With a grandchild about to be born in Atlanta, another on the way in Ho Chi Minh City, I have been thinking about the beginning of the family odyssey; of my great-grandfather, Isaac Michel, and his decision to leave the shtetl in northern Lithuania and head south from Russian pogroms toward the sun, the ostrich feathers, the gold and the promise of South Africa. I imagine his first sight of Africa in 1896 after the two-week crossing: the teeming dock at Cape Town; the bundles borne all the way from Lithuania; a sea of people - black and white and brown - moving between crates piled on the quayside. Table Mountain traces a line so flat that it seems an apparition. Colors have intensified,...
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