New Heavens by Boris Senior Read Free Book Online Page A

interesting wild game on the way, he would draw the attention of the passengers and circle the herd of elephants or giraffe or whatever. A few years later they would, after two days’ flying, be transferred to a large four-engine Sunderland flying boat at Port Mozambique, with twelve passengers and a crew of five. The flying boat eventually landed in Palestine either on Lake Tiberias or on the Dead Sea. The flight took the better part of two weeks, and no one seemed to be in too much of a hurry. I have a clipping from a South African weekly that gives an idea of air travel in that period, with a heading on one page about my parents paying “a lightning visit to Palestine, there and back in one month.” Now who had it better, the early travelers or us nowadays in the sleek jets?
THE LONELY TREE
    The Sterkfontein caves, renowned for the traces of early prehistoric civilization they contain, are forty kilometersnorth of Johannesburg. Though we lived in Johannesburg, much of my youth was spent at Doornbosfontein, a farm we owned near the Sterkfontein. It is a large farm, and its name comes from a big Doornbos thornbush tree that stands in splendid isolation in a broad treeless landscape. From my early childhood, we called it “the lonely tree.”
    After establishing himself in South Africa, my father bought the farm for his sister and two brothers and their families as a home to live in when he brought them from Lithuania. It is huge—7,000 acres. The three immigrant families hailed from the small village in the distant Baltic country having had no experience in agriculture. They took to their new environment and occupation without difficulty, as has been the wont of Jews who so often have had to migrate from country to country. The district was populated by Afrikaans farmers, who looked on incredulously as the inexperienced Lithuanian immigrants, in their outlandish Russian dress with pale complexions, began to plant corn and reap crops with surprisingly good yields.
    Despite knowing little English and not a word of Afrikaans, they were welcomed and were well treated by the God-fearing Afrikaner farmers who considered the Jews to be “the people of the Book.” Probably the sympathetic attitude of the Afrikaans farmers to the Jews had its roots in the history of their Huguenot ancestors’ flight from religious persecution in Europe in the seventeenth century.
    The farmers had been accustomed to visits from time to time by a kind of Jewish immigrant called “smouses” in Afrikaans. They were traveling merchants who went from one isolated farm to another with a bag or two of articles for sale. The farmers were isolated from contact with theirfarmer compatriots because of the lack of facilities for communicating. They tended to rely on the traveling smouses to bring them news from other farmers. The peddlers were often put up for the night by the kind Afrikaners, but they had not expected to see them working beside them as farmers. My father always spoke well of them and of the Afrikaners and their welcoming attitude to newcomers.
    Most of the road from Johannesburg to Doornbosfontein is tarred, but the last ten kilometers consists of dirt roads winding through low hills covered in dry brown grass and fields of corn, the staple food of most black South Africans. As these roads pass through farms, there are gates every few kilometers, and if one throws a coin to the Picannins who are nearby, they open and close the gate with a winning smile. After leaving the tarred road, four farms are passed in this way, the last belonging to the family of Dolf de la Rey, descendant of the famed Afrikaner general of the Boer War.
    Our homestead at Doornbosfontein was near the farm entrance and consisted of one large ancient farmhouse and another smaller building composed of what is known as
rondavels
. These are unique to South Africa and are circular structures with roofs made of thatch, the interior