Old family photo

IN ALBIE’S WORDS: This picture is taken from a book written by my uncle Bernard, we called him Benny, who was a writer, the youngest of the siblings. He wrote one book called Personalities and Places, and one of the personalities is my dad, Solly Sachs. And you talk about sibling rivalry and competition, they had it in spades. Bernard wrote an autobiographical book and the story of the family, first in Lithuania, where they were subjected to considerable persecution as Jews because of the rampant organised antisemitism there, and they’d come to South Africa. And the book is called Multitude of Dreams, and it's being launched at the biggest hotel, the Carlton Hotel in Commissioner Street in Johannesburg. And my dad, Solly Sachs, the older brother of Bernard, a well-known personality in the city, is asked to speak at the launch, and he agrees. Quite a big crowd there, and my dad holds up the book, and he said, ‘My brother Bernard is a rat. He's always been a rat and will always be a rat. And this is exactly the kind of book I would expect a rat to write’ and he slammed it down and walked out. They didn't speak for 20 or 30 years after that.

What angered the family was Bernard saying that their father, their dad, received stolen goods, and much of it was in Lithuania or in South Africa or both. And they felt that, the way I heard it from the family, in fact, it wasn't true, but Bernard felt it was like making his family more interesting, exotic, and he's the brave child telling that story. My mother, Ray was the only person who had any connection with both Solly, even after she was divorced from Solly, my dad, and with Bernard. So, I would see Bernard when I came up with my brother to Johannesburg, and I kept up some contact with him. Now, Bernard builds a whole thing about this particular picture, saying you can see Solly’s head flopping to one side, that people worried about him, and that he learned to speak really late.

The part of the grandmother that interests me was she looks like quite a formidable person. One of my cousins, who's older than me, said that our Bobba (grandmother) had been very tall, and that could be an explanation of why my son Oliver is so tall. So here she might have been seated. I'm not sure who the other children are in the picture. They could have been my aunties and my uncle, Auntie Sarah, Aunty Janie and an uncle, Yossi. They were my dad's siblings who were delighted by his denunciation of Bernard.

An interesting thing that I've discovered was that the births of Jewish children were not registered. So, neither my mother nor my father knew what their actual birthday was, so they never put anything into celebrating my birthday or my brother's birthday. They knew my birthday, and Johnny's, but it wasn't a day of, if you like, in the culture of the family, it wasn’t a day for a party and celebration. I seem to have inherited a little bit of that, I’ve avoided any form of celebration of my birthday.

Now I’m celebrating my 90th birthday, in a way sort of wrapping up a whole phase of my life and activity. But I'm doing it not for sentimental purposes but for transactional reasons. A series of activities… the launching of The Albie Collection website, a symposium by law schools on my alchemical life as a lawyer, a big event in a tent on Constitution Hill and an exhibition on my life in art, entitled ‘Spring is Rebellious’, at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town.