Beyond This Place

By Sidney Owitz

Beyond this Place consists of a collection of essays involving episodes of the past from a different world which seems so remote today. It includes memories of the authors childhood and some experiences that he encountered during his medical training and career. There is also a historical perspective of people and events that have affected the lives of those who came after them, including diverse subjects ranging from the Bible to Jewish pirates and false Messiahs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491824207

Sidney Owitz

Sidney Owitz was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he was educated. He graduated as a physician at the University of Cape Town. After practicing Medicine in South Africa for twelve years he came to the United States and became an anesthesiologist. He lives in Florida with his family.

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CONTENTS

Childhood memories

Moments medicale

On language

An invitation to lunch

Jewish pirates—and jews of the caribbean

The would-be messiah

The orphan boy

Wrestling with the bible

How the other half lives

Acknowledgements

The cover photograph, for which I am most thankful, was taken by Frayda Galvin

Dedication for Beyond This Place

This book is dedicated to all our grandchildren, Rebecca, Liana, Maya, Kaela, Javin, Ryan, Kyle, Faryn, Taylor, Jamie, Norie, Lillie, Jared and Kinsey

Invictus

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

William Henley (1849-1903)

CHILDHOOD

MEMORIES

W hy should anyone be interested in my childhood memories? Everyone has his or her own which are far more relevant to him or to her. Yet I feel that I should record mine before they become vaguer in my mind, before they are lost forever. They say that as you get older your memory begins to fade. Let me put them down before they disappear. This way my memories will out-live me!

The sounds and the smells and the visual remembrances when I was a child remain clear in my brain, yet I cannot remember what I had for breakfast this morning or the name of my partner at tennis yesterday morning. Memories sometimes lie. If you were told something a long time ago by someone else you sometimes remember it as though you experienced it yourself—just a slight error caused by those complicated brain chemicals. I also know that when my children tell stories about their growing up their memories are somewhat different from what I remember to have occurred. I always feel that their interpretation is incorrect, that they have embellished fact and fancy—and they think that I have it all wrong. I think that children have a tendency to color their memories while being unaware that they are doing so. However, this is what I remember—and let us see if you can prove me wrong!

For the first ten years of my life we lived in a house next to a railway station on a busy line that ran from Randfontein to Springs. It was the extent of the Witwatersrand (White Waters Ridge), the largest gold reef in the world which since then has been found to be even longer, taking a swing to the south from the Transvaal in to the Orange Free State. The Durban train also sped past my house every day, there and back. During rush hours this train station was a hive of activity with English, Afrikaans and Bantu languages from every corner of Southern Africa filling the air. It was like a melting pot. The gold mines employed workers from as far afield as Central Africa. There were odors emanating from their food containers and the weeds that they smoked and the potions that they drank. Some of them drank an illegal brew called ‘skokiaan’ which had a distinctive odor to it, once smelled, never to be forgotten. Their blankets and bodies emitted waves of foreign smells that tested the olfactory nerves. The sounds of crying children added to the cacophony while hordes of people were running past our front door in an effort to get on to the train before it departed. There was always a clash of those trying to get on to the train with those disembarking. There seemed to be a shortage of good manners. After the train left we witnessed the slower ambling gait of the arrivals.

These sounds from the station, and sometimes the odors too, would penetrate the windows of our home on the days that we left them open—remember, we had no air conditioning in those days, so we had to leave them open to get a breeze; somehow, the odors would insinuate themselves into the house even if the doors and windows were shut! Above all the tumult one could still hear the belching noises of the engines, the multi-lingual announcements by the conductors and the piercing whistles notifying their departures. It sometimes felt that we were living right on the train station. All this time I was supposed to be doing my homework or studying for an examination. However, you can even get used to this! Yes, on a Sunday or public holiday there were fewer trains and smaller crowds. All was quiet and empty—there seemed to be something missing.

Those coal-powered trains continued running all day and night, rattling and screeching with high-pitched whistles blowing, and all the time emitting huge wafts of unhealthy smoke from their coal-driven engines. Our window sills would be covered in soot—our furniture, too—when we did not shut the windows. Our lungs were probably filled with coal dust. Today health authorities would more than likely declare that residing under those circumstances would be a health hazard. Even though ours was not a malaria-endemic area my brother, who had never left our neighborhood, developed malaria, supposedly from mosquitoes brought in by the trains. We learnt to sleep through the loud sounds of the night, although any guests who spent the night in our home had great difficulties in falling asleep. They always questioned us as to how we were able to sleep but, apparently, we learnt the art through adversity.

Johannesburg is a large city, but it is unlike most cities in the world. Usually cities are developed because there is a river or a sea-port nearby, or they may be close to some beautiful scenery or are situated on an important route or at a cross-road. Johannesburg was built in the middle of nowhere, in the midst of an uninteresting terrain. In 1886 gold was accidentally discovered on this boring landscape. Until then nobody lived there; there was nothing to see, no rivers, no mountains, no sea (it is about four hundred miles from the ocean)—only dry veld (grass covered fields) where the grass is straw-colored in winter. With the finding of gold and the gold rush that followed it suddenly sprung to life, developed a character of its own and expanded. People came from all four corners of the world to seek their fortune. The gold industry grew and spread and boomed. There was no stopping it! Subsidiary industries developed in order to serve the needs of the mines and miners. This brought in more people, and before long Johannesburg became the largest city in the land. It developed into the second most populous city (after Cairo) on the African continent, and the most cosmopolitan and industrialized.

Johannesburg possesses a feature that no other city can display. Since it lies on the gold reef numerous mine shafts were constructed all along the reef. Once the gold in that area was depleted the mining companies moved on to a different location, leaving behind dirty-white colored dumps of sand, the size of small hills. These are dotted all around the city giving it a distinctive appearance, not replicated elsewhere.

Interestingly, a man by the name of Boschoff hit upon a plan of sifting through these mine dumps for any gold that might have escaped the big machines of the large gold-mining industry. Apparently he was very successful as there was still enough gold left in them after having been discarded as trash by the mining giants for him to become a billionaire! In fact, a word was created from his name—to rummage through garbage for financial gain is to ‘boschoff’.

Because the railway line impacted on our street the road came to an end into a cul-de-sac. This gave us our own ‘park’, enabling us to use our street as a playing field where we could entertain ourselves with soccer, cricket or rugby depending on the season of the year. It was safe as there were no cars passing through. Of course, during rush hours our games had to be suspended. Careless passers-by often interfered with our game and were apt to get a soccer ball in their faces whether they stayed on the sidewalks or not.

As a matter of fact, our family did not own a car, nor did most people in our neighborhood in the nineteen-thirties. I remember that we had a horse and cart which was used whenever we had to go shopping or travel some distance. Today not too many people born in the USA can say that they ever went to market by horse and cart. I would sometimes accompany the driver (whose name was America) when he was making deliveries for my grandfather’s business. We had a stable in our backyard, and on a Sunday morning I was carefully placed on the horse’s back and gently led up and down our street. However, all good things come to an end, and the horse and cart were sold. Municipal transport, in the form of a tram, became our next means of getting to places. Cars were still considered to be a luxury beyond our wildest dreams.

On the matter of transportation, I was offered a tricycle as a gift from my rich grandfather. I was quite excited, and when it was delivered I rode it up and down inside the house, visiting each room. I could not wait to take it outside where there were no walls to bump into. I looked forward to driving it around the block, past the Indian store and the butchery. Life was going to change for me from now on. I was going to be the Master of the Universe! Imagine my disappointment when my grandfather said it was too expensive and not worth the price. I was devastated and went back to playing with string, sticks and pebbles.

Days were long and friends were scarce. All the other children were at school. We had no kindergartens or pre-schools in my district. My mother tried to get me into school but I was considered to be too young. The thought of another year at home for me with nothing to do was even upsetting to my mother, so she bribed the school teacher for the first grade with a magnificent box of chocolates. Voila! I was a student!

The first day at school my teacher gave me a list of words written on a piece of paper, consisting of mat, cat, rat, sat, bat and fat. I remember how devastated I felt when I came home because I could not remember the words. I did not know how I could have survived such a critical situation if my sister had not come to the rescue. She often saved me from many ‘dire’ situations. She was two and a half years older than me and so full of knowledge and experience. There was nothing that she did not know!

Outside the class room school was a lonely place. I was teased by the other children because they said that I had no father. I knew that they were right, but I also knew that it was not my fault. I asked my mother why I had no father and she told me not to worry as he would be coming back one day soon. I did not believe her. What she did not tell me was that when I was too young to remember my father’s business went bankrupt and he could no longer support the family, so my grandfather took us into his house, but he would not take my father in with us because he had warned my mother against marrying a man who was a good-for-nothing, as my grandfather called him. He was wrong because my father was the hardest working man I have ever known. He was just very poor and never received any ‘breaks’ even though he worked like a slave every day of his life. My grandfather would not give him a helping hand just to prove a point. So I spent much of my childhood without a father and thinking that I did not have one. My mother was from the ‘old school’ as she did not face questions openly, but would rather hide the truth. I suppose she did not want any discussion on the subject to get to my grandfather’s ears.

On one occasion my mother told me to put on my best clothes, and I said to her Where are we going? She answered To the park, whereupon I remarked I always put on my worst clothes when I go to the park. We went to the park with me wearing my best clothes. There we met a man who kissed me and made me sit on his lap. He placed coins in my hand and gave me chocolates and toys, and could not stop talking to me. My mother told me not to tell anyone about this man. There were a few other secret meetings with this mystery man. I found out later that he was my father who had come to town to visit. We would have been in trouble if my grandfather heard that we had any contact with this secret man whom he despised. My brother and sister had not been invited to these meetings in the park because my mother was afraid that they might tell my grandfather that we were meeting him. I was considered to be too young to ‘spill the beans’.

Grandpa was a tough character. He would scream at us if we left a light on in a room that we had vacated. He followed us around the house to make sure that we did not break any of his ‘valuable’ objects. Perhaps he distrusted us because he did not like my father. However, he did give me a penny every now and then in order to buy a chocolate—so he was not all bad!

I remember spending time in hospital on a few occasions for ear infections. There were no antibiotics in those days. The treatment was placing my ear under a hot lamp. On one occasion I was discharged and I refused to go until they gave me my toys that I had brought in with me. They said that they had lost them, and so I was forced to leave toyless—and in tears.

Almost all the white people in the neighborhood moved out, leaving us behind in an area which was considered undesirable to live in because the blacks were moving in there. We could not afford to re-locate as the others had done, but were pleased to have a roof over our heads. However, like magic, a few years later my father who was living alone in another town started earning a living from his business. He bought a house in a fine suburb and he gathered his family together and we moved in with him. My mother’s words had turned out to be prophetic. I had thought that she had been lying when she said he would come back.

Before we moved in with my father I walked wherever I wished to go. I say ‘walked’, but I meant ‘ran’. Running was my mode of locomotion. There were some gangs of unsavory youths living in our district who, like the osprey, enjoyed getting hold of smaller and younger prey, and causing physical and mental injury upon us and if possible, making us cry. I decided that if I ran I might be able to avoid unnecessary trauma. It became easier—and faster—to run than to walk. Walking was so slow! You could get attacked! Most infants first crawl, then walk and later, run. Like other children, I crawled; but then ran and, later, walked. Once I ran across a busy street, and probably did not look both ways before crossing. I suddenly found myself lying on the hood of somebody’s car and being transported along the street before coming to a screeching halt. The driver was distraught; he immediately drove me home and delivered me to my shocked mother. I was devoid of major injuries, but it did not stop me from running wherever I went.

One form of entertainment that gave us great pleasure was getting a woman’s stocking and filling it with newspaper. W e would tie the top with string and let a long piece of thin wire hang off it. Then we would hide behind the gate leading to our backyard, allowing the filled stocking to lie across the sidewalk. When we saw someone approaching we would twirl or pull on the wire giving the stocking the appearance of a writhing snake. This would frighten the passers-by and they would emit a shriek, until they realized that it was just a hoax. Then we would hide quietly awaiting our next victim.

Auntie Betty made the best cakes. Everyone knew that her cakes were the tastiest and better than those which you could buy at the bakery. Many Sunday afternoons we were invited to her house for tea and cake. They had to pick us up because we did not own a car. The adults would sit around the table making small talk and waiting for that great moment when tea and cake would be served. I was fortunate to get a chance to play outside with my cousins David and Leon. We used to have fun together, and we waited for these valuable occasions when we could be together. Then after a while we would be called in for tea. The great cake moment had arrived! They were delicious. If chocolate was your choice you were engulfed in a sea of rich thick nutty chocolate that would bathe every sinew in your body. For those of us whose primary choice was cocoanut we were treated with the tropical exotic mouth—warming delight. The shortbread cake was out of this world; the mere thought of them would bring saliva pouring into one’s mouth. Nobody was able to replicate Auntie Betty’s cakes for the simple reason that she would not tell anyone her recipes. Those were her secrets. Of course, her popularity waned as a result of her secrecy. Occasionally, after much coercion and in order to try to regain her social status, she did reveal a recipe, but it did not taste the same when others made it because she would have omitted an important ingredient, such as salt or vanilla.

Participation in sports was a big thing in our lives as we were growing up. We played soccer at school and we played it in the parks and on quiet streets. We would play it before Hebrew School, and often instead of Hebrew school. When cricket season arrived we threw away the soccer balls and donned our cricket pads and wielded our cricket bats. At college we played rugby, often against the advice of our parents. On Saturday afternoons we were usually at Ellis Park where we watched our favorite teams playing rugby or we would be at the Wanderers Club cheering our soccer or cricket teams on. Yes, sport played a large part in our lives, even for those of us who were less successful at making a name for ourselves on the school playing fields. My good friend, Bunny, was great at all games that he played; he