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Abstract
This article explores the contents of a Yiddish diary, written in 1927 in Latvia by Jewish Communist and trade unionist Ray Alexander Simons, which accompanied her on her immigration to South Africa in 1929, to avoid arrest on account of her activities in an underground Communist cell in Riga. In the context of her autobiography, ‘All My Life and All My Strength’, written when she was in her eighties, and completed by various hands, the examination will consider how the diary, written when she was 14 years old, supplements the more impersonal account of the autobiography, enhancing our understanding of Simons’ single-minded dedication to the workers’ struggle and to the liberation of the Black peoples in South Africa.
Notes
1. Allison Drew, Discordant Comrades: Identities and Loyalties on the South African Left (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 1, 6–10, 36–7, 46–8 and 52–4; H.J. and R.E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850–1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 184 and 257–261; Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 2003), 8–9.
2. Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983), 241–2.
3. Ray Alexander Simons, All My Life and All My Strength, ed. Raymond Suttner (Parktown, Johannesburg: STE Pubishers, 2004), 42–6.
4. Simons, All My Life and All My Strength, 50, 55 and 62.
5. Under South Africa’s Apartheid laws people, meetings, organizations and publications could be banned. A typical banning order would restrict a person to a particular magisterial district, require them to report regularly to the police, prevent them from associating with more than one person at a time and prevent them from visiting public places and institutions. Additionally nothing a banned person said or wrote could be published. There was no avenue of appeal against a banning order, About.com, African History, http://africanhistory.about.com/od/glossaryb/g/def_banned.htm.
6. Milton Shain and Miriam Pimstone, “Ray Alexander (Simons), 1913–2004,” http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/alexander-simons-ray; Tanya Barben (Simons), e-mail, August 26, 2012.
8. Simons, All My Life and All My Strength, 351.
9. See Patricia Van der Spuy, “‘Our Book’: A Personal Reflection on Ray Alexander Simons’ All My Life and All My Strength,” Kronos 72, no. 31 (Winter/Spring 2005): 223–7.
10. Interview with Tanya Barben, August 2011.
11. Yiddish poetry diary, Jack & Ray Simons collection, BC1080, 2.12. Special Collections Department, University of Cape Town Libraries, University of Cape Town. (Unpublished). English translation by Veronica Belling.
12. See D. Shneer, “Izi Kharik,” in the Yivo Encyclopedia of the Jews of Eastern Europe, editor-in-chief Gershon Hundert (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 1: 885–6.
13. Virginia Woolf’s phrase, cited in I. Papirno, “What Can Be Done With Diaries,” Russian Review 63 (October 2004): 562.
14. Ibid., 562–4.
15. Philipe Lejeune, On Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 4.
16. Max Weinreich, Der Veg Tsu Undzer Yugnt: Yesoydes, Metodn, Problemen, fun Yidisher Yugnt-Forshung [The way to our youth: foundations, methods, problems, of the research of Jewish youth] [in Yiddish] (Vilna: Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Insitut, Optsvayg Yugnt-Forshung, 1935), 349–50; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Marcus Moseley, and Michael Stanislawski, “Introduction,” in Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust, ed. Jeffrey Shandler (New Haven, CT and London: published in cooperation with the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, Yale University Press, c.2002), xxiii.
17. In the Soviet Yiddish orthography the Hebrew words that are traditionally written without vowels, are vocalized phonetically in the way of the words of Germanic and Slavic origin. See D. Katz, Words on Fire: the Unfinished Story of Yiddish (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
18. ORT, The Yivo Encyclopedia of the Jews of Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/ORT.
19. Yiddish diary, 32, Jack & Ray Simons collection (see note 11).
20. Jochin Hellbeck, “Laboratories of the Soviet Self: Diaries from the Stalin Era” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1998), cited in Papirno, “What Can Be Done With Diaries,” 567.
21. Shandler, Awakening Lives.
22. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Moseley, and Stanislawski, “Introduction,” xviii.
23. Ray Alexander Simons, interviewed by Steven Robins and Immanuel Suttner, July 20, 1993 and January 1996, Cape Town, in Cutting Through the Mountain: Interviews with South African Jewish Activists, ed. Immanuel Suttner (London: Viking, 1997), 30.
24. Yiddish diary, 12.
25. Simons, All My Life and All My Strength, 36; Yiddish diary, 7–9.
26. Yiddish diary, 7–8.
27. Photograph, Tanya Barben, private collection.
28. Yiddish diary, 10.
29. Ibid., 10–11, 17, 32, 35, 61 and 63.
30. Ibid., 18.
31. Simons, All My Life and All My Strength, 352.
32. D. Levin, “Latvia,” in the Yivo Encyclopedia of the Jews of Eastern Europe, 1: 997.
33. Yiddish diary, 3.
34. Ibid., 7.
35. Ibid., 5. English translation by Veronica Belling.
36. Ibid., 4–5.
37. It was not possible to establish for certain the nature of the school, but as the Hebrew network of schools in Eastern Europe was called ‘Tarbuth’, one presumes that the Committee school that was conducted in Yiddish would have been affiliated to the Bund, especially as the principal is described as a Communist.
38. Simons, All My Life and All My Strength, 33.
39. Yiddish diary, 4–5.
40. Simons, All My Life and All My Strength, 31.
41. While in Latvia, Ray, like all Jews in Eastern Europe, observed their birthdays according to the Jewish calendar, a lunar calendar, so that their birthdays fell on a different date in the Christian calendar each year.
42. The Shma refers to the prayer, “Hear O Israel the Lord our God, the Lord is One” (Deuteronomy 6: 4–15).
43. Yiddish diary, 10.
44. Simons, All My Life and All My Strength, 30–31, 33 and 40; Yiddish diary, 6–7.
45. Simons, All My Life and All My Strength, 30.
46. Yiddish diary, 12.
47. Ibid., 12.
48. See H. Kazovsky, “Kultur-Lige” [Culture League], in Yivo Encyclopedia of the Jews in Eastern Europe, 1: 953–6.
49. Yiddish diary, 15.
50. Poetry diary.
51. Yiddish diary, 11–12 and 15–16.
52. Ibid., 16–17.
53. Ibid., 13.
54. Simons, All My Life and All My Strength, 88.
55. Ibid., 34 and 38.
56. Ibid., 38.
57. Yiddish diary, 13.
58. Her love of reading also features in the autobiography. However, in the diary she also discusses the contents of the articles and books that she is reading.
59. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Moseley, and Stanislawski, “Introduction,” xxxi.
60. Simons, All My Life and All My Strength, 35.
61. She refers to the story, “Hershele der Doktor” (Hershele the Doctor), Yiddish diary, 5.
62. See K.B. Moss, “Not The Dybbuk but Don Quixote: Translation, Deparochialisation, and Nationalism in Jewish Culture, 1917–1919,” in Jewish Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. B. Nathans and G. Safran (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, c.2008), 196–240.
63. Yiddish diary, 30; F. Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead (London: J.M. Dent, 1911, reprint 1939), 368.
64. Yiddish diary, 52.
65. See references to Anatole France in L. Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, c.2009).
66. Yiddish diary, 30 and 61.
67. Shomer was the pen name for N.M. Shaykevitsh; for Yiddish romantic fiction, see D. Miron, A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schocken, 1973) , 28–9.
68. Yiddish diary, 13.
69. Simons, All My Life and All My Strength, 39, 41; Suttner, Cutting Through the Mountain: Interviews with South African Activists, 37–8.
70. Yiddish diary, 7.
71. M. Freilich, “TOZ,” in Yivo Encyclopedia of the Jews in Eastern Europe (see note 12), 1891–2.
72. OZE sought to create an all-Russian Jewish welfare system with the goal of promoting the study and knowledge of medical and sanitary practices, detecting and curing diseases among Jews, preventing epidemics and creating living conditions conducive to the normal physical and mental development of Jewish children, YIVO/OZE, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/OZE.
73. Yiddish diary, 34–6 and 38.
74. Joachin Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 349.
75. See Alyssa Quint, “Personal Hygiene and Grooming,” in Yivo Encyclopedia of the Jews of Eastern Europe, 2: 1345–7.
76. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 358.
77. Yiddish diary, 39–40.
78. Joel Berkowitz and Jeremy Dauber, ed., trans. and intro., Landmark Yiddish Plays: A Critical Anthology (Albany: State University of New York Press, c.2006), 257–90.
79. Yiddish diary, 43, 45 and 59.
80. Ibid., 43.
81. “Simon Petlyura” (1879–1926), Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972), 13: 340–41.
82. See Kelly Scott Johnson, “Schwarzbard: Biography of a Jewish Assassin” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012).