GRIT in inteGRITy

The story of immigrants Reuben and Sophia Newstead and their part in establishing the Claremont shul, framed as an imaginary first-person memoir by their grand-daughter.

Charlotte Cohen, a regular contributor to Jewish Affairs, is an award-winning short’ story writer and poet, whose work has appeared in a wide variety of South African publications since the early 1970s.

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The passage was a nightmare. Hundreds of Jewish emigrants Litvaks packed like sardines onto a vessel that would transport them - each with their life’s possessions crammed into two suitcases - to a ‘new world’ … each managing to get through the ordeal of the journey by their determination to discard their desperation and consummate the dream which would take them to a new home

… each concentrating on the opportunities and well-being that hopefully lay in wait for them ...

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BACKGROUND - Sophia Newstead (born Cynkin)

I was born in April 1881 in Mir, a town in the province of Minsk. My formal schooling ended when I was ten, after which I went to work as a seamstress. Most of what I earned I gave to my mother. I continued my education by attending evening classes. Whatever little I managed to save, was carefully put away so that one day, it would help pay for my passage on a ship to an exciting new destination, leaving behind the nightmare of hatred, poverty and pogroms.

One of the people in our village had a cousin who had gone to New York.

He sent a newspaper home once a month. Circulated to every family in the village, it was perused and pored over from cover to cover! They saw a new world! A better world! … Even if it meant never seeing their children again, parents urged them to leave.

“ Go!” they urged… “Go to freedom! Go to a better life.”

When I was seventeen I met Moishe who became my boyfriend. We shared dreams and were excited about plans to go to a new lan d. e b ecame People leaving our town went either to America or South Africa.

At eighteen, with the money I had painstakingly saved and with what my parents managed to scrape together, there was enough for a single fare out of Lithuania. I chose South Africa because a Mr. Chaimowitz, a tailor who had left Mir a year before and settled in Cape Town, promised my parents – and me – that he would have a job for me.

Moishe did not have enough money for a ticket. Actually he did not like saving or even working very much – preferring to spend his time playing or pretending to study. (I say this because with all the studying he said he was doing, he should have been much more learned than he was.)

When I told him that with the money that my parents had managed to get together for my fare, I would be going to South Africa, he was outraged. He said it was not right for girls to travel on their own. He said it was against the law. He told me to give him the money. He said that he would go, he would work and then send for me. I said I would rather use my money for my own fare; and that I would go and work and send for him.

He started shouting, insisting that it was unheard of for a woman to go on her own to a strange country - and ‘send for’ a man.

Nonetheless, I told him my mind was made up: and that my own money would be used for my own fare. He flew into a rage. He broke off our engagement and cursed me by saying that all my children would be born hunchback - which was the popular curse of the day.

As having children was the furthest thing from my mind, it did not bother me very much. I had much more to think about:

The long-awaited dream of starting a new life in another country, had become a traumatic reality with the filling-in and waiting for forms and more forms, the packing of my belongings, preparations for the journey and the unbearable finality of saying goodbye to my parents, family and friends, knowing that there was little chance of ever seeing them again.

The uncertainty of the future presented a strange mixture of trepidation and anticipation; enormous sadness, anxiety and fear intermingled with expectation, excitement and hope.

I was leaving a life I had known for eighteen years with a one-way ticket to the unknown.