Serving the natives: Whiteness as the price of hospitality in South African Yiddish literature

Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants who came to South Africa from Eastern Eu rope were thrust from one racially discriminatory society into another. Ign orant of the languages spoken in the country they had made their refuge, la rgely unskilled in any trades and poorly educated, these immigrant Jews fou nd themselves ambivalent parts of a social formation that left them margina lised by the white ruling class, but socially and politically privileged ov er black workers. This dislocating experience was most keenly felt when the y sought their livelihoods in the South African trading phenomenon known, r n the racist parlance of the day, as 'kaffir eating-houses'. From the trim of the century, white South African racist attitudes held in contempt any o ccupation that provided basic services for blacks, brit prevented the openi ng of such trade to black entrepreneurs. The only whites prepared to take i t on were socially despised Eastern European immigrants, chiefly Jews. By e ntering the only occupation open to so many of them, these Jewish immigrant s became victims of multiple prejudice. They found their existence predicat ed on the necessity to negotiate an identity for themselves along a number of complex and ever-shifting frontiers. Many of the most profitable of thes e 'kaffir eating-houses' were nln by well-off Jews, generally earlier immig rants who had 'made good'. Having become employers, they in turn employed, for exploitatively low wages, poor fellow-immigrant Yiddish-speaking Jews t o do the day-to-day work. Consequently these severely disadvantaged Jewish immigrants-found themselves both the recipients and the administrators of a many-sided exploitation. Empowered whites equated them with the blacks the y served at fixed and meagre weekly wages for the profit of those who, soci ally despised themselves, were nevertheless their sole economic means of su pport. Yet in dealing on a daily basis with their black clientele, these sh op assistants were placed by the discriminatory practices of a discriminato ry society in positions of racial superiority over black mineworkers and la bourers. The confusion they experienced as a result of their marginalised c ondition created a site of multi-faceted conflict that South African Yiddis h writers repeatedly confront and explore. The predicament of the kaffireat niks, as they were contempuously called becomes a metonym for the problem o f defining immigrant Jewish identity along the unstable social, economic an d political frontiers of racist South Africa. This paper drawing on seminal texts, investigates the way South African Yiddish fiction problematises qu estions of race and gender identity formations, and the moral ambiguity inh erent in occupational segregation for Eastern European immigrants who found themselves part of a racist social formation that continually demanded eth ical compromise as a precondition for social acceptance and economic succes s.