One afternoon I was at my parents’ looking at a large framed photo on their bedroom wall. I knew the picture well. It showed a family group, sitting in the back yard of a house. It had the appearance of a Victorian formal photo: furniture and carpets had been dragged out into the yard to create a tableaux. On household chairs sat a family, the father a paterfamilias in suit, waistcoat and Lech Walesa moustache. They all wear formal clothes, but they don’t look uncomfortable. They are all dead now and I never met any of them, but I can recognise myself in their faces and I can see my children in their children. I know, of course, the many descendants of Jeanette and a grand-daughter of Miriam. For the rest, I have no idea. But one thing I do know is where this photo was taken.
Anticipating a day when my father would no longer be there to tell me who these familiar yet mysterious people are, I carefully made a schema on the back of the picture and marked out who they all were. Sitting proud amid their five children are Rachel and Herschel Pope. The year is about nineteen-fifteen and these two had both immigrated to South Africa from Lithuania as children in the previous century. This was not unusual. For some historical reason most Lithuanian Jews went not to America or England, but to South Africa, leading to a thriving community that eventually provided some of the leading lights of the independence movement. Rachel and Herschel’s five children are, from the left: Jeanette, Eli, Bella, Jack and Miriam. Jeanette is my grandmother.
My grandmother, Jeanette, married and had four boys by the early thirties. She also had a single daughter who died in infancy. My father was her oldest son. They’re all dead now, but he was the last to die. The first to be born, he arrived out in the bush where his parents were running a hospital, and he outlasted all his brothers. It was said this was because his mother fed him on mealy maize porridge for the first years of his life. I’ve read that what you eat in the first year of your life affects how long you will live, so maybe that’s true.
So I was looking at this photo and drawing a little plan on the back and writing in names of everyone and I asked, so where was this house. Because the yard was so easy to overlook, such an anonymous space. And he said, that was the back yard of my grandfather Herschel’s house. Herschel is the one who looks to me like Lech Walesa, the Polish leader of Solidarity back in the day. He’s sitting like a Victorian patriarch, but I think he was actually a bit of a softie. They lived right next to the rugby stadium. Straib Street. My grandfather owned and ran three shops on this street, he said.
I immediately wanted to look up the street on the internet, on Google Maps. I’ve never been to Johannesburg, I’ve never been to South Africa. When I was younger my family often went, but I always missed out, either because I was away travelling or because I was boycotting the regime and my family by association. I was a bit purist. Not only had I never been there, but Johannesburg, the South Africa of my father’s childhood, was to me a historic dream. I knew a lot about it, I’d seen a lot of photos of his family, but I didn’t consider it to still exist. I’d never actually wondered about where he lived as a child, where he grew up, where he’d gone to school.
To me, the world was sundered by the Nazi period, and although my father’s family were luckily safe and far away from the European horrors, I didn’t consider that anything from before the war could have remained just as it was, especially when it pertained to Jews. My father was born in nineteen-twenty. He had his barmitzvah in nineteen thirty-three, just as the Nuremberg laws were being passed. I saw a terrible symmetry in his life. He joined the army as a nineteen year old and served in Africa until late in the war when he was discharged. After the war he came to England just as the Nationalists came to power in South Africa and instituted apartheid. He had been a communist as a youth and I imagined that he was a target for both Nazis and the apartheid regime. I constructed an image of him as a holocaust survivor, not because he’d been there but because he’d been alive and a Jew. As I told myself, there are not many Lithuanian Jews born in nineteen-twenty who are still alive. Not many.
So that day, when he told me the address of his grandfather’s house, it was like a small crack opened in history and let me take a look in. I immediately went and put the address into Google Earth and in the satellite view that popped up in an instant there was the street, with no houses still standing, but right next to it the national rugby stadium. I took the laptop through to dad and showed it to him. Yes, he said, unfazed, we could see the rugby stadium, it loomed over the house and cast it into shadow. Then he looked at the map again for a while. ‘We lived up there,’ he said, jabbing at the screen with his finger to the north of the rugby stadium. I scrolled up and he guided me until we found his street. He pointed to houses, that one, no, that one. Yes. That’s our house.
I was astounded. I’d never considered that the house he grew up in might still be there. It wasn’t that I didn’t think it would be there, rather that it had never entered my head. I know nothing much about that part of his life, although there are quite a few pictures of him and his brothers in a large garden. The Google satellite image showed a typical urban city landscape: plenty of large houses with their own gardens. I was thinking about the house, but Dad was already off around the block. That’s where Ruby did his apprenticeship. Ruby was one of his brothers, a chemist with his own shops. Or was it a chain of shops. What did I know about this family? And that’s my school, over there. I scrolled sideways. And we used to walk up and down this road to visit my grandparents at weekends.
We were suddenly back in nineteen-thirties Johannesburg, a calm ordered world, privileged, but before apartheid. Before the holocaust. Before the war and his move to London and the part of his life that I was part of. We scanned the streets and he pointed out landmarks that he could remember. After a while he tired of taking me for a walk around his childhood town. I realised that Google maps is a time machine, that if they retained each change of satellite imagery we would be able to peel back the years, to travel back to earlier incarnations of towns and cities. Of course, the Johannesburg we looked at that day wasn’t the same Johannesburg he grew up in. The road he walked down to visit the grandparents had turned into as sunken multi-lane carriageway. But it was close enough. I’d done something I never anticipated. I’d seen where my dad grew up with him by my side and it’s something I’ll never forget. I wrote the address of his grandparents house carefully on the back of the picture. Now I can go back there any time.
