Shock of abuse in Jewish Joburg
Not many know or want to admit that it exists, writes Sue Grant-Marshall
SEXUAL abuse in Johannesburg’s Jewish community seems an unlikely topic for a debut novel, but this one is hard-hitting and has the pace and verve of a thriller.
Yet this is what former journalist, and now public relations practitioner, Marilyn Cohen de Villiers has produced in A Beautiful Family.
Her main protagonists are South Africans Alan and Brenda Silverman. When they meet in the 1980s on an Israeli kibbutz, she is waif-like. He’s tall, blonde and a babe magnet with his charming ways and good looks.
The kibbutznik girls lie in wait for Alan and are astonished when he falls for the tiny, childlike Brenda, who spends her days constantly assuring everyone that she’s almost 18.
The first hint in the novel, which moves backwards and forwards across the decades, that something’s not quite right, comes on the kibbutz when they make love. Alan tells Brenda, whom he clearly adores, to “just lie still and enjoy it”. She obeys.
The book opens decades later in 2012, with the mysterious death of middle-aged Brenda in the couple’s palatial and well-fortified Johannesburg home. She has no injuries, there’s no blood, and two of their three grown-up children are at home.
Until then, the Silvermans had seemed the perfect, Orthodox frum (devout) Jewish couple living a fairytale life.
A rookie reporter, Tracy Jacobs, is sent to cover the socialite’s death. She starts to investigate its possible cause after the Silvermans’ son, Yair, whom she knows from her schooldays, whispers an outrageous comment in her ear at the funeral.
Her news editor subsequently assigns her to cover the inquest, at which Alan has an extremely sharp lawyer looking after his interests. This intrigues Tracy.
Alan is a pillar of the community, a man with huge wealth and impeccable struggle credentials, having fled SA in the mid’80s rather than serve in the apartheid army. Furthermore, when the couple lived in London in the ’80s and early ’90s, he was a familiar figure in the exiled African National Congress elite as he promoted their cause and the anti-apartheid movement.
Tracy, a tall, gawky young woman, who was mocked at school, gets home in the evenings from the newsroom to find herself under attack. Her mother is reading her reports with growing incredulity and outrage as details emerge of sexual abuse in the Silverman family.
“How can you write such stuff? Jews don’t do this,” she accuses her daughter.
Despite having been a journalist, Cohen de Villiers was as shocked as Tracy’s mother to discover there is abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community, when her husband, Poen de Villiers, alerted her to it years ago.
“Poen was a member of our local community police forum. He told me the police commander had mentioned a particular problem in our precinct … domestic violence in the Orthodox Jewish community. Just like my husband, I was stunned.”
Cohen de Villiers, friendly, assertive, at times forceful, had always believed — like too many others — that sexual abuse was a social ill fuelled by poverty, ignorance and substance abuse. It didn’t happen in the leafy suburbs, she believed, and certainly not in “good” Jewish families.
She grew up “in a memorably happy family, where my parents were still holding hands after 58 years of marriage”.
Some years after the revelation, a good friend of Cohen de Villiers died at a young age, in her sleep. It made the author take stock of her life. “I questioned what I’d done to be proud of — besides having a great marriage and two lovely daughters.”
She’d graduated from Rhodes University with a journalism degree followed by Honours in English. “I’d always loved reading everything from Shakespeare to Thomas Hardy, Dan Brown to Jeffrey Archer.”
So, she decided, the time had come to write a novel. Six months later she handed it to her creative writing teacher, Richard Benyon. He suggested she restructure it and remodel Alan to make his backstory more sympathetic. “I found myself wondering if sons were ever abused by their mothers, because we hear so often of fathers abusing daughters.” Cohen de Villiers began researching hebephilia, in which adults are attracted to children who are in the midst of puberty.
She visited sites where academics and psychologists posted their findings, as well as ending
I am sure that ultra-orthodox women who are being abused are totally isolated
up on internet chat rooms frequented by hebephiles.
“It was not a comfortable experience,” she says, but it helped her to reconfigure her character, and rewrite her book.
The result is an empathetic, insightful and sensitively drawn portrait of a sexual abuser in a family saga that takes place on three continents over 40 years.
The author has sited it in a Jewish family, “because that’s my background. It’s what I know and who I am.”
Cohen de Villiers grew up in Johannesburg’s northeastern suburbs, attended an 80% Jewish school and was in her third year at varsity before she was subjected to overt anti-Semitism.
Her character Alan grows up in a Free State Afrikaans dorp where he’s the only Jew at his school and spends the rest of his life wanting to belong. “I can understand that,” says Cohen de Villiers. It’s why Alan ensures that he and his family become Orthodox frum (a Yiddish word for devout or pious) Jews, and part of a supportive, caring community.
Cohen de Villiers located her story in an area she calls “Jewish”, inspired by the words of a work colleague who explained that when she hails a taxi, “she says she’s going to “Jewish”: the Sandringham, Highlands North and Glenhazel area of the city’s northeast.
Cohen de Villiers is at pains to explain that her novel is pure fiction; none of the abuse is autobiographical. Nor does it relate to anybody she knows.
“I found out about a shelter for abused Jewish women — the Johannesburg Shalom Bayit project — from a book about religion and domestic abuse in the Jewish community.” Until she began her research she knew nothing of its existence, “and I’m a fairly aware person”.
She also has no idea of the shelter’s locality.
“Obviously not — it’s a shelter … I think many within the Jewish community do not know of its existence.”
She believes abuse flourishes because “the ultra-orthodox community is secluded, there is often no TV and secular books are not generally read. I am sure that women who are being abused are totally isolated.”
Cohen de Villiers emphasises repeatedly during our conversation that abuse “occurs at all levels of society, from the really poor to the well educated and rich.” If just one abused woman reads her book and realises that she is not alone, “then my book will be a success”.