My woodwork teacher in a Johannesburg high school, Mr Richards, a small, blond-haired man with a ginger moustache, occasionally admonished the boys (mostly gentile) not to complain ‘like little Jewboys’. So too did his fellow manual training teacher, Mr Swart (Captain Swart in another life), a rugged Afrikaner. Otherwise, I was blissfully unaware of antisemitism among the teaching staff.

At primary school I remember one little boy yelling ‘bloody Jewboy’ as he cycled past me, but that was unusual. Or perhaps I was unusually innocent, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, antisemitism was like a well-fed crocodile, lurking out of sight in the watery depth. Somehow, I knew that I had to keep my Jewish identity hidden from my predominantly gentile friends.

Today, the very word ‘Jew’ has a faintly pejorative ring to it. The plural, ‘Jews’, is slightly more acceptable, but it is still considered by gentiles more delicate to refer to ‘a Jewish person’, or ‘the Jewish........

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