In the year 1848 in Russian lands, an edict was passed that Jewish men were to take on surnames. For at this time, there was an 18 year conscription into the army and young Jewish men, were often able to evade call-up because they simply could not be identified.
Peoples names simply consisted of a first name, the name of the father and his Hebrew lineage. Doron ben Aharon Ha Levi is mine. Maoris have a similar naming tradition, and in their case they link themselves back to the waka (outrigger canoe) on which they arrived here in Aotearoa in the year 966 from Hawaiiki.
The most common naming protocol was to take a name from one?s trade. In fact this is a tradition of many cultures. A Schneider amongst Jews is the equivalent of a Smith amongst the English.
Another way was to adopt a surname resonant of a local landmark.
Few were immune to call-up and such was the fear of this internment that in small Jewish settlements across the steppes and the Pale of Europe, men did whatever they could to find a way of avoiding conscription for it invariably meant that they would never return to their homes.
In many villages there was a practitioner whose role it was to maim a boy, to take off a toe or a finger.
In my family the forbear was a peasant farmer, a man named Krieger. It may well be that he had been conscripted into the army given his surname.
Desperate to disappear off the roll he took on the name of his wife?s family.
She was the daughter of a blind rabbi. They lived in a tiny shtetl called Baisjagola, off Highway 44 near Kaunas in Lithuania. The area was owned then by a local count and most people it seems, worked in his mills.
The community could only gather up enough money to support the rabbi, but not his family and so when Krieger came along they were only to happy to do a deal with him that would take his daughter off their hands. And so the name Krieger disappeared and, based on a small mountain in the locality the became the progenitor of a new line of heritage. The mountain had the name the Living Mountain. Thus was commenced the family Levenberg.
My grandfather was born in 1900 in Baisjagola. In 1905 he recalled standing at the side of the road to watch the Russian army go by on its way to fight the Japanese. He watched them return as a rag tag bunch of beaten men.
And at that same spot three years later he bore witness to the first motor car, belching smoke, to drive through his town. It was a wonderous beast owned naturally, by the local count.
Many years later, on the occasional Sunday morning my grandparents would pay us what seemed to be royal visits. In a car which represented my long suffering grandfather?s only excess. His jet black Zephyr. All chrome and protruding red lights. A car fit for the Jetsons.
My grandmother Masha was a silly and vain woman. Her raven black hair was done in the style of 1920 starlets of cinema ? a galvanized iron look that protruded perpendicular to the head and smelled distinctly of a science experiment involving ammonia and glue.
She was an extremely short woman, an encumbrance which she compensated for by wearing shoes with heels closely resembling church steeples. In later years she put herself to bed and never rose again complaining of dizziness ascribed to Meniers disease. But I was not alone in believing that it may well have been those shoes that had made more than their fair contribution to her vertiginous fear of life.
As long as her heels so too the length of her cigarette holder. It was a cultivated look of that era. Today she would have been well cast with 101 spotty dogs in the role of Cruella.
My grandfather was a sufferingly quiet man. He could be nothing else with a wife who exhibited such crass peasantry as if it were the height of style.
Whenever they came to visit, my grandparents would bring with them a small bag of sweets. For us it was a bagatelle. A bribe we stored no value in and one that we would soon forget.
But for them that tiny bag of unloved sweets carried a heavy history.
In his teens, my enterprising grandfather had started his own business. He worked hard to make a go of it. It was back-breaking work and the rewards were meager. And then, in 1918 in the small shtetl of Baisjagola that has now been buried by history and the will to forget, the Cossacks came.
It was the beginning of the end for a region of people that had lived in relative peace.
In the nearby town of Radviliskis there is a small museum. Hidden in its archives is the terrible story of the treachery that the people of that town were to exact on the Jews who had been their neighbours and sometimes friends for hundreds of years. For with the arrival of each invader they were quite comfortable in ascribing on their local Jews, all of the evils of the time.
My grandfather had started a sweet factory. Little sugar sweets made from big bags of sugar boiled in vats. When the Cossacks came, in a form of cruel irony, he was put to work. In his own sweet factory. But no longer was he able to enjoy the sweetness of his own enterprise. He became a worker.
For the rest of his life he walked with a stooping back. He said it was because of the heavy bags of sugar he had been forced to carry. But his face told that the burden had been far greater than that.
In 1925, leaving his young wife and newly-born son, he headed off to start a new life in a new land. At the foot of Africa. The trip from his village at the side of Highway 44 in the Central North of Lithuania was a long and arduous one. It takes you across Lithuania, into Poland and on to Gdansk. Then a sea crossing on a freighter to England. There he stowed aboard the Durham Castle of the Union Castle lines finally after months to arrive to the shores of Cape Town.
In order to leave he too needed to disappear from the authorities. His brother already served in the Russian army and they arranged a swap. And so my grandfather Barney Levenberg became Beryl Levenberg and Beryl remained on in the Russian army.
It is hard to imagine what fears and expectations he might have carried with him. He would only have had scant details of the fierce native tribes, the hungry animals. He would not have known that a cruel white nation awaited with mockery at his halting English, his thick accent and a hatred for his religion that simply mirrored those from who he was escaping.
But there was greater hardship than mockery and the toil of starting a new life. Simply that it took more than three years for him to accumulate enough money that he might afford to pay for his wife and son to be brought to him.
When we take pity on ourselves for having had to start our life once more as strangers in new lands, we should never forget that we were born into a world of plenty.
We should never forget that for the grace of fortune and the colour of our skins, we were born unto privilege where many around us were not. Nor should we lose sight of just how precious a small bag of sweets might be.