Category: Social Commentary

In 1964, the United States Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, had two Fourth of July parties. One was for people of all ethnicities. The other was a reception for government officials, “sanitized” for whites only. Invited to attend, I declined, repelled by this American tolerance of apartheid. 
A few days later, I visited the Embassy to talk with Public Affairs Officer Dr. Argus J. Tresidder about my upcoming departure to the United States as a Fulbright grantee. When I told him of my annoyance with how the Embassy had behaved on the Fourth, he suggested I express my views to Ambassador Joseph Satterthwaite. From the smile on his face, I could see that he fully expected me to accept the challenge. He was right. Growing up in South Africa, and having worked for the heroine of the parliamentary opposition, Helen Suzman, MP, had been excellent training for speaking truth to power. I followed Argus to the Ambassador’s office and made my opinion of His Excellency’s shameful conduct quite clear, in notably undiplomatic language. Argus, still smiling, escorted me back to his office before the Ambassador could recover.
In early December of that year, I returned to my birth city, Cape Town, to say goodbye to my parents before leaving for my new American life. In the evenings we walked together on the Sea Point beachfront, looking out across the water to a clearly visible Robben Island, where, six months earlier, a “terrorist” by the name of Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned. It had been an interesting year. Two days before the Fourth of July, President Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.
Returning to Pretoria, I walked across town to the great terrace of the Union Buildings to pause there and say farewell to my country. I could never have imagined that, thirty years later, a liberated Nelson Mandela would be inaugurated as his country’s President on that very spot, and that in 2012 South Africa’s currency would feature his portrait.
On the tenth anniversary of my departure from South Africa I became an American citizen. In the course of those years I read widely in American history, while also witnessing the experience of the Civil Rights Movement. This year I shall be celebrating my forty-eighth in-country Fourth of July. While many of my compatriots will be watching fireworks displays and people dressed in eighteenth-century costume re-enacting scenes of the time, the day will mean something else to me. I was born and raised within the British Commonwealth, and have family and close friends in England. My visits to Britain have been delightful, and I do not hold any grudges against King George III or his descendants.
For me, our Independence is not so much about the past, but about the continuing dynamic of our country. It’s about becoming independent of all forms of prejudice, discrimination and anti-science foolishness. It’s not only about following the trajectory of our Founding Fathers and their astonishing brilliance, but about holding dear the lessons of a continuing momentum for extending civil rights. It’s about recognizing that this country, and indeed no country, can afford to continue “traditional” attitudes to minorities, women and gays. It’s to value not only Jefferson and Franklin, but also Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez and the pioneers of gay and women’s rights. It’s to celebrate that previously excluded groups now include high government, business and academic figures. It’s to rejoice in the courage of Lily Ledbetter’s struggle for equal pay; Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the DOMA case; and Texas State Senator Wendy Davis. The arc of our Independence continues to move forward, perhaps more slowly than some would like, but nevertheless it moves.
Just days ago, our black President addressed Africa’s future in a speech at my alma mater, the University of Cape Town. A thousand miles to the north, one of his heroes and mine, Nelson Mandela, lies in a hospital while the world waits. I believe the United States Embassy in Pretoria has had only a single Fourth of July party per year for decades now. The arc moves.
Before the destruction of New York City’s Twin Towers, my American-born francophone wife encountered a French tourist couple on the observation deck. They told her that they admired America’s dynamism, but observed condescendingly “La civilisation ça viendra” – civilization will (eventually) come. They were wrong. Civilization has been evolving here all along, but it is unlike Europe’s more constrained and settled curriculum. In every field of human endeavor, American civilization is a magnificent work in progress. Commemorating the history of our Independence is only the preface to building our future. I have great nostalgia for that future.
_________________________________________________________
© 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.

Many, many years ago, in deep midsummer, I journeyed to consult with the wisest of all people, the Oracle of Delphi. The arduous horseback ride north of Athens was quite uncomfortable, especially the last twenty kilometers into the mountains.
Arriving at the top of the hill, where the temple is located, I sank to the ground and rested on the cool, shaded marble, drinking copiously from an unglazed amphora of cold water provided by an acolyte. I sat there, quietly and reflectively, for perhaps an hour, before being summoned into the presence of the Oracle.
We looked into each other’s eyes for what seemed a long time, and then she asked why I had come. “Well,” I said, “though I’m still a young man, I’ve been wondering what kind of eggonòs I shall have.” That’s Greek for grandson, and of course we were speaking in Greek, but I’ll translate this dialogue into English for your benefit.
To my great surprise, she answered my question with another question, strongly suggesting that she too may have been Jewish.
“Well, what kind of eggonòs would you like?”
I answered “A fine boy, with a very good mind and fluent tongue, and an imagination so grand as to encompass the universe. You see, Ms. Oracle (we were not yet on first name terms), our friend Albert Einstein once wrote that imagination is more important than knowledge. And it wouldn’t hurt if he were also affectionate and handsome.”
“You want a lot, don’t you? That’ll cost you an extra hundred drachmas.”
So I placed the golden coin on the marble altar, bowed and took my leave. I returned to Athens by nightfall the following day, and had a fine dinner of avgolemono, spanakopita, roast lamb and a full bottle of retsina, which ensured a deep sleep, and, by morning, a considerable headache.
I soon forgot about this episode. Decades went by, until, in the autumn of 1999, my son-in-law handed me a small bundle, a baby wrapped in a blanket, and said these poignant words: “Would you like to hold your grandson?” It was, and I knew it then, a moment that would forever change my life.

And I want to tell you about that.
What does this lad mean to me? I am the South African-born refugee immigrant son of Jewish refugee immigrants from a darkening Europe. Unlike his father’s family, which has longer roots in the United States, my grandson is, on my side of the family, the very first American born to American-born parents, Jon and Ruth. He and his siblings are my own heritage as well as their own future.
If they take great care to protect their rights and responsibilities by exercising them well, they will never need to know the pain of leaving their family, their homes, their friends, their country, and having to start all over again. That makes my own early long and difficult effort to secure a future in the United States so much more worthwhile, so much dearer to me. We’re home.

An illness prevented me from saying these words at my grandson David’s recent Barmitzvah. This column gives me the opportunity to correct that by writing that I love him and his sisters greatly, and that his beautiful Lithuanian great-grandmother would have been astonished by her great-grandchildren.
As part of my education, I was happily exposed to the ancient mythologies of Rome, Greece and both testaments of the Bible. My grandson seems captivated mostly by futuristic mythologies. But he should know that the Oracle of Delphi turned out to be completely right, and surely deserves another hundred drachmas.
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 the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, my father would occasionally bring home from the synagogue on Friday nights a person or couple who had survived the Holocaust.
In the warm South African summer of 1945-6, I saw a number on a dinner guest’s arm. When I asked him about it, he looked at my mother and she gave a barely perceptible shake of her head, so a child’s question went unanswered. My parents were then, and remained thereafter, quite remarkably silent about the catastrophe. Curiosity was partially satisfied when I began to sing in the choir of the Vredehoek Synagogue, and on the single time I can recall him rolling up his shirtsleeves, I saw a similar number on the arm of the Cantor, Jakob Lichterman, a Polish refugee whose fine lyric tenor voice and sweet temperament remain pleasant memories. I didn’t find out much more until my freshman year at the University of Cape Town, a time of wonderful intellectual opportunity both inside and outside the classrooms. It left me, then as a student, and later as a professor in the United States, with the clear understanding that lecture halls are just a fraction of where learning occurs.
I spent much of that year in the basement of UCT’s Jagger Library, reading the newspaper stories of the events from British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s signing of the Munich Agreement in the year of my birth, 1938, to the surrender of German armed forces to Field Marshal Montgomery at Luneberg Heath in May, 1945. Some of my formal academic work was neglected, in favor of an education about the numbers on victims’ arms. Almost a decade after graduation, I introduced a course on race as a factor in international relations at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I’d had good preparation: the son of fugitive European Jews, raised in apartheid South Africa.
In 1946, a young American couple from Chicago, Howard and Elsie Schomer, accepted an invitation from Pastor Andre Trocme to help with postwar reconstruction in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a French village on the plateau west of Lyon. They took their infant daughter Karine along with them, and stayed there for ten years. The story of Le Chambon is now well known. During the years of the Second World War this largely Huguenot village offered refuge, and therefore life, to about five thousand Jews escaping from the predations of the Nazis. In what Philip Hallie in his book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, called “a conspiracy of goodness,” the heroic rescue was presided over by Pastor Trocme and his wife Magda, and the center of it all revolved around the Protestant church, the temple.
It is a sacred place for Jews, too, and indeed for all humanity. The story has also been told in the film Weapons Of The Spirit, made by family friend Pierre Sauvage, once one of the rescued children, and by a more recent book, We Only Know Men: The Rescue of Jews In France During The Holocaust, by my friend, Patrick Gerard Henry, Emeritus Professor of French at Whitman College, Oregon.
Howard Schomer worked as one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948. South Africa and the Soviet Union abstained. In later years he would serve as President of the Chicago Theological Seminary, and in 1965 walked with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the march on the bridge at Selma, Alabama. I first encountered my future father-in-law when I saw the documentary footage of the march.

 I have spent the last twenty-five years largely in the pursuit of photography and writing, and have made thousands of images in the Americas, Europe and Asia, as well as many “conceptual-art” pieces constructed for the purpose in my studio. So I’ve decided to nominate one of my own images as my personal icon.
Famous artists usually have art historians nominate theirs. For Pablo Picasso, it is probably Guernica, for Marc Chagall, perhaps The Violinist, for Ansel Adams, Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico. My latest reading includes Anne-Marie O’Connor’s brilliant volume Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Thus, for Klimt, that is surely his icon. Mine was unexpectedly made in a little village in France.

In 2001 I accompanied Dr. Karine Schomer, now my wife, to “her” village. The temple has none of the grandeur associated with the great cathedrals and churches of France. It is, in fact, a simple stone box, but in that box there was, at a time of great need and terrible danger, a spirit of humane commitment far beyond even the words engraved above the doorway, the great injunction from the Newer Testament,“Aimez-Vous Les Uns Les Autres,” Love One Another. 

I made the accompanying picture of Karine there. The iconography is simple: a relaxed, confident, strong woman, raised in an atmosphere of deep commitment to human rights, before the unyielding square stone geometry of that particular Huguenot church with its heroic congregation. On her right, at face level, I added a worn, painted graffito of the bleu-blanc-rouge, the French flag. It is as worn and scuffed as was the honor of France during the war years. Le Chambon was the village that accomplished so much to rescue that honor.
I therefore use two names to identify the picture, and they are both entirely apt: “Aimez-Vous” and “L’honneur de la France.” The picture contains so much that is dearest to me. This is the picture that brings me home to my own values. It is my icon. 
_________________
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.