Serving the Natives: Whiteness as the Price of Hospitality in South African Yiddish Literature

Abstract

Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants who came to South Africa from Eastern Europe were thrust from one racially discriminatory society into another. Ignorant of the languages spoken in the country they had made their refuge, largely unskilled in any trades and poorly educated, these immigrant Jews found themselves ambivalent parts of a social formation that left them marginalised by the white ruling class, but socially and politically privileged over black workers. This dislocating experience was most keenly felt when they sought their livelihoods in the South African trading phenomenon known, in the racist parlance of the day, as 'kaffir eating-houses'. From the turn of the century, white South African racist attitudes held in contempt any occupation that provided basic services for blacks, but prevented the opening of such trade to black entrepreneurs. The only whites prepared to take it on were socially despised Eastern European immigrants, chiefly Jews. By entering the only occupation open to so many of them, these Jewish immigrants became victims of multiple prejudice. They found their existence predicated on the necessity to negotiate an identity for themselves along a number of complex and ever-shifting frontiers. Many of the most profitable of these 'kaffir eating-houses' were run by well-off Jews, generally earlier immigrants who had 'made good'. Having become employers, they in turn employed, for exploitatively low wages, poor fellow-immigrant Yiddish-speaking Jews to do the day-today work. Consequently these severely disadvantaged Jewish immigrants found themselves both the recipients and the administrators of a many-sided exploitation. Empowered whites equated them with the blacks they served at fixed and meagre weekly wages for the profit of those who, socially despised themselves, were nevertheless their sole economic means of support. Yet in dealing on a daily basis with their black clientele, these shop assistants were placed by the discriminatory practices of a discriminatory society in positions of racial superiority over black mineworkers and labourers. The confusion they experienced as a result of their marginalised condition created a site of multi-faceted conflict that South African Yiddish writers repeatedly confront and explore. The predicament of the kaffireatniks, as they were contemptuously called, becomes a metonym for the problem of defining immigrant Jewish identity along the unstable social, economic and political frontiers of racist South Africa. This paper, drawing on seminal texts, investigates the way South African Yiddish fiction problematises questions of race and gender identity formations, and the moral ambiguity inherent in occupational segregation for Eastern European immigrants who found themselves part of a racist social formation that continually demanded ethical compromise as a precondition for social acceptance and economic success.