“With the last gasp of life, you get a new lease on life.”
(Samuel Beckett)
My godmother Juanita Rothman refused to be defined by a lifetime of chronic illnesses that ultimately made daily tasks into an obstacle course. “So boring,” she’d say about her health problems, not as a matter of denial or stiff-upper-lipishness, but because life is short and there’s so much to discuss, debate, and create. “Achievement, that’s why I think we’re put on this earth,” she once told me. “To get things done, that’s what life is about.” She stuck to this mantra right to the bitter end of her ninety-four years.
Whenever I visit the old country, I make a point of spending time with Juanita. It’s a pleasure, not a duty. We are not biologically related, but I feel connected to her as though by blood. And it’s a bonus that she links me with Nat, the love of her life and my godfather, and the circle of friends around my parents in their youth.
Yes, I know I’m writing in the present tense as though she’s still alive. I miss her deeply.
“How’s the new writing going,” she’d ask me, even after I’d just completed a big project and felt I deserved a breather. Didn’t she understand what it was like to teach at a state college, loaded up with three demanding classes and close to one hundred needy students, with not a teaching assistant in sight? “Have you started a new book,” she’d ask, and I’d mumble my reply as if I was a procrastinating student about to miss a deadline. “No, not really, but I’m thinking about it,” I’d lie. “The problem with writers,” she’d reply, not missing a beat, “is that they think too much and don’t write enough. When one is a writer, Towhnee, one writes. Don’t make up excuses. Just pick up the pen.”
She died in her elegant home in Cheltenham, England, on December 11th, surrounded by collectible memories – “A poet gave me this hookah … I collected these ivory elephants in Africa… This is my father’s humidor the way it looked the day he died” … – and a vast, eclectic library, including an impressive collection of first edition poetry that she bequeathed to me in recognition, I suppose, of my efforts to transgress the boundaries of academic prose.
As Juanita Masur she grew up economically and racially privileged in South Africa – the daughter of Gertrude and Max, a Hungarian woman born in the United States and a South African businessman, both Jews. Apartheid and the Second World War shaped her antifascist politics. At Witwatersrand University, where she received a degree in political philosophy and economics, Juanita was, in her words, “a bit of a Bolshy.” She took over as editor of the campus newspaper from her comrade Ruth First, who later as Ruth Slovo was the first white woman imprisoned for political activism under the apartheid regime’s detention laws. Juanita ran a clandestine school teaching literacy to Black South Africans. In the 1940s, the Nazis murdered one of her uncles in Germany, while her brother joined the Canadian air force and died during the war in the Netherlands. Back home, she helped her mother administer a camp for 90,000 prisoners of war. After graduation, Juanita worked as an assistant editor at the Johannesburg Sunday Express
By the 1950s, as South Africa’s racial lines hardened against the post-war winds of change blowing through the continent, the regime viciously cracked down on dissent. Many activists left the country, including Ruth Slovo, who was assassinated in Mozambique in 1982 by a letter bomb delivered by the South African security forces. Juanita also exiled herself into the world, no small feat for a single woman in a pre-feminist era. She lived for a while in Greece before moving permanently to England.
Juanita’s personal life similarly defied convention. With little patience for dutiful wives, she married three times and divorced twice, the kind of behavior typically reserved for men of her generation. She scandalized South Africa’s middle-class Jewish community by marrying a working-class Greek immigrant whom she was tutoring in English. “He wasn’t Jewish,” she said. “The marriage didn’t last. It was all about sex.” Divorced and now a parent, she focused on making a career as a writer and journalist. She lived for a while in Greece where she wrote for United Nations publications and received a transfusion of blue blood through her marriage to Count Nicholas Kalerghi Mavrogeni, an official in the Ministry of Justice.
In 1961, after her second divorce and move to England, she crashed the boys’ scientific club to publish and edit a new magazine, Hovering Craft and Hydrofoil, and become a founder of the International Hydrofoil Society. She was courted by the patrician Edward Boyle, a Tory rebel who broke ranks with his party over capital punishment, education, immigration, and foreign policy. Boyle joined Harold Macmillan’s government, working his way up to Minister of Education and, later, the House of Lords as Baron Boyle of Handsworth. But he didn’t join Juanita. She turned down his persistent marriage proposals and an opportunity to become a Lady as well as a Countess, instead choosing Nat Rothman, the Jewish ex-commie, on condition that she wouldn’t have to sacrifice her career to deferential domesticity.
After Nat’s death in 1998, she wasn’t interested in another relationship. When she showed me her photo albums – organized in seemingly random, non-chronological order – I could see that from her earliest years she had a spark and zest for life, not traditionally beautiful, but a looker with pizzazz and smarts, who attracted men and looked them right in the eye. From her attentive father to the two men who, she told me sheepishly, proposed marriage when she was in her 80s, she always had suitors.
In her last decade, she was too busy for romance. She worked for free as a literary editor and agent for aspiring and established authors, helping them to publish in a wide variety of genres, from fiction and memoir to scientific and historical treatises. She worked harder than most people twenty years younger. Aspiring and published authors somehow found their way to her to receive rigorous editing services, handwritten in ink. During a visit a few years ago, she showed me some of her projects: a World War II memoir that’s been published, a novel she was submitting to Routledge, and another 500-page novel that she was inclined to reject. She had to inform a retired, well-known chef that his memoir of cooking for the stars in swank restaurants was not up to par. “He started sobbing, I thought it was about the book,” she told me. “It was embarrassing, he wanted to marry me.”
Juanita relished political discussion, no subject off-limits, no orthodoxy unchallenged. She was easily irritated by the local retirees’ fondness for gossip and organ recitals – “all they want to talk about is their health” – and had no time for the Jewish book club other than to give its members advice about what to read. She didn’t care what people thought about her decision to support a program that brought Palestinian kids to Cheltenham. “Time waits for no man, Towhnee.”
She was more up to date on literature and the arts than I was. It was her boundless reading that introduced me in 1997 to the work of W. G. Sebald, whose book The Emigrants left a lasting impression: “They are ever returning to us, the dead.” During a visit in 2010, we discussed and argued about presidential politics in the United States, the Middle East, the state of London theatre, and what we were reading. Her gifts to me included Bernard Schlink’s latest novel (Homecoming) and a new book of unpublished stories by Primo Levi (A Tranquil Star). She knew my tastes well, but she was usually ahead of them. When I asked about her bedside reading, she showed me a new book on Walter Benjamin (Archive) and a coffee table book of Tracy Emin’s controversial work. She flipped open the pages and showed me the artist nude, the artist semi-nude, and the artist with legs spread-eagled in a very unladylike pose. Emin’s texts refer to fuck and fucking in many inventive permutations. “Well, some of this is silly,” said Juanita in her ever-so-polite and measured English, “but I think she’s saying something interesting, don’t you?”
I will miss her voracious curiosity, fierce intelligence, and tough love. She had absolutely no sympathy when I complained about writer’s block. I can hear her now: “Get cracking, Towhnee. You have an obituary to write.”