HERBER HOUSE: "A HOSTEL FOR JEWISH CHILDREN" (Part III)

The "Cane Mutiny", a "Feral Culture", rawfers and shluppers and liedjies on the school bus - All this and more in this final part of the author's history of Herber House hostel.

Stuart Buxbaum holds an honours degree in Sociology from Wits University (1970) and an honours in Judaica from UNISA (1984). After working in the social research unit of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies in the early 1970s, he farmed for many years in Mpumalanga.

This is the third and final part of my paper looking at the establishment, running and final closure of Herber House, a hostel for Jewish schoolchildren in Johannesburg established under the auspices of the SA Board of Jewish Education (SABJE) in 1943.

At this point, we will interrupt here the narrative of how the SAJBE lay leadership and staff of Herber House grappled with the short and longer-term challenges of running the hostel to dwell a little on what everyday life was like for those youngsters (including myself) living at the institution.

“Feral Culture”

By the late 1950s, HH was drifting into a benign dystopia. Only the regularity of the school day provided structure to the pervasive laissez-faire spirit, as did the remarkable group cohesiveness of the boarders. From the group we drew our strength, a closeness that persists via shared memories almost sixty years later. How was this culture expressed? Thus: having already davened shacharit and breakfasted hurriedly by 7am, we would clamber aboard the buses that would ferry us to school, still isolated from the day scholars. In the song’s refrain, “You could meet us at the back of the bus”, is where we sat bunched together, expressing our otherness by often singing Afrikaans liedjies in unison. This is probably where the future Rabbi Philip Heilbrunn received his early chazanuth training! Once at the high school, we were not required to attend prayers. Instead we sprawled into a classroom together, chatting and gossiping and completing homework. Break-time would see us reassembling on a bench outside the tuck-shop. The rare purchase of a 15-cent hotdog meant the brave customer would have but a small portion of the delicacy, the rest being diminished in its passage down the line on the bench. The rule of ‘opps’ (sharing) was mandatory, to be ignored at the buyer’s peril. We were a band of brothers.

This feral culture had been long in its making. It was the alternate reaction to the state of affairs so often agonizingly mulled over by the committee in their lofty considerations. After the excitement of those early years during the establishment of the hostel, the committee was often preoccupied with the inhospitable physical nature of the property. It was in extent about four acres, rocky and somewhat forbidding. It kept the boarders cut off from the urban environment, accentuating their separateness. Time and again, the committee would bemoan the lack of extensive playing fields, but for the boarders it was a minor inconvenience. There was enough space for endless games of cricket or soccer and daily games of that hostel staple, the game of king stingers.