Kurgan’s ‘A Crowd of One’ is a cathartic exercise

MOIRA SCHNEIDER

Dr Kurgan, a psychoanalyst, has been living in Los Angeles since 1979. At the launch of her book held under the joint auspices of the Jacob Gitlin Library, the South African Jewish Museum and the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies, she recalled an event that had made an indelible impression on her as a young child and had come back to haunt her many years later.

While the book relies for its content partly on her vivid childhood memories and partly on her scientist father’s diaries that were translated into English after his death in 1973, she says it became hard to distinguish between the two. Except for the memory of her father’s white face as the border guard refused them entry into Romania – their passports had identified them as being Jews.

Eventually they were allowed in, remaining for 13 months before obtaining fake certificates of baptism at great cost, allowing them to secure visas for Brazil.

Fate was to intervene, however, in the form of an uncle contracting smallpox en route, with the result that they had to disembark in Kenya. After some time, circumstances forced them to head to Cape Town where the party docked in April, 1941 and were put up at the Jewish orphanage.  

“The Jewish Board of Deputies and the community helped tremendously,” Kurgan recalls, “and eventually we received permission to stay on humanitarian grounds despite the Aliens Act”, a 1937 law aimed at curtailing Jewish immigration to this country.

In 1979, after 38 years in South Africa, Kurgan, together with her husband and children, immigrated to the United States.   

In 1995, she decided to visit Poland, connecting with a psychiatrist there with the idea of contributing in her field of expertise. But the experiences of the past served as a psychological block to any such notions.

It was here that a hotel receptionist curtly asked for her passport, bringing memories of the earlier trauma at the border flooding back.

“I once again saw myself as the distasteful other,” she remembers. “I wanted to forgive them, but so much in my soul stood in the way.

“Another 20 years elapsed before I could begin to think another way. Writing the book led me to deeper compassion,” she says, concluding that “hatred poisons the soul, forgiveness frees the soul”.

She again visited the country in 2014, and acknowledges feeling “a startling affinity to the country in which I was born”.

She says: “Anti-Semitism in Poland will always be there, but there seems to be a bond (between the Jews and the Poles) that goes back many years – we are inextricably bound up with each other.”

Many Jews who live there were brought up as Roman Catholics, but admit to being Jewish on their deathbeds, Kurgan notes.

Indeed, on her first visit to the country, she was perplexed as to why a cousin had seemed very reluctant to meet with her. It transpired that this woman’s husband, to whom she had been married for 38 years, had no idea that she was Jewish and she swore Kurgan to secrecy, worried that this revelation might destroy her marriage.

* “A Crowd of One” is available on Amazon.com in Cape Town at Clarke’s Bookshop and the South African Jewish Museum shop and in Johannesburg, e-mail tkurgan@iafrica.com.