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, and my frequent attendance of symphony concerts, led me to consider those elements which contribute to greatness in art: composition, coloration, balance, harmony, surprise, and sensory nourishment, among others. I found these in the great paintings, sculptures, architecture, photography, literature and music that have illuminated my soul and so enriched my life. 
That’s when I realized that Mrs. Marcus had also been an artist. 
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© 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

Once a week, usually in the morning, the fruit and vegetable man drove his Jewish truck down our street in Cape Town, stopping outside our home and blowing the horn. Until I walked out to look at his truck, I didn’t know motor vehicles could be Jewish. But there it was, on the nose, a star of David, with the initials “DB” in the center. Dodge Brothers. Even then it was an old truck, Dodge having been acquired by Chrysler Corporation in 1928. Maybe that Jewish truck was why my parents felt good about purchasing produce from the old man, who was certainly younger than I am now.
Growing up in a major port city, I knew that ships could be Christian, having once read about the violent process of christening, smashing a bottle of champagne on the hull, and hoping that my Christian friends survived their baptism intact and sober.
We lived in a small flat, in a block of four very modest homes. The other residents were also Jewish European refugees. Mother would take her purse, and go out to the truck and buy fruits and vegetables on a very limited budget. In summer, on rare occasions, she would carry in the ultimate treat: a tiny wicker basket, lined with leaves, containing a dozen or do small strawberries. After dinner, my parents and I shared the delight, sometimes annoyed at the rotten ones. Dad and Mom were Litvaks, who grew up in a northern climate that favored berry fruits, so our fridge usually had a bottle of strawberry jam, to be applied in very thin layers to rye bread. I can remember at least two occasions when, just returned from junior school, the only snack available was a cup of tea and a piece of toast with breadcrumbs scattered on top. Mom and I laughed about our inventiveness.
As the years went by, Dad made more money and we moved to a more comfortable flat on a hill. There were a dozen pine trees on the property, and that’s when a friend introduced me to pine nuts. We’d search for fallen cones, and remove the nuts. By placing them on top of the brick wall that surrounded the property, we’d use a fist-sized rock to smash the shell, rescuing tiny, mashed portions of the nut. It was a lot of effort for very limited results, and may have sparked my later interest in Adam Smith.
As we became better off, the range of fruits, nuts, and other comestibles became more ample, and included small amounts of European chocolate, but those early days and the Jewish truck have stayed with me.
Now, so many years later, here in California, the legacy of early privation hasn’t entirely escaped. My wife and I greatly enjoy having friends over to dine. Just recently, I stopped at a local farmer’s market to buy ingredients for the fruit salad we’d serve for dessert. Among the other items, I came back with three pounds of luscious California strawberries, each one so ample that it seemed to require an entire shipping container for itself. I also bought a pound of shelled pine nuts to scatter in the dinner salad. Good food, great friends.
I have become prosperous. 
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© 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

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.
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© 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. 
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© 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.” 
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© 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, Shevelev for Citizen (or at least, for immigration status). No posters, buttons or public speeches. For the next two and a half years, the Campaign became a passionate, desperate commitment. I knew it was a waste of time to appeal to the bureaucracy of the Department of Justice’s Immigration and Naturalization Service. Civil servants are bound to follow rules. When I did approach them, they agreed that my American-born daughter was welcome to stay, but that the rest of us would have to leave.
Politics became my choice. I used every contact I could, in government departments, Congressional offices, and the media. I had lunch with Senator Alan Cranston (D-California), Congressman Robert Leggett, whose daughter Diana was one of my students, and, with the help of a congressional staffer, lunch with the brilliant and courageous Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine), the “conscience of the senate,” enemy of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Broadcaster Edward R. Murrow called her “the only Senator with balls.”
Late one afternoon, an agitated Congressman John Moss of Sacramento called me and said “Get your students off my telephones, and I’ll help.” I had no idea that students were calling from the student government offices to jam the Hon. John Moss’s telephone switchboard.
Professor of Microbiology, Donald Montgomery (Monty) Reynolds, whom I didn’t know at all, summoned me to his house. In my presence he called Congressman Leggett at his Washington office, and said “Bob, if you don’t help this guy, I swear you’ll never run in this district again.” In his kitchen, Monty gave me a bottle of Champagne, “to celebrate your citizenship.”
Nevertheless, I started to investigate the possibility of an escape to Canada. This became more urgent when I received a letter from Immigration, summoning me to Federal Court in San Francisco, “to show cause why you should not be deported.” Then, three days before the hearing, while I was alone in the department office, photocopying materials for my students, the phone rang. Owen Chaffee, legislative aide to Congressman Leggett, asked to speak to Professor Shevelev. When I’d identified myself he said “BINGO! You’re getting your green card. No court on Monday. But I need your alien registration number immediately.” That number was, is, permanently engraved on my memory. The relief of that moment signaled the beginning of recovery from years of anxiety, overwork, sleeplessness, migraine headaches, and a heart irregularity diagnosed by a campus physician who told me “You need a holiday.”
The green card arrived, and, from a separate address, so did my draft notice! Vietnam? Was Canada still an option? No, at 30 I was classified “over age.”
Five years later, on December 17, 1974, the tenth anniversary of departure from South Africa, a Federal Judge entered a hushed courtroom in San Francisco and said, “Of all my duties as a judge, this is by far my favorite,” then administered the oath of citizenship to a hundred people. Immediately afterward, I took the prepared form and two small portraits of myself down by elevator to the passport office. Three days later my passport arrived. I had finally made the transition from a country, which, like many others, regarded a passport as a revocable privilege, to one where a passport is a right.
In the ancient Roman world, if a citizen were accosted or threatened, saying the words Civis Romanus sum – “I am a Roman citizen” – would virtually guarantee his safety. On the day I received my citizenship, I sent a telegram to Congressman Leggett: Civis Americanus sum.
Happy Fourth.
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© 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.

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 do when faced by large beasts. 
Late that night in Windhoek, my first encounter with Aunt Greta was less than pleasant, as were my second, third and fourth. It didn’t improve for the week we stayed there. She was tall, lean, dressed in clothes that matched her severity, brown hair pulled back in a bun. Their daughter, my cousin Lola, a year or two older than I, was much more fun, part of it the game of avoiding her mother’s ire. On my second day, we children were served canned plums. I hated their taste, and said so, whereupon Aunt Greta insisted I eat them, invoking “the starving children of Europe.” I didn’t obey, wondering how my food consumption could possibly help or hurt others, but the thought of starving children shocked me. Lola and I found a waxed paper bag, inserted the plums, in crayon addressed it to the starving children of Europe, walked down the block, and put it in the mailbox. 
In the winter of 1949, I came home from school one day and found mother carving up a large fish in the kitchen. She was red-eyed with tears, struggling to control her sobbing, and the large blade in her hand. “Uncle Abe is very, very sick,” she said, trying to deny to herself as much as to me the truth of his death. Dad had left an hour before my arrival. He caught a flight to Windhoek on a South African Airways DC-3, and returned two or three days later, after the Masonic funeral.
In his will, Uncle Abe mentioned me. He left me fourteen lambs. The only place we could put them was on the concrete yard at the back of our flat, under the washing lines. I found string with which to secure the gate, then told Anita and Alice, the children of German Jewish refugees next door, that they could play with and feed the lambs. For a few weeks, whenever I heard the approach of a heavy vehicle, I’d rush to the window to see if my lambs were arriving. They never did. 
So I didn’t benefit from Uncle Abe’s death. But all my life I have greatly benefited from his.
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© 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.

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.
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© 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.

On the Saturday before Rosh Hashanah in 1946, before my eighth birthday, I accompanied my parents to visit my only remaining grandparent, Blume-Devorah Westermann-Shevelev. The others had all died in Latvia and Lithuania before I was born. We lived in a flat on the lower slope of Table Mountain, with a view of the city and harbor. My paternal grandmother – bubbe – lived in the vibrant suburb of Sea Point, two or three blocks from the oceanfront, from which one can see Robben Island. It took two bus rides to get to her home, the first down the hill into the center of Cape Town, the second westward to the Sea Point Main Road, a busy commercial avenue. The bus stopped at the corner of St. John’s Road, and we’d alight to walk a block to a very modest four-flat building. We didn’t yet have our first car.
Grandmother lived on the left, downstairs, in a tiny two-bedroom unit. She had to put coins in the meter to generate the gas for cooking. I liked standing on a chair to help her with that. The smaller of the two bedrooms was occupied by uncle David, my father’s youngest sibling. The two men hadn’t talked to each other for years and wouldn’t ever again. During our visits, uncle David would sequester himself in his room, and I’d knock to gain entry. I liked him, and in retrospect, given the unexpected direction of my own life, perhaps it was because he sketched so well. He was then the only member of the family with an interest in art and classical music. Years later, when I was a student at the University of Cape Town, I asked each of the brothers what their feud was about. Neither could quite remember, but that wasn’t the point.
Anyway, on that Saturday, grandmother gave me her usual treat: a sixpence so I could walk back to the corner of Main Road, and buy a packet of potato chips in which a small twist of paper held the salt. When I returned, the adults (sans uncle David) were conversing in Yiddish. I joined in.
It must have been late in the morning, close to noon, when we heard the postman arrive. Grandmother rose to retrieve the mail, and when she came back, her faced reflected foreboding. In her hand, among other items, was an envelope marked with the emblem of the Red Cross. She sat slowly, and clearly without willing, opened it. Inside was another envelope, addressed to her. She recognized the script.
During the Second World War, the Red Cross made prodigious efforts to ensure deliveries of foodstuffs and mail to prisoners of war and, when possible, prisoners of the German concentration camps. Occasionally, perhaps once a year, those confined would be permitted to write a very brief censored letter to relatives on the “other side.” By the end of the war, a huge quantity of mail had been accumulated, and now, in the second year of the peace, it was being distributed. The letter was from her first child, my oldest uncle, Moses. It had been written several years earlier, before he was murdered in Majdanek.
Moses Shevelev was born, I believe, in 1908.  As a young man, he had left the family home in Libau (Lepaja), Latvia, and found his way to Paris, where he attended the Faculty of Law at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), and practiced as an attorney until the German conquest of France. The French authorities, pre-empting their German overlords, rushed to detain and deport Jews. Uncle Moses was put onto a train. The destination was Majdanek, on the edge of the eastern Polish city of Lublin. Unlike other camps, Majdanek was not screened from public view. It was right there, the fence also demarcating the border of Polish farmers’ smallholdings, as it still does. Shots and screams from the camp must surely have penetrated the air, as did the stench from the crematorium.
Grandmother, my parents and I sat in silence. She had certainly known – or guessed – that her son was dead. We sat there for a long time. The adults said nothing, and I knew enough not to ask.
Just before the war broke out in September 1939, my father and his brother, my uncle Max, also settled in Cape Town, made a determined effort to extract Moses from France. With their considerable diligence, and certainly bribes to officials, the offer of a visa to Madagascar came through. The telegraphed response from uncle Moses lives with me still: “I don’t want to be stranded on a remote island.”
Among the small items that have accompanied me to homes on the other side of the world is a photograph made in the early 1920s. It shows four of my grandmother’s five children. David was either an infant or not yet born. Those depicted are, in ascending order of age, Helena, who, as a very young woman emigrated to Palestine, Max with his left hand on a toy wooden horse, my father Jacob (Jack), and Moses.
In 1994 that photograph accompanied me to another place: Majdanek.
I found a niche in the wall across from the ovens, and photographed the photograph there. Karine and I were doing the research for what would later become my book, Liberating the Ghosts: Photographs and Text from the March of the Living. (LensWork:1996). The book is dedicated to two men: my uncle, and a French Huguenot called Daniel Trocmé. Both were murdered in Majdanek.
On Easter Monday, 1994, we took a short bus ride to the camp, and found ourselves alone in that vast, cold, depressing place. Taking shelter in one of the huts, we lit two votive candles on the concrete floor. One was for uncle Moses. The other was in memory of Daniel Trocmé, from the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where Karine had lived as a child. Daniel ran a children’s home in which he’d hidden Jewish refugees and supplied them with false papers. When German soldiers raided the home and took the Jewish kids, Daniel insisted on accompanying “his” children. We later discovered that, by an astonishing coincidence, we’d been in the camp precisely on the fiftieth anniversary of Daniel’s death.
Perhaps the two men had met and gotten to know each other.
The letter is long gone, though I wish I’d been able to preserve it. It may have been written in Yiddish, though Moses and his siblings were all also schooled in Hebrew, German, Latvian, and, of course, he was Francophone. Perhaps the letter had been written in German, to pass the censors.
I don’t know whether Moses ever married and fathered children. Many years ago I would fantasize about finding long lost French cousins. But the story, though it continues to haunt me, ends with the letter. It was the beginning of my consciousness.
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© 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.

In January 1947 my father’s pride and joy arrived. His only child was then eight years old. The brand new 1946 Chevrolet Fleetmaster, grey with a blue top, had been transported to Cape Town by rail from South West Africa (formerly German West Africa, now Namibia) where my mother’s only surviving brother, uncle Abe, owned a dealership. The license plate read OT414, the letters being an abbreviation for Otjiwarongo, an inland town a thousand miles north. 

It became urgent to find a garage. There was none at our flat. So my Dad found one for rent about half a mile away, and the car sat there, in solitary splendor except when my parents and I walked over and opened the padlock on the garage doors. We gazed reverently at this glossy monster, touching the sleek surface (but only after wiping our hands), and sat inside with a magnificent sense of ownership, breathing that special smell, the scent of future prosperity. We told the neighbors, of course, especially those who had no car of their own, and invited them to viewings. Many of them were refugees from the recent European catastrophe, and they obliged by voicing their admiration in Yiddish superlatives. It was as though Tevye had bought a new cow.
That lovely summer was so full of promise, though shaded by the memory of horrors that had left many members of my and other families murdered in “camps.” No longer were the streets of Cape Town populated by men in army and navy uniforms. No longer did my uncle Max, who served in the Home Guard, leave his helmet, gas mask, rifle and bayonet in my bedroom when he came visiting. No longer was there a minute of silence throughout the city when the noon gun, triggered by an electrical impulse from the national observatory, went off on Signal Hill. No longer did we have to draw blackout drapes each night. No longer was the port out of bounds to everyone except those with official and military permission. Even the armed sentries who guarded the entrance to Simonstown, home of the Royal Navy base, disappeared. No longer did recently arrived strangers with numbers on their arms come to dine at our table.
We were all both joyous and struggling with the prospect of peace. The Chevy was a significant investment in the future, as was our new radio and phonograph combination. It was a Romeo, named after its manufacturer, Captain Romeo Buttolo, an Italian naval officer interned as an enemy alien early in the war. Captain Buttolo came to our home and installed it personally. In this kosher Jewish household, the first 78 rpm record had Beniamino Gigli singing Ave Maria on the obverse, and Agnus Dei on the reverse. I played it daily for months, turning Gigli’s solo into a tenor-soprano duet.
Neither of my parents could drive. My mother never did, largely because my father wouldn’t trust her with the family chariot. My father only learned to drive about eight years later, and then became a nervous, uncertain driver. So my parents took advantage of their tentative step into the middle class, and of South Africa’s racial situation, to hire a Cape Colored driver. His name was Martin Pretorius.
Martin was a gentle man as well as a really good driver. We enjoyed each other’s company and our burgeoning conspiratorial relationship – once I dissuaded him from calling me “Young Master” – an embarrassingly obsequious Victorian custom imposed upon servants. He would explain the workings of a car to me, and also tell me a little of his life and the constant struggle to survive. Aside from his chauffeur duties, my father insisted on having the car immaculately clean at all times, so sometimes, without my parents’ knowledge, I would help wash and wax our status symbol, and that gave me more time with him.
One of Martin’s early tasks, in February 1947, was to drive the family to Kirstenbosch, the spectacular botanical gardens in the southern suburbs. There, after a long walk on gravel paths, my parents and I sat on the verandah of the restaurant, looking out on the gardens, and consuming our tea, with warm scones under clotted cream and strawberry jam. On the way home, a strange sight awaited us along Rhodes Drive. Crowds were gathering beside the road, and further along there were lines of policemen in white gloves. Cars ahead of us were waved through, as we eventually were, but those behind us were held back. As we passed by, with our new, polished chauffeur-driven Chevrolet, people cheered and waved Union Jack flags.  Apparently, a mile or so behind us, heading in the same direction, was a convoy carrying the visiting Royal Family, King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. When I realized what was going on, I became quite princely, waving to the crowds with that peculiar gesture of the King’s, rotating my right hand counterclockwise from the wrist. Seated in the rear, my parents were not amused. Martin giggled.
During the summer vacation at the end of 1951, as I was getting ready to transition from elementary to high school, from short pants to long pants, we would, especially on weekends, be driven to the Indian Ocean beach resort of Muizenberg, so heavily populated by members of the Jewish community that it was occasionally called “Jewsenberg,” though not always with benevolence. It was a beautiful small town from an earlier age, its gorgeous beaches welcoming the rhythms of the warm breakers.
On one such Sunday, along the road to the beach, traffic was slowed by a donkey-drawn cart filled with fruit and vegetables, driven by a black man on his way to market. With oncoming traffic, it became a challenge to pass the cart, and finally we got the chance. Martin had just moments to execute the maneuver, and, as he did so, the front left fender scraped the wooden cart. The pride and joy had sustained very light damage, but the annoyance in my father’s face was enough to dim the sunshine. He didn’t say much, but it was clear that he blamed Martin. When we got back home, my father kept staring at the scratched tiny dent, running his hands over it. The next day a body shop did the repair for four pounds sterling.
On December 31st, Martin came into my father’s study to collect his pay. A few shillings had been deducted from his meager salary, and would be for months to come. A chagrined Martin had no choice but to accept. I witnessed that scene, and the small and large indignities and injustices of that society began to take hold. It was the first of many, many times, when I would have loud and angry disagreements with my father. We argued to the end of his life, years after I had left South Africa to live in the United States.
In my parents’ bedroom, there was an elegant wardrobe of birds-eye maple (there were no built-in closets). My mother kept it locked and made sure the keys were close at hand. Sometimes I’d be with her when she unlocked it. Among the things she kept there was a family photograph album. I’d ask her to take it out, sit with me on the bed, and tell me about the people in the pictures. She would do that, and then, after turning the second or third page, would burst out crying at the sight of dead relatives, and return the album to its place. On the shelf that held the album was an envelope containing a small stack of banknotes. Money, she said, for housekeeping. Dad’s bank was quite far away, in the suburb of Salt River.
One day, when mother was completely absorbed in cooking, I wandered into her bedroom and found the keys on her night table. In silence, I opened the wardrobe and took a fiver. King George VI, whose profile was on the note, didn’t seem to indicate royal displeasure. Later that day, in a shop downtown, I exchanged it for five one-pound notes, and slipped four of them to Martin. I thought of it more as an act of social justice than the theft it really was. The last pound, my social justice brokerage fee, probably went to buy a record or a book.

The illicit four-pound investment in Martin yielded unexpected results. When we were alone in the car, driving along a suburban avenue, Martin would pull over and invite me to take the wheel. He was an exacting but humorous instructor. The conspiracy, even with its dangers, perhaps because of its dangers, was high comedy for us both.
While I was in high school, my father learned to drive, and Martin was let go. He and I had a tearful parting. Before my seventeenth birthday, I was sent to the Cape Town Driving School. After one lesson, the instructor said “I don’t know where you learned to drive, but you’re ready for the license test.” I took it eleven days after my birthday, and passed. My parents were proud of my ability to learn so quickly, especially because it had taken two courses of five lessons each to teach my father.
My last sight of Martin came on a day when my father gave me a ride downtown. I think we were driving on Strand Street, when he suddenly braked. An apparently inebriated Martin was weaving across the street. My father shook his head and said “Poor Martin.” It was the first time I’d heard him voice compassion for someone of a different race.
I’ve been a licensed driver for fifty-eight years. I aced my recent renewal test at the California Department of Motor Vehicles. As I left the building, I said a silent thanks to Martin Pretorius. 
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© 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.