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Recordiad sain / Audio recording: Michael Picardie
Oral history recording with Michael Picardie collected as part of The Hineni Project, an insight into the life and stories of a Jewish community in all its diversity. Hineni was a collaborative project between Cardiff Reform Synagogue and Butetown History & Arts Centre.
My grandparents came from Tsarist Russia to South Africa as part of a wave of Jewish immigrants escaping the poverty and pogroms of the late nineteenth century. My paternal grandfather established himself as a small shopkeeper, and my maternal grandfather was a dairyman and then a bookkeeper. My father became a schoolteacher (and taught for a time at the Indian High School), and my mother was a gifted pianist. I lived in a Jewish neighbourhood in Johannesburg, and my parents spoke Yiddish and English. I had my bar mitzvah with Rabbi Moses Cyrus Weiler, whose sermons on prophetic Judaism inspired me. I went to the University of the Witwatersrand from 1953 to 1958 and studied politics, African studies, history, psychology and sociology. My radical ideology was partly inspired by my knowledge of and love for a family of Zulu domestic cleaners in our block of flats, and one of them, in particular, Peter Ngubane, was my constant companion throughout childhood. At university I became chairman of the Students’ Liberal Association and joined the Congress of Democrats, the white sister of the African National Congress. After the Sharpeville shooting in 1960, I was jailed. I was released from prison through a stroke of luck and secretly made my way to Swaziland and back to Britain. I had lived on Kibbutz Hazorea in Israel and was at Pembroke College, Oxford in 1958 to 1959, and after returning to England in 1960, I married a South African, Hilary Garnett, and we had two children – Justine and Ruth. Ruth tragically died in 1997. I have four brilliant grandchildren in London aged sixteen to twenty-two. I’ve published poetry, short-stories and produced eleven plays, all of which have been performed in England and Wales, and one, Shades of Brown (originally Jannie Veldsman and his Struggle with the Boer) has played in London, Brussels, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, Canada, South Africa and Kenya. Jannie Veldsman and The Cape Orchard, (which Foco Novo toured in Britain in 1986), have to do with the white Afrikaners and the Coloured people who descend from various indigenous ethnicities. My father’s second wife, Marion Boles, was an Afrikaner. My other plays, Shaloma and The Zulu and the Zeide, relate to Jewish and South African themes, including the Holocaust and the history of the liberation struggle in Johannesburg. My father was a bard of the Cambrian Eisteddfod in Johannesburg in 1922. My most precious possession is his bardic chair. I won South African Eisteddfod medals and certificates as a child. Alongside writing, I trained as a psychiatric social worker and taught social and developmental psychology at Oxford, Cardiff and Botswana Universities. I feel acknowledged and appreciated and very much at home intellectually and socially in Cardiff. Justine and Ruth were not brought up as Jews, although Freud and Marx were ever present in our secular household. When I went back to South Africa in 1990 to look after my ailing father, I was given an opportunity to start a non-racial nursery school in the Temple Israel Reform Synagogue in Hillbrow, where I had my bar mitzvah, and which is still part of the Tikkun upliftment programme. I became a reader at Temple Israel and was very happy to be part of the Progressive Jewish tradition. When I returned to Cardiff in 2000 I started to go to the synagogue at Moira Terrace and took a few services as reader, and now teach basic Hebrew and secular Jewish meditation – kabbalah. I want to be remembered as a creative writer, that I tried to be a good son, husband, father and friend, and that I tried to make a difference to the liberation of South Africa.