From Russia with Lunch Read Free

motivation, the primary goal of these organisations was to facilitate the efficient movement of such strangers to somewhere far, far away, lest they be thought of as encouraging the arrival of immigrants as opposed to funnelling them through to shipping lines. The Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter formed a particularly strong alliance with the Union-Castle shipping firm, which offered passage to South Africa. Newman tentatively – his word – concludes that many migrants bought as a single package a ticket from Lithuania to South Africa on the Union-Castle line. A crucial part of this arrangement was the Shelter meeting migrants in London, housing them for a few days and then seeing them onto boats which often departed from Southampton.
    And so it was that in Southampton Moses Dibobis – go on, sing the rest – stepped on board HMS Repulse on 28 March 1925 for the month-long voyage to a land of promise. The monotony of steerage class travel at the time was so pronounced that many a romance developed on board. So entrenched was the phenomenon that in the cabins of one such ship travelling between Britain and America the following notice was posted: ‘All couples making love too warmly would be married compulsorily at New York if authorities deemed it fit or should be imprisoned.’ Three questions: how do you make love too warmly, what crime could you be charged with and would it stand up in court?
    The Repulse travelled via Gambia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. On 30 April 1925 it pulled into Cape Town and berthed beneath the hulking magnificence of Table Mountain. Always partial to a bit of flamboyance, Moses stepped off the gangplank amid streamers, applause and the strains of a brass band in full cry. ‘Oy!’ he recalled thinking, in years to come. ‘These people sure know how to make a boy feel welcome.’ Alas, Moses wasn’t the only man on board with important business ahead of him. Up on the first class deck, smiling his thin-lipped smile, was the Prince of Wales who would later exhibit a penchant for a certain American divorcee. He had come to muster support from an Afrikaaner population whose burgeoning nationalism would eventually result in the apartheid regime.
    While Moses’ arrival story was undoubtedly a cracker, it was unfortunately not true. Although the brass band, blinding sunshine and looming mountainous background had made their way into family lore, my grandfather’s passport has him leaving Germany on July 24 1926 en route to South Africa. A full year after the Prince’s visit. After the initial surprise that came with hearing that this chapter of our history had been somewhat embellished, the family concluded that Moses had appropriated the tale from an earlier traveller and dovetailed it into his library of autobiographical belters. At the time, stealing another comic’s material was not the heinous sin it is today.
    What is certain, however, is that shortly after he arrived in South Africa, Moses Dibobis became Maurice Dibowitz as that is how his name sounded to the immigration official at the end of his line. Another person to take on this patronymic was a young Capetonian named Anne Jaffee whose parents had also migrated from Lithuania and ran a boarding house where she met the young Maurice. They married in 1935 and two years later my mother arrived. Her name is Renecia, which my grandmother made up on the grounds that it sounded pleasant and looked unique. She could never have known that some seventy years later it would sound like all the other ghetto-fabulous names on The Ricki Lake Show.
    Renecia Dibobis became Renecia Smiedt in 1959, with both sets of my father’s grandparents also hailing from Lithuania a generation before Maurice heard the band. Our ludicrously opulent lives under the apartheid regime have been chronicled in my previous book, Are We There Yet?, but the Lithuanian ancestry was rarely spoken of. We knew that was where we